skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If people are trying to assign blame to a bug or outage, it's time to move on.

This is one of my favorite excerpts. I once worked in a lab where we would have frequent catastrophic failures because there was never any disaster planning or contingency management plan. I personally triaged 3 such incidents alone or with people who happened to be there when the problem arose and attempted to disseminate some suggestions for how to prevent similar problems in the future. No one was interested. People were primarily interested in tearing my head off because I hadn't handled the problem the way they would have done it (of course, they were out drinking beers or sleeping while I was dealing with the issue at 12 AM or on a weekend).

After the third time I said fuck it, the next time there is an issue I am going to insure my own projects are safe and then I'm going home and turning my phone off. Let someone else deal with it. That is the not the culture you want to be promoting.
> You don't need to be so accusatory or ungenerous about it.

At least four decades of mostly bad internationalization support it's no longer accusatory, it's empirical and quite generously worded.
Transrapid
Yeah, and I think this is fundamentally what's wrong with our anti-trust law. Trying to decide what harms the consumer is far too narrow in scope, and instead we should have some broader goals related to the promotion of markets and competition, rather than just focusing on consumers. e.g.

- competition is good in and of itself, so new entrants should not be harmed and competition should be promoted and monopoly restricted purely on the basis of promoting competition as a policy goal.

- creation of new markets should be viewed as a policy goal in and of itself. Thus if a firm impedes a burgeoning secondary market or new derived market, that impediment should be viewed as a violation of anti-trust law.

- consumer harm is also a factor, but only one of three factors.

IMO, our maniacal focus on consumption while abandoning promotion of production and healthy market competition is behind many of our economic policy blunders.
To be clear: thats the stuff that puts you off with UWP, not Rufus, right?
>>> Beyond that, HN has had so many threads arguing the same points about cryptocurrency over and over, that it's not clear there can ever again be a new discussion about it.

Fair point. Sad, but fair :-)
Amazon does have the ability to remove downloaded items from your Kindles (assuming they sync with Amazon, of course); they've publicly used it before [https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...]. I can't confirm whether that happens when you chargeback, though.
Wow. Seriously?

There are some good arguments against it but this is still elementary-level crypto-bashing. I’ll just leave this here

https://twitter.com/PeterDiamandis/status/139837433261162906...
The Queer Legacy of Billy West and Zuni Café
Does this actually apply only for Objective C or can other programming languages benefit as well?
Have you been looking at the Maetaverse at all?

https://www.sandbox.game/en/
https://decentraland.org/

These are 3D virtual world environments and people are using crypto to build an online economy. They are trading property, buying virtual artwork and creating galleries, setting up clubs and meeting spaces, etc.

You can also explore decentralized finance, act as a peer-to-peer lender, provide liquidity in a marketplace, fund an idea you're interested in, whether that's a game (https://illuvium.io) or a commission for a comic book series (https://www.one37pm.com/nft/art/punks-comic-pixel-vault-cryp...) or start a DAO and raise money for charity or open source software (https://gitcoin.co/).
It still competes for fab space and raw materials.
Sure, but a lot of early technologies move laterally in some unexpected direction, and it was reasonable to expect blockchain stuff to do the same. Maybe the original idea could never fly (even in 2008 you didn't have to be a genius to see that evading financial controls would be the chief use of a working cryptocurrency). But likely someone would find a really neat twist on it and find the blockchain equivalent of VisiCalc, and that would happen again and so on.

What's interesting to me is that the original idea was clearly brilliant, but never found any of those lateral steps. It's kind of a string theory for programmers now.
Agreed!

Dynamodb has some really great features and high performance when used correctly but it also has a steep learning curve especially for anyone coming from sql and other relational databases.

AWS tries to push the concept of single table design which allows you to store an entire application's data in a single dynamodb table and using a bunch of complicated indexing and overloading columns with multiple types of data to sort of get relational data without any joins.

This is really easy to get wrong and you need to have all your access patterns figured out ahead of time so that you can create the indices you'll need when you create the table. You can't create new local indices later... only global secondary indices which duplicate the entire table (and double your storage costs).

Dynamodb streams are really cool - great way to setup webhooks for data changes.

Dynamodb pay per request is super cheap and fast for a serverless db. Aurora serverless isn't pay per request and has slow cold starts.

My recommendations if you are using dynamodb because you want something serverless and NOT because nosql is actually the best storage option:

* don't do single table design - just make more requests to different tables and join your data in code

* if joining in code is too slow then use a sql database...

* abstract all your data access calls so you can eventually migrate to a sql database
The issue of the "promise" of cryptos (and blockchain in general) is that it tries to solve problems that are not tech problems.

They are mostly political/governmental problems that are solved by a working democracy. In countries where there is no working democracy, the dictator won't give two shits if this NFT proves that you own this piece of land before taking it from you. Blockchain in itself is not something that brings political stability to a country.
> predictability

have you reviewed what you are writing or is it just a Markov chain generating text?
Why can't the tech be neat/super cool and primarily be used to run a scam?

I mean bittorrent is neat tech as well but it's still primarily used for piracy. Doing a deep dive into how bittorrent works doesn't suddenly change the fact that 99.9% of torrents out there are violating somebody's intellectual property.

All I'm saying is, there's lots of super neat tech out there that's primarily used for not-so-super-neat stuff.

(sidenote, I actually think piracy is pretty neat, but it was too good an analogy to pass up)
It's a revealing bit of contemporary criticism, but it comes across as a bit naive, as if the author somehow expected something different from an author of popular spy fiction and was disappointed. He's not wrong, he just misses the point. Of course Bond is a head case whose psychological foibles are a reflection of his creator, or at least of his era. A woke Bond would be about as interesting (and about as profitable) as a woke Batman.

And as for Fleming's predilection for writing about card games and golf games: if you can make those interesting -- and he could, and did -- you're certainly entitled to be listed among the ranks of Real Writers. That's when I realized it was time to take Stephen King seriously -- not when he wrote interesting stories about vampires or demons or aliens, but when he wrote interesting stories about baseball.

Edit: on finishing the essay, I'm being too generous to the author here. His rambling about an anti-Semitic subtext in Fleming's books has no justification, and he knows it, which is why he starts rambling about anti-Semitic subtexts in other authors' works.
I remember reading something particularly negative about terra in 2019[1]. Although I haven’t used terra at all since the time I first tried it (not long after I read the above mentioned article), I think it’s relevant to mention that at least at one point, terra has had major problems regarding design. If anyone has used terra in any non-trivial capacity I’d love to hear what your experience with it has been like.

[1] https://erikmcclure.com/blog/a-rant-on-terra/
The End to the Myth That Content Needs Distribution – The Information
As a weapon, the bayonett is absolutely not obsolete. It may be the only weapon available to a soldier after they run out of ammo. There are infinitely many conceivable situations where retreat is not an option.
Distribution and Demand – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
> On a visceral level, the benefit of their phone far outweighs abstract privacy concerns.

True. Most have been fed the "if you have nothing to hide..." bullshit for too long, so they now think only criminals must have something to hide, which is nonsense, and paves the way to potentially horrific development if taken to the letter.
There's this other article https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop... which among other things explains that gain of function is technically defined as modifying existing human viruses to make them more dangerous.

The SARS2 quite likely isn't based on an existing human virus but on a bat coronavirus.

The NIH has been apparently funding modifying bat coronaviruses in Wuhan with minimal guardrails as to be able to infect humanized lab mice but that's not gain of function as per that definition.
Centralized in what way?
Should be irrelevant isn't the same as is irrelevant. You can't derive ought from is.

The methods of science and peer review and open debate only work when a majority of the participants are good faith disinterested truth seekers. When bad faith motivated reasoners start to crowd out the former, you end up with something akin to a show-trial. The process is technically followed by the result is a fraud.

There is so much political interest in the lab leak question that I think good faith scientists are strongly outnumbered. There's a truth value to the lab leak question, but I can't possibly expect to know it in this environment. Anyone making a claim to the contrary is a bullshitter.
Key paragraphs:

> Now, if this were all that was happening, sellers and brands could just sell outside of Amazon, avoid the 35-45% commission, and charge a lower price to entice customers. “Buy Cheaper at Walmart.com!” should be in ads all over the web. But it’s not. And that’s where the main claim from Racine comes in. Amazon uses its Buy Box algorithm to make sure that sellers can’t sell through a different store or even through their own site with a lower price and access Amazon customers, even if they would be able to sell it more cheaply. If they do, they get cut off from the Buy Box, and thus, cut off de facto from being able to sell on Amazon.

>Amazon has between a half and three quarters of all customers online, so not being able to sell on Amazon is a nonstarter for brands and merchants. As a result, to keep selling on Amazon, merchants are forced to inflate their prices everywhere, with the 35-45% commission baked into the consumer price regardless of whether they are selling through Amazon.

[...]

> Amazon also uses its bazooka of cash from Prime members paying high consumer prices, laundered through third party sellers, to distort industries across the economy. Amazon spent some of it to build out a Hollywood studio, offering its original content ‘free’ to Prime members, who are of course indirectly paying for it with higher consumer prices. Prime also offers free video games and millions of songs. But none of this is actually free, it’s paid for by Prime members in ways that Amazon disguises with its coercive arrangements.

Screams monopoly. I think if the regulators and courts are just they'll sunder Amazon's "flywheel" and force them to deal honestly.
Did I say I did not find it deeply troubling?
> They don't see the huge silent majority of tech people who know it's a scam. That's on us

Serious question: What does "not silence" looks like?

Anyone who asks me gets my viewpoint on cryptocurrency and blockchains generally (which is more or less the same as Maciej's). My relatives all know it, but they also know another relative (who also thinks it is a scam!) made a couple K back in the first bubble because he was just playing around with the software. My coworkers all know it. Repeating it only causes strife, not education. People don't want to hear they've made bad financial decisions no matter the time, place, or tone. They instantly get defensive. I mentioned it in passing to a new hire in their trial period recently and got a really nervous look like "is this guy going to not give me a permanent contract because I liked bitcoin?"

There's no forum in our society for us to say "this is a scam" that isn't run by people with millions or billions of dollars invested in that scam - unless you're famous enough to get on cable news as a minor tech entrepreneur - and no social maneuvering that makes it effective on a personal level.
Why don't more people have seasonal affective disorder then?
Comment about seg faults. You can with a little upfront work trap them and pull enough information off the stack to know where that happened.

I find that 90% of the time I can figure it out via inspection of the offending code.

Opinion: The class of bugs that cause seg faults in some languages cause run time errors in other languages.
i my case I shorted it and have been using the vacuum for another 10 years. there was dust in the fan bearings, but i sluiced it out with mineral oil.
Looking at the list of countries by minimum wage [1] containing data for 201 countries:

* only 5 countries have nominal, effective minimum wage above $30k (Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland)

* when accounting for Purchasing Power Parity no country has minimum wage allowing to buy more than $30k in US (obviously ignoring Argentina, as it data is not reliable)

Additionally earning $34,000 in 2012 made you into the richest 1 percent globally [2]. So we may guess that today $30k easily lands you in the richest 5 percent globally.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_minimum_w...

[2] https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/02/27/were-all-the-1-percent/
There was no reason to believe it would move laterally, for both technical and social reasons.

First, the underpinnings of Bitcoin are ideological, namely in Austrian economics. This means that any change that caused any inflation would be socially resisted.

Second, most of the issues with Bitcoin stem from the lack of a central authority to do things like chargebacks and handle conflict resolution. It is not possible to solve many of the issues of Bitcoin without a central authority, and that was not going to happen for obvious reasons.
Can you please make your substantive points without swipes? It's hard for conversations like this to stay interesting and this sort of exchange tends to push them over a cliff.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you're really cool, you make it throw an error if n > 50 along with a comment explaining why, or at the very least leave a comment saying "this is not the optimal algorithm and will break if N gets much bigger than 50".
I didn't claim that Amazon was or wasn't a monopoly so I'm not following the point you're trying to make here. Centralization is not the same thing as monopoly.
Yeah sure, every time there's a crisis bitcoin loses 50% of its value. That's indeed such a great protection from inflation...
> The author clearly doesn't understand Bitcoin at all

Putting aside softer claims, writing "at all" is an exaggeration. Would you care to moderate your opinion or at least elaborate? Please point out area(s) where you think the author is mistaken?
Private Money and Central Bank Money as Payments Go Digital: An Update on CBDCs
Crypto Conundrum: When Is a Dollar Not a Dollar?
It works whatever way public sentiment wants it to work.

Most of us live in a democracy, laws aren’t black and white and can be changed on a whim with little more than a single election cycle, or interpreted by courts in any arbitrary fashion. Sure, a large company can push unfair practices to a point, and can throw lawyers at it to a point but I think some large companies fatally underestimate the danger of flouting their position; the US government or a pissed off Judge could shut down Amazon’s entire operation in a day if there was the political will or some scandal came about. So it is absolutely in their self-interest to make sure their practices are “fair”.
I have a vague sense this overlooks inelastic demand and living wage somehow but I can't put it into words.
That makes it a commodity, not a security. Securities are very specific things described by the SEC Act and the Howey test.

But if you don't like Bitcoin you can use USD based cryptos like DAI or USDC to transact and conduct peer-to-peer lending, purchase art work, save with higher yield, provide liquidity in a peer to peer marketplace, etc. By no means do you have to choose Bitcoin.
The kernel itself does not consist of any shell scripts. It may have them for building the kernel, but just like the shell scripts at boot, the problems solved there are much simpler (mostly call compiler and linker on a set of files). So I agree: For simple high level problems a dynamic language is sufficient.

As to your second paragraph, I do agree that C has a vastly insufficient type system from the 70s (even though I think better type systems were already available at the time, but the inventors of C might not have known or cared about that). Rust solves the problem you described, and what you complain about is actually that errors in C tend to be represented not statically enough.
No, it’s not. In a discussion about the credibility of an academic researcher, their track record is entirely relevant. The same isn’t true of an HN comment.
People socialized with their peers before widespread mandatory schooling existed. This is the first argument that usually comes up when someone makes the outlandish suggestion that kids don't need school, and if that is the main reason we should keep school then what is school but not a daycare center? Do we really need the government spending billions of dollars to force us to hang out with our friends?

Where you spend day in and day out growing up is not a low stakes situation.

What should kids do when they're teenagers? Whatever they or their parents want. Work with their dad, take up hobbies, spend time with their peers outside of government buildings, get jobs.

The optimism comes from a rather unique experience and perspective. I was taught to read before I ever started school, and I went to a school for a period of my childhood where I learned far more than my peers in my country within a short period of time. We don't give kids enough credit, we slow the pace for the lowest common denominator and stifle high performers. We spend several years looking at pink and green dinosaurs and watching cartoons about stegosaurus and a is for apple and b is for banana. It is honestly ridiculous, and shows my point again, school is designed to keep kids somewhere so their parents can be off doing more important things than raising their children. It is state mandated daycare.

Why do we just assume most parents are abusive? Some are, sure. But the solution to that problem is to round up every kid every day and stick them in a government building? And that solves the problem of abusive parents how exactly? People still exist in society without school, and I'd argue taking a kid to some building every day of their lives takes them out of society. Most kids do most of their socializing and learning about society during summer, when they're not required to be in school. I'd like to see some sources if you have them that home schooled kids are more dysfunctional than public schooled kids.

Teachers are glorified babysitters.
I also have so many questions... I've lived in the UK, South Africa, and New Zealand and have never had an opportunity to try one before.
Yeah... in hindsight checking for impassible cliffs would have been a smart move too
Thanks.

I’ll add a pointer towards Mazzer grinders too.

The key is to buy them when they are described as broken, then they are very cheap. As far as I can tell they are almost never broken as such. Either something inside needs plugging back in, or the on/off switch needs replacing (it’s got spades on it, so just plug a new one in).

They are nearly entirely metal, with the few plastic components readily available.

The are quite easy to sand and repaint too, so you can match them to other bits of equipment or decor. The correct colour choice is a 1970s orange.
The Oxford/community college point is a valid one, because it points out the emptiness of the clickbaity "learned at Oxford" in the OP title.

The "cliché internet objection to longer articles" can be valid in some cases. This is one of them. Plenty of other comments in this thread have pointed out the inherently blogspammy nature of the OP. It's a long, rambling piece with a clickbait title that wraps a tiny nugget of advice that may in any case be of limited applicability.

I'm a huge fan of long-form writing, like many of the articles one can find in e.g. The New Yorker, The Paris Review, etc. If this had been an article like that, then a snarky but biting dismissal might have been out of line. But the only thing the OP article has in common with those articles are its aspirations, which it failed to deliver on.

Responding to the form of a critical comment without considering the context is blind application of rules that doesn't help maintain the level of dialog. If we really wanted to apply effective moderation here, it should be to the OP article.
20 Euros per hour is a lot better than $30k per year.
I disagree with the characterization that the primary use is a scam. That’s like saying the primary use of email is to receive ads and phishing mail.
I don't care too much about the karma itself, it's more so I want to know why something I said is worthy of this little down arrow thing. Am I completely incorrect? If so why? What specifically is wrong. I want to learn and have discussions about these things. Sucks to see people downvoting you too - they're just proving your point.
I used the Inky Impression with some bash scripts, also connected to a Zero. It has 7 colours, which gives some neat expression. Here's a Twitter thread with pictures: https://twitter.com/berenguel/status/1344016064196304899

The rotating images keep me entertained during the workday.
I’m unfamiliar with this topic, what do you mean? I thought spinal fusion was just a medical procedure to connect a couple vertebrae for some reason, but I thought the downside was a little less flexibility. I wasn’t tracking it being especially barbaric.
The rule of thumb is simple: more middlemen equals lower share going to the person actually making the thing.

I had this revelation too when I started buying food from farmers direct and was surprised at the low prices. Its kinda obvious, when you think about it.
I am fairly sure that you actually can dispute partial amounts with your issuer.
The same issues exist in a ton of other academic fields though, most of which do not get crazy salaries. IMO academics are more concerned with recognition and other ego-stroking than they are with salary.
Can Twitter Give Insights Into International Differences in Covid-19 Vaccination [pdf]
Bitcoin is giving people in Turkey an opportunity to be scammed $2billion: https://www.afr.com/markets/currencies/trader-flees-turkey-w...

From my experience living in a 2nd world country, the people involved with buying Cryptocurrencies are typically young males working in IT, who proceed to waste their time, money and energy.
Up to 8,700 patients died after catching Covid in English hospitals
The same applies to Google Play. Can't take donations without giving Google a cut.