skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sure Merkle trees have been rediscovered many times.

In my case, I'd recognized the problem of digital time-stamping, but couldn't come up with a solution, failing to identify the essential role of an observer. The problem is indeed about the efficient use of observers while cryptographically securing the work to be timestamped.

I went to a talk by Stuart Haber on his work with W. Scott Stornetta on digital timestamping, slapped my forehead, and thought of the idea of a Merkle tree to make their approach more efficient. How much information does a client need to save to confirm their time-stamp, after a hash of their document has been merged into an observable event? With a linear chain, one needs all the hashes in the chain. With a tree, one gets a logarithmic speedup.

There were recent stories in the New York Times about how quickly computer science was advancing with the advent of email. Someone could go on vacation for a few days and miss everything. Inspired, I pulled an all-nighter writing up my improvement, emailed it in the morning to the people at the talk, and slept. We discovered that this thing I'd devised was called a Merkle tree. Haber and Stornetta rolled my work into a second paper, which (like their first) was cited by the original Bitcoin whitepaper. My involvement was so slight that online accounts often don't include my name.

There are many mathematicians out there much smarter than me. If I can think of a Merkle tree as an indivisible immediate thought, facing the right problem, Merkle trees are too obvious to deserve a patent.
I made a point of emailing them about this (and suggest you do so too) - I'm not sure it is legal to prevent me from managing my data, despite living outside the UK. I understand they want to prevent foreign actors from misusing the service, but this is not it.

As if making it opt-out isn't bad enough, for some, they can't even opt-out. What a s*t show this entire process has been.

What's the betting that this data is being sold for 'research' to raise a few more pounds to combat the coming economic crash?
This article is a general critique of the reward system in academia, bolted on the lab leak hypothesis for clickbait. "The Science Game" is a thing and often discussed on HN, but I don't see any causative link here.

> All to say: scientists create dangerous synthetic viruses to achieve “high-impact” scientific output.

Does gain of function research yield more high impact papers than more benign types of virology research? The article seems to suggest so, but provides no citations indicating that. Were the scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology publishing their research to general acclaim up until now? Given how little we know about it, doesn't seem so. Are these scientists driven by the same invectives as western university research academics? They're probably state employees on stable contracts for a start, not the PhD students and itinerant PostDocs of the university system, who are the main players of the Science Game.

I don't know the answers to these questions, but the article would be more persuasive if it did.
It was first called the Wuhan Virus by mass media and researchers, even in China. That naming choice was fairly ordinary, similar to Spanish Flu, West Nile Virus, or Crimean–Congo fever. The "China virus" term became problematic once it was politicized in a criminally dumb way by the Trump government - back when they claimed it's not dangerous at all and totally under control in the US.

Insisting on a more neutral name was helpful for distinguishing reliable information from nonsense. But in my opinion the name Sars-Cov-2 was unhelpful in the long run because people just ended up calling it Covid or Coronavirus instead. Wuhan virus would have been a better naming choice, and it was called like that inside China at the beginning. The politicization of the health crisis (instead of showing solidarity first) was the big issue. Worse, it's still ongoing.

If totally neutral names are so important, maybe virologists should start thinking about naming schemes like meteorologists use, e.g. using first names.
> This is where things get interesting. At this point in the ruling, Judge Lee decided to make a comparison, and that's where Star Wars comes in.

Was fluff added by GPT-2 to make the word count longer? All of the information included in this article could have been written with a lot less words.
That’s like people who preferred Donald trump. Indications from other areas showed he was going to be worse, but he hadn’t already had an actual history in office so many former supporters were unable to extrapolate.

Xinjiang, Tibet, and events in Hong Hong don’t bode well. Trends in the South China Sea show that China doesn’t respect its neighboring countries claims either. So the external events that do exist are not promising that China will be better.

And in internal politics and equality, we haven’t yet forced academics and professionals into labor camps but it may be trending that way.

Edit: I’m by no means downplaying the terribleness the USA did in South America, the Middle East or elsewhere nor our own internal discriminations and worse, I’m pointing out that given the limited information we have, it does not give any confidence that China will be an improvement. My own feel given my fairly limited understanding is that overall it will be worse for the environment and justice globally and at the very best essentially the same but with a new face.
Monroe doctrine implies the US navy has ownership too.
It seems like W .CA should have links to Seattle-Portland-SF-LA-San Diego, Russia, Japan, and China.
Two things can be true:

1) The NHS is free at-the-point of delivery, funded through taxes, much like schools and roads

2) That does not mean I owe them the right to unilaterally give away my data
And its a real pain if you have a complex condition that spans trusts /organizations.

I have contact with 3 / 4 trusts and they have difficulty looking at each others records - also blood tests across trusts are non standard.
I've been following the situation in Argentina for some years, and it seems that their military is tired of fighting with the political class for the appropriate resources. They seem to be technically competent, but the resource allocation is a joke.
Same. Last Jedi felt like a stab in the back, and when I heard the end of the trilogy is even considered bad by people who liked TLJ I knew Disney Star Wars is a lost cause unless drastic changes are made.

This whole debacle is a huge example for how not to continue an IP.
I strongly agree with the judge’s other implication that The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker were mediocre and schlocky. My indictment is directed towards Kathleen Kennedy’s involvement as the president of Lucasfilm.
Government actor says hold my beer
Nice to see my town mentioned! I hope we remove even more of the current traffic roads in the center, it is great.
This is a pretty cool feature to help out people that can't set up a mining rig themselves. However, not everyone has the hardware for mining in their home. Personally, I use https://hashing24.com/ to earn bitcoin without having tons of hardware heating up my home. It's a great bitcoin cloud mining service that lets anyone mine some bitcoin for themselves at any time.
If you are outside the UK then you can download the PDF version of the form and email it to (enquiries@nhsdigital.nhs.uk) after completion.

(https://www.nhs.uk/your-nhs-data-matters/manage-your-choice/...)
> almost as bad as walking

What's bad about walking? It's good for your health, good for the economy, good for the environment.
Criminologists are pseudoscientists; if this is the extent of the "backlash", then it's not a problem but a self-correction of science. I bet that the (anonymous!) author of this article thinks that there's only two valid chromosomal configurations, too.
The company's purpose is to make as much money as possible. That means that their interest is to make their employees work as much as possible while paying them as little as possible.

If they try to make you do better/more work a nicer or a ruder way is an implementation detail. The goal is always to extract as much work as possible from you at the lowest price.

Sometimes the goals of the company converge with the goal of employees. Most of the time they exist in a state of frozen conflict. It sucks, but that's just how the employer/employee relationship must work out in general.
I would say that polymorphism open to extension is also important, and subtype / supertype hierarchy. It implies some kind of composition of interface types in a static language.
I expected exposing pedophilia, turned out to be just special effects.
I found it hard to understand the point of this. It talks about imitating the “look and feel” of LaTeX documents in HTML, but fails to do so. If the article itself is an example, it’s the familiar low-quality browser-rendered HTML typography.
I'm impressed that it worked so smoothly after I entered Tokyo. Fully expected my phone's browser to crash at any time as it proceeded to download 34MB of data. Scrolling and zooming didn't even stutter.

I've done a thing with the same base idea in the past, and absolutely love the style of those things, especially if there are enough roads available to get a more dense shape: https://christian.rinjes.me/posts/2020-11-25-tokyo-street-ar...
I read a lot of Chinese fantasy fiction (xianxia and wuxia) online and its extremely common for the heroes of the stories to use potions or herbs or magical ingredients to increase their powers and abilities. Something unique about them though is it seems super widespread in these stories for the main character, neutral factions, and enemies / evil factions alike to exhaust discovered resources to extinction, with the main ethical / moral crisis being whether to distribute them according to power or according to fairness. Fights over how big one's share of the pie is are common, and 'evil' characters are often those that express greed by demanding an unfair share. But the question of whether it's a good idea or a moral choice to harvest an entire field of 1000 year old ginseng or stealing all of some rare previously thought to be extinct Phoenix's eggs vs tending to the field and harvesting only a small crop or only taking the resources of older birds rarely comes up.

There are plenty of other cultural differences in these stories but overall I'm always left wondering whether some of these reflect broader cultural attitudes or if this is like if someone tried to get a deep understanding of western culture by reading Spiderman comics and that's it.
In another thread I just read this[1]: "Using a systems language where it’s not required is just burning time and money." and was considering a response like yours. Is there actually going to be any noticable consequences to the jank of Slack, Teams, GMail, and so on bringing laptops to their knees and damaging user morale and taking a company brand reputation hit?

After you get frustrated by the jank and leave, is there anything else you can do except go back because the people and customers and services you need to deal with are using the janky systems, and all the systems are janky these days - and finding ones which aren't, and predicting they will stay that way, and moving to them, is non-trivial?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27406824
Haskell is also garbage collected
Just to underline your excellent advice:

I developed back pain cycling at some point, which turned out to me coming from right hamstrings. Regular stretching solved it immediately.

And a bike fitting is a thousand percent worth the effort. Cycling is a bit weird in that it's a low impact sport, but uses very repetitive motions. If things are well adjusted, you can ride bikes til you're ninety. And if they're not, you can slowly exacerbate bad pressure on the knee until it's a nightmare.
Because the company leaders want people who are motivated by ideology. This means they can potentially pay less or have you work/produce more. It also helps them create a culture that is easier for them to maintain and control.
> nobody called for eradication of cats

While "eradication" evokes killing and hostility, many small island communities all over the world which cohabitate with rare and vulnerable bird species do ban or severely restrict the ownership of cats.
Santa steals WiFi from Russia. Although, the damn reindeer keep visiting naughty hoofed ruminant sites on their iPads, clogging the limited bandwidth.
I, too, focus on problems at home that I have any hope of changing rather than yelling at countries on the other side of the planet that have zero incentive to listen to me.
... like the ethernet port on the ... power brick?

They shipped one major hardware improvement, and that has been an architectural change that took years.

However, the problem with removing perks that employees like is you're going to lose your best people, because those can just quit and have another job next week. You'll be left with those that can't afford to quit because they won't find another job easily, which in IT means not so competent.

I remember the rumor mill when Marissa Mayer canceled work from home at Yahoo saying they're losing all their good people. Considering what's left of Yahoo it looks like the rumors were right.
When Sun Microsystems tried to sell Brendan Gregg his own DTrace Tools
Covid: Twitter suspends Naomi Wolf after tweeting anti-vaccine misinformation
"In my experience, expecting passion for the product instead of professionalism for the work has always turned out to be a badly managed company. "

Are there any well managed ones? It seems they all do this.
Parasites are no problem as long as you cook the food properly.
I don't think anyone is claiming that humans can compute computable functions in some way better than a computer, the claim is that minds can do things that are not reducible to computing computable functions. See, for example, the Lucas-Penrose argument:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose%E2%80%93Lucas_argument

Note that I am not suggesting that I concur with it.
We'll have to agree to disagree then. The overall sentiment in big tech is still very much "If you leave your cushy FAAMG job there are hundreds of people eager to replace you, and the employer is well aware of this when announcing returning to work."

Although I would love to know if you're also doing work in union/labor organization either at your employer or otherwise.
What cause have you provided to believe your empty assurances? They correctly foresee that engineering is likely to follow production in the name of communication and efficiency.
"WebExtensions" is a nebulous term and I can find no where that Chrome calls their API WebExtensions, it is simply the "ChromeAPI"

Mozilla as even stopped using the term WebExtensions, instead just going with Extensions [2]

The "spec" that most people refer to as WebExtensions, is BrowserExtensions orginally published by Microsoft via W3C [1]

[1] https://browserext.github.io/browserext/
[2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Terminology#Background
It’s from this page (which was linked in the opening sentence of the April & May 2021 progress report):

https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2021/05/24/temptation-of-the-ap...
Farmed animals have a tendency to be a mono culture that is housed on way too little space which is a breeding ground for problems that then need to be controlled by heavy use of pharmaceuticals which is detrimental to human survival.

Think anti biotic use in chickens for example. And the resistances that come with it. And fish tanks that do exist already have some of these issues already as well. How expanding that even more is a good thing is nebolous to me.
What do you guys think about it? Any features the app might be missing?
Same here. They could send out a daily e-paper though (and some do!).
Yes, that is probably the relevant national law for NHS Digital itself.

Then presumably they're relying on GDPR points 9(2)(h) and 9(2)(i) with reference to that national law to argue that the default prohibition on processing health data in paragraph 9(1) doesn't apply.

And then they've got public interest/official authority under 6(1)(e), or perhaps compliance with a legal obligation under 6(1)(c), as a lawful basis.

But all of that just means the processing wasn't automatically prohibited under the GDPR. All the normal rules including the principles set out in Article 5 still apply as well, and those principles include purpose limitation, data minimisation, storage limitation, and integrity and confidentiality. There are also some specific obligations around professional secrecy under Article 9 because it's health data.

Given the extremely broad scope of the intended data lake here, the ambiguity about who might end up with access to it, and the extremely sensitive nature of the data, I don't think I'd want to be the one defending NHS Digital when the seemingly inevitable ICO investigation comes.
> Effective research is not disciplinary, interdisciplinary, or multidisciplinary; it is transdisciplinary... Disciplines are taken by science to represent different parts of the reality we experience. In effect, science assumes that reality is structured and organized in the same way universities are.

Not just the sciences. Rigid, path-dependent taxonomies are a plague in all disciplines and in daily life.
.NET Native is effectively dead (critical fixes only) and the .NET team is focusing on NativeAOT instead. They’ve done a very poor job of communicating it but that’s what I’ve gathered from various MS employees.
Trump's non-stop intentional effort to say outrageous and nonsensical things in order to inflame passions (for his own personal profit) and try to hide his own ignorance and lack of work ethic, make it important to have an honest public conversation. This can't be understated. It went so far that half a million US Americans died due a botched response that included people refusing to take basic safety precautions (and supported by their political leaders) just to "to own the libs"
Covert mines. No attribution. Better yet buy the mines from China. Once ships start disappearing they will think twice about entering illegal waters.
Where do we see prototypal inheritance in nature? I can think of lots of examples of composition, but none of prototypes. The closest I can think of would be DNA, but even that would be better modeled as composition in my mind.
Violence is never a “good” option but to paraphrase Winston Churchill: you don’t negotiate with a dragon while your head is in its mouth.

Sinking some of these vessels would attract the right amount of international attention and force action. Seizing and destroying is a worth while risk and a “cost of doing business”.

You want to play a game of cat and mouse? You’re one cat they’re many many more mice.
If this was 30 years ago, there would be no corporations involved directly, but the entire analysis of these records would be done in government institutions or academic hospitals.

Corporations would only be there to provide the hardware and basic software such as OSes.

Can we please get a law that any crowdsourced data and all derivative works belongs to the public?

And can corporations please go back to their role of building products that aid in research, such as computer hardware and software? Combining "building software and hardware" and "needing to look at data" is a source of trouble. Your software can look at the data, but not you. We'll run the software.
"Personality is far more important."

I guess you could call it that. The leaders want a company culture that is easy to control and "fanatical" employees.

Edit: why downvote? This is definitely one of those leadership buzzwords that they are trying to work on.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/smallbusiness/simon-sinek-ho...
> Good that we don't have to rely on only hydroelectric storage eh? Just like we don't have to rely on solar or wind only.

If scalable alternatives exist, it'd be good to mention what you plan to use and how you plan to scale it.

> Nuclear power whitewashing won't make it "green". This Astro-Turf crap is fuelled by ignorance of the dirt this technology leaves behind for future generations and greed of a few remaining participants in this dying industry.

The entirety of th US's nuclear waste fits in a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 yards high [1]. Alleging that people who disagree with you are part of some kind of conspiracy is not a good way to make your point.

Nuclear power remains the only non intermittent form of carbon free energy generation, besides geographically limited things like geothermal and hydroelectric power.

If nuclear power harms the fight against global warming, why does France (nuclear power leader) have about 1/5th the carbon intensity of electricity then Germany (renewables leader)?

1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
RailCams, Railroad Webcams, Live Train Videos
He has donated it to a great aircraft museum in Australia - it should be making its way down this year.

They have spent years getting it back to spec to make the trans-pacfic flight back home
That’s an extreme comparison! I bet only a few US cities would approach what you see in Berlin or Paris.
From Sockets to WebSockets
If you have no evidence, "no clue" is the correct conclusion.
It's the guy, Russell Ackoff! I still remember reading all about Systems Thinking from year 1. Do they still use the same material in Systems Design Engineering?
Between juggling a 20+ person team that spans the Globe, hiring for another 20 slots and a 2 yr old at home - I definitely don’t have time for exercises like that.
It's not that you don't have a personality. It's that your personality would not be as easily controlled and wouldn't fit with the company culture.

Edit: why downvote and flag?
When we visited South Africa, locals made a point of showing the Chinese fishing vessels that had mechanical troubles and were forced to dock in Cape Town. The locals refused to service them, and the anglers lived on their boats in drydock.

This is well known throughout the world, but my suspicion is that governments receive enough Chinese investment (personal or otherwise) that they turn the other cheek. SA in particular had whole quarters of industrial areas that had only Chinese signage, and were wholly owned by China / Chinese businesses.
> What are the five shops you visit three times a week

Ah, chemist, supermarket, coffee shop, butcher maybe bakery? Heck, I might run out of sugar and have to go shopping again! Is it really that weird?

I’d particularly like to point out that all-in-one shops are globally atypical, and specifically atypical in smaller communities.

I seriously think you should consider your buying patterns as not representative of... most people, in most places, and specifically not el salvador.
One of the best ways to eliminate left turns is to replace four way intersections with roundabouts. This has the advantage of working even where there isn’t a grid to facilitate the “3 right turns” strategy.

For a great description of why this is so effective, see the recent freakonomics podcast:
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/roundabouts/
Funny proof that P=NP