skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't agree that email isn't an example of a decentralized application. She argues that it's not because it's really hard to run your own mail server.

I don't think this is a fair characterisation of the article. She argues that email is an example of something that is failing as a decentralised application: Google's power over email is too strong. This is very different from claiming that it isn't an example of a decentralised application.

Email and the web are decentralised applications. But they are not the email and the web of the 1990s, when their decentralisation was the killer feature that saw them beat out centralised networks. To try and live on a non-Google/non-Facebook web is like using Linux on the desktop in 2000: it's certainly possible, but it's a bit of a hairshirt.
Overall too much time spent on the rant for me. To paraphrase: “true” crypto has a long way to go and some large companies have dominated otherwise successful decentralized systems. Yes, no doubt. The last section is the interesting discussion that needs having.

The hypothesis is: capitalism is a hostile environment for user centric (non-abusive) software. I think I tend to agree (despite also believing that as an industry we could do a lot better job of pushing licenses that protect user freedom and help isolate users from abuse back against the domineering capitalists that simply don't understand how software ecosystems work).

I don’t think the author sufficiently defended their hypothesis. I didn't see any discussion about how and why profit motives are misaligned. The piece is missing evidence that supports the jump from “look some big companies have dominated decentralized systems” to “capitalism creates profit motives that must yield the results we’ve seen”. How are we sure the same result wouldn't happen under other economic systems, for example? Thats’s not a defense of capitalism on my part, just a desire to explore this topic much deeper.

Maybe software needs to be designed to resist domination? Or maybe the ability to be dominated has made certain applications successful? Maybe we shouldn't run some software for profit? Maybe we simply need to make it illegal to use persistent identity information in internet-scale applications and data sets beyond authentication and security purposes? Maybe our browsers aren't doing enough to present an “opt in on every use” type of experience for users (I wonder why)?

I do agree there’s an uncomfortable political element to the discussion.
Depends on how angry you are with said office building.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Austin_suicide_attack
That's very disappointing. I assume this means there will be a big price hike for NAC now? I can't see how requiring a prescription for it would keep it's supply/demand balance in favor of the average consumer.

Hopefully I can stock up on some before it disappears from store shelves.

The public should be able to hold the FDA accountable.
> Western countries definitely won't do that in Belarus, a boots-on-the-ground invasion like that seems totally implausible and would risk escalation into a military conflict with Russia, it's just not going to happen

I don't disagree with your conclusion, but I just don't understand why so many trillions of dollars around the world are being spent on military power that just sits by and watches dictatorships kidnap protestors from other countries and execute them.

Having grown up in the early 2000s and seen some offensively transparent excuses to start military invasions, surely this is a far more justifiable reason for conflict. Is everyone just waiting for Lukashenko and Putin to die and hoping that their successors won't be as maniacal?
Perhaps, there could be a specialized substrate, that absorbs the ink, makingnit suitable for pasting on a blank PCB board. Say an organic porous film, on which we could print the circuit, then paste it onto a base, heat it and get a working circuit.
It's quoting an American Intelligence Report, which doesn't necessarily make it more credible, but definitely makes it more newsworthy.
You're right. The content to length ratio is extremely low for this blog post. I didn't see clear structure or fully fleshed out arguments.
demo was all about constraints, cpu speed, ram size, binary size, etc. constraints push creativity. so does deadlines.
Indeed. I suffered numerous occasions of pointless, perhaps malicious downvoting on blockchain threads. Okay, we get it.
> Is there even a single decentralized app that is mainstream?

People have mentioned email and the Web as examples; I'd also throw in podcasts. (None of these are "apps," per se, but they're all examples from the article, so.)

> An argument could be made that inherently a centralized app, who is trusted, available and resilient, will always be superior. Any thoughts?

Yes. :)

The article makes the point, in so many words, that a lot of decentralized services end up dominated by a small number of major players. I think this is hard to argue with; yes, there are other service providers competing with the big ones, but that doesn't disprove the point. The most recent figures I can find suggest that Gmail had 43% of the email "market" in 2020; that's not more than everyone else combined, but number two is Yahoo (!) at 26%, with third place Outlook (i.e., the email service Microsoft keeps changing the name of, not the client application) trailing at 6%. Many people who might have been bloggers a bit over a decade ago use Medium or, more likely, just Twitter. (I think Twitter did far more to kill the blog than the death of Google Reader, but that's a different topic.) We can go on.

Where I think the article gets it wrong isn't in its description of the problem, it's in its diagnosis. Partially. I think the author is right in saying that better tooling isn't the problem, but wrong in saying that the profit motive is in "ensuring decentrialized systems fail." The profit motive is, to borrow your apt phrase, in making centralized systems trusted, available, and resilient. GitHub, Google Workspace, and Slack took over as much of the business world as they did because they're not only easier to set up than doing it yourself, they gain the benefits of a tremendous userbase: they're highly available and resilient, they're well-understood, they have lots of integration plugins.

I'd love to see more decentralized/federated systems succeed, but many of them aren't just fiddly and quirky, they're proudly fiddly and quirky. If they're going to take off, we may need to focus less on where we think companies behind centralized services are deviously undermining their decentralized relatives, and focus more on why those services succeeded in the first place.
Don't judge the author too harshly. Ingrid presents an overall perspective of the entire field. Yes, some definitions are somewhat skewed, but I'm sure many people see things the same way. In a way, the fact the author wrote the article and we're all reading all these comments, is because we all care about this and we want to see a truly distributed web succeed. So it's ok to try to reason how we get there.

In all honestly, I've had very similar thoughts. As someone who started with BITNET before the Internet, I always believed "the Net" was supposed to level the field, and we no longer have to be "consumers" but rather willing participants capable of innovation, on our own right. I know, how naive.

Where I disagree is in the solution. It's not political. Whenever you think about the Internet, you MUST think global. I've had the chance to visit around 35 countries, and I've seen first hand how governments don't work for people, for the most part.

It comes down to this: we (geeks and nerds) need to get out of our comfort zone and think in terms of user experience. We CAN create amazing things. But we must think about the people using these solutions. People use Dropbox because it's easy, not because it's good. Same for Gmail and other services. If we are not creating solutions that can be used by anyone, in an easy and straightforward fashion, we're not doing our job. If companies don't see value in what we are creating when it could help them tremendously (i.e. IPFS) then WE are doing something wrong.

I think it all comes down to UX.
The shards have thousands of different validators, all of which are staking their Ethereum on being accurate, and if they are malicious, they lose that Ethereum they staked. There are over 100k people signed up to this already (each staking 32+ ETH). So the likelihood of a shard going offline or forking is about as likely as AWS going down.

The beacon chain is the central chain, all shards write a hash of what they've done to this one. All nodes validate the shard they've been assigned to as well as the beacon chain.
Just a coincidence. Most people have no idea what XMPP was, never even cared, and joined the change.
> False advertising.

Sure, that’s how non-Leninist socialists (including Marxists) see it. But the upthread claim was that the USSR did not use the term “socialist” but instead invented the term “communist” because it did not view its own system as socialist. In fact, the USSR used the pair of terms “socialist” and “communist” together in much the same pattern (if, arguably, a somewhat different understanding of the precise meaning of the two terms) as non-Leninist Marxists did (its worth noting that one of Marx’s well-known works, with Engels, was The Communist Manifesto.)
Maybe about 15 years ago, I was driving through Kansas with my dad. Dad was going through the radio channels to find something to listen to, and ended up on the Dave Ramsey show. One call has stuck with me all these years: the caller had recently graduated high school, was working for $12/hour on some low-skill job, and was interested in majoring in a STEM major. The caller had one question: should they save up money to go to college (on their $12/hour job) or take out loans for college?

And I don't remember Ramsey's response, but it essentially boiled down to recommending that they save money working their current job, and then go to college. That answer has always struck me as completely bonkers - sure debt can be bad, but this is a case where debt is good: it's going to be much easier paying off college loans with a high paying college-requiring job in STEM than saving up on a low-paying job.

Since then I have always regarded Ramsey and anyone who recommends him with disgust. Totally willing to hear anybody who wants to change my mind, but at least for now I consider these people as charlatans.
It isn't a fallacy, and in any case the article isn't claiming that decentralised software has become centralised because companies have built good defaults on top, so that's a complete strawman.
I am using Bitcoin as money and there are a lot of people like me. Just by saving in Bitcoin is using it. The primary purpose of money is to save your purchasing power. From my viewpoint, it is inevitable that Bitcoin replaces fiat currencies. Given free markets, people will eventually choose the most sound money.
Agreed, but I don't think there's a lot of motivation to do so. At that point, BitTorrent is just DCC in a new fur coat. As stated earlier, BT is most appropriately used in a setting where you want to download a single file from multiple sources, distributing the workload between them and your network. This results in faster downloads, and does so in a way that is decentralized (for the most part) and scalable by design.

So while it could be done, the question is really "should it be done"? I'd love to be able to send a file over the internet easily without using some centralized service, but if there's only 2 people that are meant to have the file, does the overhead of BitTorrent make any sense?
That's not always obvious. Luckily, we have a lot of movies showing us the difference between goodies and baddies
https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?SearchText=iphone+repla...

the only way you'd get the plod even vaguely interested would be if these arrived in boxes that claimed they were genuine parts, and even then...
You pretty much have no clue what your talking about when it comes with the duty of the police. The police have no charge to protect you or your business, at all, whatsoever. This has been decided in the high courts in the US. Pretty much everything you stated is completely incorrect.
> I temporally lived in S. Korea for a few months and there were solid blocks of days the air quality was so bad you could barely be outside. Of course the pollution made its way down from China’s unregulated factories. I quickly realized South Koreans are frankly quite racist against the Chinese.

If I couldn't go outside for days in a row because of pollution from China, I'd probably be pretty pissed at them too.
Fed chair Powell floats central bank digital currency and more crypto regulation
We already have SFTP for this.
Economic freedom with KYC-free agorist markets
Believe it or not, just because mainstream media likes to paint most of the conservative parts of the US as evil places of hate, they very much are not. They just tend to be poorer/not as industrialized.
Some examples that are being worked on right now:

Trading of any financial asset - why do we need Robinhood / Fidelity etc to trade shares? If shares in companies can be listed on a blockchain then people can trade them anywhere anytime directly with each other even when they don't trust each other.

Larger markets for digital goods: Many games have started putting their items on Etherum (or layer 2 solutions) so that players can easily trade them without the developers needing to run their own marketplace. This can then extend to being able to use items across multiple games, or trade items from one game with items from another.

Now there's ethereum tokens that allow the original creator to get a cut of all trades of that item. This opens an interesting funding model where a company could create an open source permissionless game where you download the client, connect to the public chain, play and acquire items, trade those items with others, and the game creators gain funds based on a cut of all trade happening around the game which allows them to further development. Then because it's open source people can create forks with their own art styles and mod the game easily and people can participate in the same world with many different clients.
>in the sense that somebody loaded up a pallet and took it from its manufacturer without paying.

Pay is involved, and its Apple authorized recyclers who are selling parts on the black market breaching Apple contract stating everything needs to go into Shredder and get pulverized into dust.

Here is just one example "Apple sues GEEP for not shredding reusable iPhones" https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/07/apple-g...
I definitely identify with the author. A big mistake I made in the past was to assume that other software engineers are equally enthusiastic about these kind of projects, or the least bit impressed by them. I was asked for a job interview to prepare presentations on two projects I was particularly proud of. I chose a hobby Operating System kernel I'd developed from the ground up, and a fully-functional MIPS assembler I had written. The interviewers (senior developers within the company) really just did not get it. Responding with questions such as: "Is this going to make you any money?", and "When do you expect this to be complete?". They really couldn't understand my motivations. I did these projects for no other reason than that I love programming, and I have never stopped loving learning about it. I have never needed to consider, or justify to myself why I did these things. I do them because I enjoy what I do.

I ended up pivoting to discuss some comparatively banal professional project migrating a mid-sized financial product to a new tech-stack, which managed to captivate their attention. I found this experience extremely disheartening, however important a lesson it was to learn. I don't think it's changed my outlook in any way though, admittedly. I still work on the same kinds of projects, and I still think the best developers are the ones who do work on toy projects for their own enjoyment.
I disagree that such a political solution == socialism.

Every time some piece of infrastructure became critically important for the society, people used political power to regulate the companies providing the infrastructure. Happened with railroads, water and sewers, electricity distribution.

The modern big tech with it's social networks is very similar to these older networks.
How many of these €50/month does it take to reconsider? €50 for hosting, €50 for email, €50 for tracing, €50 for sentiment analysis, €50 for this, €50 for that. By the time you realise, you are burning €6k a year on stuff that takes hours to roll out yourself.
Black Lives Matter activist Sasha Johnson shot in the head
Now I want a restroom done in Cray decor.
Doing iOS development includes a whole other bundle of costs associated with it. $1000/yr if you want to even try to sell on the app store?
> Also, the energy of an electromagnetic wave grows as the 4th power of its frequently, IIRC. This is why old power supplies which directly used the 60Hz frequency from the socket were so bulky, while modern power supplies, which convert the mains electricity to high-frequency AC, can use physically small and lightweight transformers.

It's much more roundabout than that.

A transformer has a magnetizing inductance (you can measure this with an LCR meter by leaving all other windings open). This is generally a pretty big inductance (several henries for mains transformers). When you supply a waveform, that inductance will cause a small current to flow. That's the magnetizing current. The problem is saturation - if the voltage over time gets too large [=the magnetic field in the core], the transformer's core will saturate (that's also why transformers cannot handle DC; any DC offset will accumulate over time and cause saturation). This causes the magnetizing inductance to drop to approx. zero. When that happens, the magnetizing current becomes huge, basically a short circuit.

This means that you need to avoid saturation. Note that the strength of the field depends on the number of turns - each turn reduces the impressed field. So you want as many turns to avoid saturation as necessary, but as few turns as you can get away with (each turn adds resistance, and needs space inside the transformer).

And this is why mains transformers are so big. Because the frequency is low, voltagetime is large. So they need many, many turns (a few hundred to thousands) in order to prevent their steel cores from saturating. So the primary winding is a very long wire, which has a lot of resistance. So you need to increase the size of the core to fit a thicker wire, in order to avoid resistive losses. Now that bunch of wire doesn't fit any more through your transformer, so you need to use a bigger core, but wrapping N turns around that needs even more wire and so on. So you end up with a big, heavy transformer.

For a high-frequency switch mode power supply, the frequency is high, so voltagetime is orders of magnitude lower (e.g. 100 kHz vs. 50 Hz = 2000x lower), so they need far fewer turns. So their primary winding's wire is short, so it can be a) a little bit thinner and b) takes up much less space! So you get a small, light transformer.

But the core, it doesn't really care about power, like at all. It's all about not driving it into saturation, and having windings that can carry your current. Those two factors make the cores of mains transformers so big.
Just FYI our state abbreviation is AR, AK is Alaska. It gets mistaken a lot hahaha
I read the initial article but missed the petulant response. They intended that stupid response to be read by lots of people, I don't know how they thought it would help them.

This in particular:
> Yes, you will be in a building where 1000 people hate you, but we will assign security to protect you….that is how cults do it

I understand there's jokes in here, but I think the setup is earnest. The part where they invite the author to be in a building with 1000 people who hate him, I don't think that's in jest.

They're talking about a Worship Service, and most of their employees, as I understand it, are Christians. I hope they were embarrassed and ashamed to have it claimed that they hate someone.
All of the labs I’ve been to, including ones doing “weapons development” (shorthand for nuclear weapons programs, at least amongst my colleagues, who were not connected to those programs directly), have been very much like other areas of academia. Significantly more security, of course, and there are restricted areas, but generally quite nice, and I don’t think anyone who is used to working in a research lab or research university would feel out of place.

Far more spooky is the lack of amenities. I did my PhD in a program where I worked some of the time at Brookhaven National Lab, and both the dorm and cafeteria there were just embarrassing. It honestly was one of the reasons I left academia after awhile. It was hard to feel appreciated when your tiny dorm rooms frequently had broken AC/heat/refrigerators, and you shared your space with (impressively large) bugs.
> Rossman's motives are purely financial and self promoting.

How does he benefit by teaching others on how to repair stuff for free. You can start your own repair business by watching and learning from his videos.
It's very hard to overstate the profundity of Buddhism. The author embarked in self-reflection journey with this article, and I think had he kept going he would have bumped into Buddhist teachings.

Suffering is the foundation of experience. The author could not have arrived at his conclusions without suffering through what he did first. It's a contradiction like many Buddhist teachings. By embracing suffering, you somehow avoid it.
Well it's no longer a singleton now I guess.
They were researchers. Doubtful they were elderly.
> by Marx’s standards, nothing about the USSR could conceivably be considered communism

Yeah, my comment history has plenty of rants about the difference between Marxism and Leninism and how the phrase Marxist-Leninist is oxymoronic. But the claim I took issue with was not the (true) claim that the Soviet system was very much not Marxist, but the (false) claim that the Soviet union didn’t view its own system as socialist and, in fact, adopted “communist” in place of “socialist” for that reason. Leninists did (and they and their ideological descendants do) see their system as socialist and use the terms socialism and communism together in a similar way to the way that Marx and non-Leninist Marxist do, or at least did (non-Leninist Marxists now avoid “Communism” a lot because of association with Leninism, and use “Marxism” in its place.)
If you're really in that situation, you should attend community college, which you can easily afford out of your $12 / hour wages.

In the more likely case that you sort of feel like you might give it a shot, Dave Ramsey's advice looks even better: dropping out will only waste money you already had if you were paying out of your savings. It will waste a lot more than that otherwise.
I have an older relative who thought I was crazy to go to law school straight out of college. She thought that instead I should work, save money, and then when I had enough money use it to pay for law school.

But the math doesn't work at all. I could have saved maybe $10k/yr at the absolute maximum, and law school cost $120k for 3 years at that time (now it's around $200k). If I had followed her plan, I never would have actually enrolled.

I remember thinking my relative was foolish for suggesting that I was taking too big a risk by financing law school with loans. But when the financial crisis hit one year after I graduated, I realized that her advice was not all bad.

I ended up weathering the recession fine, but if I had graduated one year later I would have been in a much tougher position.

TLDR: leverage can be great — assuming everything goes well.