skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I liked the part where they talked about the blocks with the blocks and the block blocks and how they all block together.

I thought the reference to field pioneers was a bit much, I wouldn’t have the blocks to do that with a straight face. I wish these app makers (see also Figma, AirTable) would refrain from making their self-aggrandizing “we’re bringing computing to the masses”; what a load of blocks. What you’re doing is creating a product (another silo in waiting) serving a market that presently is interested. This block model is also not unique (see WordPress and Drupal): Notion may be refining some of that in a more seamless experience, but this is a different kind of statement. Perhaps “we added collaboration to blocks” would be a possible claim for uniqueness.

Aside from this, I found the technical decisions interesting and worth a read.
Oh thanks! Yes, this website is still very much a work in progress I do it the "#buildinbuplic" way, so some content on the website still needs to be created / improved.
Not being able to afford a private concert doesn’t mean that common decency should go out of the window too though.
Basically at the end of the day what happened was that the Web people killed Flash, slowed online gaming for 10 years, while nowadays everyone that cares about games moved into native mobile gaming.

It is quite telling that the cloud gaming efforts rather render everything server side with video streaming for the browser than fixing the games APIs on the browser.
And WIFI is total bullshit. They say "WIFI frequency" aka 2.4 GHZ because, as we all know, that is the deregulated frequency reserved for consumer application. So, IMHO the researcher shouldn't have used that term, is confusing ! From there to say that the experiment involve the problem of powering cordless devices in the sense of electronic gadget with an access point is a complete misunderstanding of the sense of that research. They intend to power something very close to the emitter in medical/niche applications with a dedicated emitter. This is an important clarification because WIFI data transmission delivered power is NOT constant and too weak, differently from the one from a signal generator near the device.
there's lots of different kinds of "rights".

You may not own any of the water running through the creek, for example you may not be able to divert it or damn it or mess with it in anyway. Same goes for minerals. If you discover oil on your several acres it may not belong to you.

it gets really confusing
saved in bookmarks folder: cultural revolution
Where is it hosted? Do you have instances in all data centers moving shards to where they are used?

Using databases outside the same availability zone can be slower...
Why don't we setup a panel of PhDs who will vet all new contracts? Sounds fresh.
There is no context provided as to what type of land it is, and what use it is for.

Just because 250,000 people can live on 71,000 acres of land in Orlando, does not mean 71,000 acres of dessert land with no water, no food, no easy infrastructure could
As I quoted: """Of course, most math problems have correct answers, but sometimes there can be more than one way to interpret a problem, especially word problems, leading to more than one possible right answer."""

Just how certain are you that all problems posed in primary/secondary school mathematics quite clearly have a right and wrong answer? Judging on my own experience, you aren't correct.

My point was to highlight how the WSJ op-ed was overly selective quote mining. You appear to be objecting to how one quote uses the term "objectivity". You likely know there is no simple definition of what "objectivity" means, yes?

If not, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-objectivity/ for a lengthy discussion focused just on scientific objectivity, in the introduction writing "The ideal of objectivity has been criticized repeatedly in philosophy of science, questioning both its desirability and its attainability" and saying in the conclusion "In each case, there are at least some reasons to believe that either science cannot deliver full objectivity in this sense, or that it would not be a good thing to try to do so, or both."

Equitable Math specifically uses the description from Jones and Okun (2001), and links to https://www.thc.texas.gov/public/upload/preserve/museums/fil... .

The first of these is "the belief that there is such a thing as being objective"; a belief which I pointed out "has been criticized repeatedly" and that likely cannot or should not be achieved in science. (See "positivism", "postpositivism", and "interpretivism" in case you find it hard to get to sleep.)

Other characteristics from Jones and Okun include "invalidating people who show emotion" and "the belief that emotions are inherently destructive, irrational, and should not play a role in decision-making or group processes."

I do not invalidate BitwiseFool for showing emotion ("scares and angers me"). Nor do I think others on HN would regard BitwiseFool's emotions as destructive or irrational.

I therefore believe that most people on HN do reject "objectivity" as used by the authors of Equitable Math.

While you may dislike the authors' definition of "objectivity", I don't think it's appropriate to dismiss their work based on a tangential quote I pasted here. Consider how confusing is it that in math a set can be neither "closed" nor "open" yet in normal a door is typically either "open" or "closed", or perhaps "ajar."
How many cursors can be on at the same time?!
He's talking about the Financial System, not the Bank (akin to a node)
I don't think PC gaming should require you to be part of the top 10% in order to fairly price computer hardware between mostly foreign miners buying scores of chips whose primary contribution to society is using 129 TW hours annually and individual users buying a single GPU.

As a selfish American I would rather we arrange for GPUs to be useless to a small number of users buying a large number of GPUS for mining in order for the much larger group of users to be able to afford one GPU.

If this strategy is successful and AMD doesn't follow suit nvidia GPUs will basically be the only ones most people can afford and if mining collapses years later AMD wont have any marketshare left to lose in the consumer space.

The only other way to still get their hardware in front of people who they want to keep a relationship going with will be via privileging OEMs over selling individual GPUs but in fact people are actually buying machines for the GPU and turning over the remaining GPU less machine in the consumer market.

As it stands the whole situation is broken for the only buyers that are sure to be here in 10 years and I would rather it move towards sanity sooner rather than later.
Nvidia contributing directly to the energy waste
Exploiting contract bugs.
It shouldn't be much of a surprise to learn that the r/bitcoin sub, bitcointalk.org, and several other bitcoin communities are owned by one and the same person that have a history of censoring dissenting opinions. Just read up on the r/bitcoin history.

Bitcoin is the illusion of decentralization.
The brain is a lot of different components working together. Perhaps the bits which do statistical learning are functionally distinguishable from the bits which generate permutations on the data.

(This is in fact how modern neural network training often works: start with a set of 50,000 images, run them through a bunch of permutations — translation, rotation, lighting changes, etc. — and produce a training set of 1 million images which yield better generalization when trained against.)
Yet whenever Monty Hall comes up on HN there are long threads of people discussing slightly different problems.

The answer to "should you switch in the Monty Hall problem" is very much "it depends how you've worded it", and that's a valuable skill we need children to have.
it's definitely admirable, and given the number of people who yell i would say it's pretty difficult for a lot of people too
Entertainingly, the technology to real-time impersonate someone over zoom photorealistically is also rapidly approaching - the window of irrelevant travel might be small.
I think what's even more unsettling is realizing people's interests aren't as much predictable as they're being made predictable.

My wife and I, we experience a "Facebook is listening" event roughly every month these days. Of course I know they aren't, but these too-well-targeted ads or post recommendations aren't about generic, easy-to-guess interests - they're about completely random things that we just happened to spontaneously and briefly talk about that same day. The most likely explanation to me is that those conversation topics weren't actually spontaneous - that is, we were already primed, nudged to talk about this, and while we didn't know that, ad targeting algorithms did.
I am an engineer for more than 12 years. I think I have a reasonably good idea of how a blockchain works.

I have no idea how these two projects are supposed to work. Who is supposed to use this if there isn't even a concise description of the product?

Judging by their Twitter accounts both of these companies have been around since 2017. How many active users do they have?
It's not anyone's responsibility to make things "better" for you or anyone else.

The person I was replying to said that mining was destroying the planet. This doesn't seem particularly true to me if you're mining on renewables.
Thank you! :) While Depop & Poshmark are 3rd party marketplaces, we see our product as more of a tool to help micro & small businesses sell products directly to their audience on Instagram
It looks like this is tied to the hardware, so miners should look to avoid a particular manufacturing run of a SKU.

Personally, I'm ok with this approach as it's tied to the hardware, and can be researched by everyone ahead of time to avoid "Model X, manufactured from Y to Z dates". Hopefully this can be determined from the SKU + serial number easily by a human reading the serial number.

It's not a software driver change nerfing the card remotely, which I would be absolutely against. It appears it could be eventually reverse engineered and bypassed, which I'm also ok with.

It's also not immediate e-waste as miners will avoid it anyway, and gamers can just use the card as normal regardless of the manufacturing run -- this isn't hardware that lacks video ports.
Explaining my experience - I haven't done any hardware or firmware programming besides messing around with Ardunios. I have written a low amount of C (tiny VM for toy language) and a moderate amount of Rust (a couple thousand lines for various projects, mostly console apps that needed to run fast).

It sounds like you have some experience in this and I have been curious for a long time why Rust can't or doesn't run on almost every micro-controller? Is it based on the compiler? I thought that because Rust has no runtime/produces a binary which does not require a runtime that as long as the Rust compiler emits the right backend instructions it should just work?

Adding to my confusing, I think rustc uses LLVM which is a way of separating a language's frontend from the backend code emitted, so I thought any micro-controller supported by LLVM would work for Rust.
> If you're selling out make more and/or raise prices.

What if you want to raise prices only to crypto miners, and not raise them for gamers/professions, in order to support your long term customers?

There are lots of very good business reasons to provide preferential treatment to a specific customer base, and to raise prices on a different customer base.

It is called price discrimination, and is very useful.

Do you not support companies making obvious business decisions like this, with their own company, that have large benefits to their existing customer base, as well as being perfectly rational from a business perspective?

Having crypto miners subsidize an existing customer base, makes a lot of business sense, and helps out a lot of people.

And it is all done, with people making voluntary decisions with the products that they choose to sell. Don't buy the product, if you don't like it.
Yeah, the last year has shown us that streaming videos with some side chat is the easy part. Heck, maybe it's even better than in-person a lot of the time. I can re-record stuff when I screw up and do some things I can't do in front of a room of 50-100 people.

And it's even good that people who just go to sessions for the content will be able to do so--for a lot less money and effort. But I'm planning to go back to in-person conferences as soon as possible.
Just hierarchies that don’t contain themselves at the top.
Hopefully, voters can NEVER influence how private land owners choose to use their land holdings.

Do we live in the same country? Do you actually want other people to tell you what you have to do with your private property? I suspect that if you were a land holder being told what you had to do with your land you would be rather miffed.

I just don't understand how a citizen of the US living under the US Constitution comes to the conclusion that they should have authority to tell other people what they can do with their property.
As an individual, if you spend more in a year than you earn, are you still required to pay taxes? Of course.

Whether or not a corporation is profitable is not relevant. A corporation that is consistently loss making may fold slightly more quickly - that sounds like a good thing.

But a corporation that has any control over its prices yet has low margins shouldn't be troubled by this - other competitors are likely in the same boat.

Taxing revenue instead of profit encourages high-margin businesses, which is fine by me; and it doesn't subsidize loss making - also, fine by me.

Shell companies aren't hugely problematic, but they are problematic.

Problem #1: every extra corporation is problematic, because of the built in risk-collectivization - i.e. excess profit is privatized, but excess risk is protected by bankruptcy. Having networks of cooperating corporations can make it easier to push losses onto others, which incentivizes worse than zero-sum economic behavior.

Problem #2: complexity. Complexity is bad; it simply introduces friction, and unforeseen consequences. Notably, stuff like the double irish with a dutch sandwich not only required various limitations in irish and dutch law, but also the ability to create arbitrary corporations. Each law taken by itself seems reasonable, but the interactions in combination with the complexity that shell companies enable allows for undesirable consequences.

Problem #3: Lack of transparency. It's easier to hide fraud or simple unwanted behavior when things get complicated, or even when things involve multiple jurisdictions. Economic actors - i.e. us - don't behave randomly, we look for opportunities. And people will take opportunities that are to the detriment of society, whether entirely legal or not. The ability to see those problems is critical to being able to mitigate their consequences, or solve them outright.

So yes, I do think shell companies have an intrinsic cost. I'm not sure what your background is, but to pick a simile - it's kind of like the cost of lock-free multithreading - it may appear to work, but the chaos can hide bugs that are hard to find, and hard to pin down, and fixing one may introduce another. Having decent, comprehensible abstractions helps, but legal systems aren't easily engineered top-down like that; they're evolved in each jurisdiction separately, and piece by piece, with lots of input from the very bad actors that are abusing the loopholes. It's unlikely we'll find ideal "abstractions" in that world if they even exist; so keeping things as comprehensible and simple as possible is a boon.

Shell companies without actual economic value represent complexity and are thus bad.
I guess the issue is, let's say you're doing something in CUDA, and the program uses $FOO, something commonly used by miners. Never mind that you're not mining any kind of cryptocurrency, the card or driver will decide that because you did $FOO, you're mining and gimp your work, or, let's say that they doubled down further, shut it down completely.
I'm all for it. My system with a 3080 had a hardware issue so I needed to swap it for a new one. It took me weeks of shenanigans with the vendor because they couldn't get a new card to send me a new system. And that was after a month's wait to get the original system, also due to supply constraints. I have actual work to do, and am fine with NVidia making it harder for make-money-fast potlatchers if that means I can actually buy their product to do useful work.
The Next 700 Programming Languages (1966) [pdf]
Personally I think we’ll soon discover that what we’re doing in ‘quantum’ is indistinguishable from classical analog at that frequency and noise temperature, and that will also be the point where it becomes broadly useful and scalable.
There's also the risk that stablecoins aren't actually stable but just claim to be such: https://www.coindesk.com/tether-first-reserve-composition-re...
"Independent" is often used by American media when describing pro-western publications backed by the CIA.

https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/26/archives/worldwide-propag...

>In its persistent efforts to snape world opinion, the C.I.A. has been able to call upon a separate and far more extensive network of newspapers, news services, magazines, publishing houses, broadcasting stations and other entities over which it has at various times had some control.

I don't think the internal affairs of Belarus ought to be the concern of Americans.
You say that, but but you might change your tune if 4 months from now you can easily buy an Nvidia card because miners stopped buying them while AMD cards are still scarce.
Excellent article !

I got hit by the exact same issue which is described in the fermilab paper, namely packet reordering caused by intel drivers. It took me several days to diagnose the problem. Interestingly enough, the problem virtually disappeared when running tcpdump, which, after a lot of reading on the innards of the linux TCP stack, and prodding with ebpf, eventually led me to conjecture that it was a scheduling/core placement issue. Pinning my process clearly made the problem disappear, and then finding the paper nailed it.

Networks are not my specialty (I come from a math background, am self taught, and had always dismissed them as mere plumbing) , but I have to say that I came out of this difficult (for me) investigation with a great appreciation for networking in general, and now enjoy reading anything I can find about them.

It's never too late to learn, and I have yet to find something in software engineering which is not interesting once you take a closer look at it!
Waggoner Ranch, near Vernon, TX, is 535k contiguous acres. Makes it roughly half the size of Rhode Island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggoner_Ranch

The owner is Stan Kroenke, number 5 on this list. He owns a bunch of major league sports teams. His wife is the daughter of one of the WalMart founders, which appears to be where all the money initially came from.
Agreed that if your frontend is mostly GraphQL, and your data flow well taken care of, you shouldn't see a need for a separate state management solution.

However sometimes you have to work with various APIs and filter/display/modify/update/delete/change/patch various parts of the responses you receive. That's the environment where solutions like Kea (mentioned in the blog post) come into their own.
> Are you only believing what you read in the media or do you know people that actually work at Amazon?

I’ve talked with people who work there as engineers. I haven’t any friends there.

The engineers seem well looked after, but engineers are not what I’d describe as ‘low level employees’.

I’m not sure that rejection of unionisation says as much as you are attributing to it and if reports are to believe, Amazon used a few dirty tricks.

Likely both sides did, but there is plenty to suggest that Amazon isn’t a kind or benevolent employer.
> None of those things are necessary for civilisation

That's only true for low values of civilization. Even bronze age tech consumes more than hunter-gatherers which consume more than monkeys.

> Besides, surely it must be simpler to build a fusion reactor on earth than harvesting enough material to cover the sun in solar panels.

Dyson swarms sit higher on the kardashev scale than harvesting whatever you can get on a single planet. At some point waste heat rather than fuel will also become a real problem. Fusion reactors are ultimately thermal power stations, glorified steam engines.

> Would the solar system even have enough resources for that?

You'd start small with asteroids. And then disassemble some moons with shallow gravity wells. Which of course again requires stupendous amounts of energy just to move the material around but the sun still has billions of years left so there will be time to recoup that investment.
Yes, in pow systems, miners can only ddos the network and they can do nothing more.
> Pokemon card ... artificial scarcity.

It is not an artificial scarcity though. The seller can't print more rare cards, unless you were refering to Nintendo. I.e. if I am low on dollars there is no artificial scarcity of dollars just becouse the Fed can print more.
Freedom is only good until an incentive aligns that causes harm to the long-term stability of an industry or society. Right now, people who want to create value cannot do so because a paperclip maximizer has found a way to exploit the system for its own gain. Nvidia's move, futile as it may be, aims to maintain the stability of the GPU market for professionals and consumers, the actual value producers of society. Crypto mining does not produce true value commensurate to the burden it is currently placing on all other industries that use computing power.
Why do anything?

Any questions of resource allocation ultimately come down to a question individual and social values, or merit, as you phrased it.

Merit is inherently arbitrary. Some people can and do think answering the question of the existence of extraterrestrial life has intrinsic merit and is the single most important society could do. More important than improving global prosperity or even continuation of the species.
many people buy land in the exurbs, wait for the growth, and then sell to developers. I have a friend who's grandfather gave her 40 acres in Prosper TX. When we were in HS it was basically worthless/pointless, but now, she could retire on it if she wanted.
Dijkstra once explained what he meant when he claimed you could "derive" correct programs mathematically:

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd11xx/EWD1162.PDF

In this paper, he begins with a program written in what I believe to be propositional logic notation. This program can't be typed into an HN comment, but it can be trivially translated in to Common Lisp:

(loop for k from 0 below n always (f k))

The rest of the paper is about him translating this program into another kind of math notation with C-like semantics. By the end of the paper, he has proven that the second, lower-level program is equivalent to the first program, which is the same thing that a compiler does.

He does not prove that the thing he originally wrote at the beginning correctly expresses his intentions. So his method is basically this:

1. Write a bug-free program in a very high-level programming language, or a very rigorous pseudocode.

2. Translate it to a low-level language.

3. Prove that the translation is equivalent to the original program.
If you’re a desperate entrepreneur in B2B, just a heads up that there are a lot of predators out there trying to cheat you into cheap/free work. It’s like a special kind of land shark that can smell your desperation.

The willingness to walk away is a game changer in sales (and other things in life).
Bluehost Review
In my experience it not that the latest generations aren't interested, it is that there isn't much available, and what is available is not in an interesting location or is too expensive.