skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We built this really cool iOS app a couple years ago called Editional that was centered around NFTs. Anyone could create one, and they would mint so many editions, the first being the most valuable (since it’s the “original”). I still contend that we were far ahead of anyone even today: we had the ability to facilitate multi-atomic swap trades even.

…we ended up closing shop. We were paying for minting transactions behind the scenes and the market was too expensive in 2018-2019. We made a crucial error there, but we didn’t think people would be willing to pay so much for transactions.

..boy, were we wrong. I just sold a couple remnants of my old Editional wallet for a good chunk of money. I had a…hard time doing it though: transaction fees cost from a minimum of $40 and and a maximum of $160 for those smart contract transactions. Add in the fact that every provider takes a large cut: from Coinbase, to NFT marketplaces, to the 10+ dollar fees to actually complete a successful transaction.

To be honest, I was intimately involved in this space for a while, and I don’t get it anymore. We had this hypothesis that the ecosystem would scale and mature as we went, but we didn’t see much of that at all. It’s all gambling. It’s not even cool gambling: the decentralized prediction markets I was particularly excited to see never really took off.

I got interested in the space because I thought: decentralized consensus is really interesting, how important that’ll be in a world trending lower on trust; but this crypto world is so dishonest that I’ve realized that trust is integral to most effective systems.
The author, Peter Woit, is a long term critic of string theory. His wikipedia page should give you an overview of his background. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Woit
Turns out , if you tell people to market themselves as if they are toothpaste, they will lie and lie and lie some more. Shocking
That’s just risk management
Product page:

https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/corporate/29933371.html

"Low-speed automated driving with a focus on safety"

- "The e-Palette is equipped with a specially-designed automated driving system that includes control hardware, software, and advanced sensors such as cameras and LiDAR. Combined with high-accuracy 3D mapping and an operation management system, e-Palette will realize low-speed automated driving at SAE level 4."

- "To support safe operation, the e-Palette features an external human-machine interface designed to assist communication with those around the vehicle, including pedestrians, during automated driving. Both front and rear lamps on vehicle mimic eye contact to inform pedestrians of vehicle actions."

- "The automated driving system constantly monitors for obstacles across a full 360-degree field of vision around the vehicle and operates at a speed appropriate and in accordance with the surrounding environment. As a preventative measure, an on-board safety operator will also monitor the vehicle's movement and be prepared to take control if necessary."
Let me ask gently what you do professionally, because in our market -- high-end project management financial reporting software sold to very large customers -- Excel is absolutely EVERYWHERE, even with younger clients.

R and Pandas are cool, but they do not appear to be gaining market share from people using pivot tables and Power Query in our market.
I guess "Bus-driver orders self-driving bus forward at stop, striking visually impaired Paralympian disguised as able-bodied person", just doesn't have the same ring.

It's difficult to see how this could at all be Toyota's fault. The system stopped at the crosswalk correctly. The pedestrian was apparently not carrying any visually recognizable means to identify them as sight-impaired. There was even a crossing guard who also did not stop the pedestrian from aimlessly wandering into the intersection.

Is the problem actually that the electric busses are too quiet and the pedestrian didn't realize it was there? I know some cities have had problems with this, but I thought installing beeper-devices on electric busses was pretty standard by now. Seems like the sort of mistake that a podunk town in bumble-fuck nowhere would make, not something that would happen in Tokyo.

I'm assuming this person is used to walking around without a cane and has thus far managed without incident. Or maybe he's getting hit by cars all the time and this is the first we're hearing about it because it was an automated vehicle.

Regardless, there are a dozen scenarios that are more likely than anything being done by anyone involved with the bus, driving it, supervising it, or manufacturing it.
If I let my bias show I'd say Microsoft's value is from developing technology just enough to set up bill gates for customers :p
Exactly. If the tax rate on capital gains is excessive, what's my incentive to invest in a small startup? Its extremely risky as it is, but without this, parking my cash in my brokerage account becomes all the more likely.
There's been a few articles about rounding floating point numbers correctly in the past few days, but I realized that might not always be what you want.

For instance when adding some small positive number to a floating point value I would typically prefer it round up if correct rounding would mean that it remains unchanged.

b ≠ 0 and a + b = a can be a source of fun bugs.

However a point can be made that if you even need to consider such behavior, you should probably be using something more precise than your current number representation.
Beijing? Maybe 2050, maybe sooner. 200 km away in countryside outside Beijing vs 200 km away countryside outside London? Probably much longer.
I spent time in Japan on a project with an 80 hour per person average workload. It was millions of dollars over budget and years late. Putting in the hours was cultural around not wanting to let the team down, but there was a leadership failure too. Crushing people to implement bad (or vague or undocumented) decisions made the problem go from bad to worse over time.

My sense is that in tech jobs it just doesn’t scale.

There are professions where it does seems to work. Banking analysts who expect to go back to school in 2 years crush themselves to get Goldman Sachs banking on the resume.
Celebrating maximum exploitation of workers by those with all the leverage & power and calling the decent consideration of another man's well-being silly, that's, well, I'll just say that I believe we can do better, sir.
Pretty sure it’s DistilBERT, not DistilBART: https://huggingface.co/transformers/model_doc/distilbert.htm...
Typically unique_ptr is represented as a pointer (check sizeof). For shared_ptr, there’s an atomic refcount but no locks. Operations on the shared_ptr object itself aren’t threadsafe (you can’t have the same shared_ptr assigned by two threads at the same time without locking), just like int, but the reference count is atomic, so copies of shared_ptr can safely be shared among threads. Atomic_shared_ptr adds atomicity to the pointer itself. I believe that usually uses locks.
how come Apple/Google is not consider a monopoly on smart phone?
I think the point was more that it is comparatively easy to develop your new theory to fit known 'facts', so that testing against them should usually be regarded only as a sanity check rather than as additional evidence. To be a bit pithy, prediction is worth more than postdiction.

(Of course, if your theory fails to comport with known 'facts' but successfully predicts the result of new observations, then that is deeply exciting!)
Rubbishing the Doherty Report by Matt Barrie
When will Microsoft learn? – Windows 11 Privacy Preview
Aluminum melts around 1200F. That’s a really hot fire! Was it a windy day?

(Lead, on the other hand, melts at half that.)
> The impact on us economically was probably in the 10s of millions

That's less than Roman Abramovich paid for one Chelsea player. There's probably been more than £10m of donations to the Tory party alone from oligarchs. Try again with a more realistic figure.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/21/tory-donors...
It isn't, just like opposite of free software is not great UI. Despite that, free software and terrible UI gets conflated; so what's just one more conflation, right?
Use Microsoft recommended browser settings
When learning elixir and phoenix, it is hard to find updated tutorials. Whenever I try an youtube tutorial, there is always an error. Can you share some updated links/books for a beginner?
Or just use sqlalchemy...
Except of course that when incompetent or authoritarian governments have to borrow or seize money they need to cover up shortfalls, the consequences aren't exactly better...

And it's not like crypto removes the notion of wealthy elites capturing the revenue of money printing, it just moves them and their money a long way from the local economy, requires them to spend a lot of money on burning power and removes any incentive for them to spend it on local roads or schools.
Wouldn't any Southeast Asian country except Singapore suffice?
But still eats genetically modified food, uses airplanes and electric vehicles, his home is (probably powered by the utility grid) and uses the internet to work.

I hate how technology only relates to his personal computer
Apple seems to have completely botched this PR stunt/feature.

Reading your comment, I realize how these… ‘criminals’ could use phone number networks to share illegal sexual content peer to peer.

In other words, Apple doesn’t need to analyze your images to find these criminals. They only need to analyze the frequency or quantity of flagged images.

In other words not one image correctly/falsely tagged, but individuals and networks of individuals who are *collecting* and *storing* mass quantities of these images. And, they’re using Apple privacy and security to hide from law enforcement.

Racketeering?
Show HN: Node Typescript Postgres Query Builder
I’m all for criticism of reckless self driving implementations but it seems this can’t be blamed on software:

“ Two bus operators -- on board to supervise the autonomous driving -- said they noticed the athlete, but thought he would stop walking as the bus was approaching, according to Japan's Asahi daily.

The Mainichi daily said the bus automatically stopped but the operators pressed the start button as they did not think he would walk out on to the road.”
Researchers Ready Lab-Grown Delta for Human Trials
hey HN!
This is a simple typescript wrapper around the npm pg-node library which provides autocomplete and validation for basic crud queries out of the box, without having to use an ORM.

I do alot of refactoring on my projects and I find crud queries to be around 80% of my APIs, so having typescript have my back really helps out.

The idea is mostly to provide helper functions for the common commands we do, and leave the more complex queries to the same query APIs in pg-node, with a couple tiny optional helper functions for field autocompletion.

Curious to hear your thoughts!

Note: Posted again from a couple hours ago since I didn't realise the repo was private!
Baumol's cost disease : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
Note: Posted again here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28327008) since the repo was private
Sometimes you need dynamic SQL, because the DB doesn't have stored procedures you can use for the same purpose (e.g. SQLite).

I talk more about this use case here: https://death.andgravity.com/query-builder-why#the-problem
You mean like Optimizely? I thought most startups these days had absurd adjectiverbnoun names.
I think the poster means that it's a symptom of (and a temporary solution to) underlying issues.

Sometimes I have to do a bit of overtime to fix a time-sensitive issue, and I'm fine with that. The underlying issue, though, might be lack of code review, insufficient testing, fatigue or anything else.

It's good to remember that overtime is a viable solution, but as any solution it has its costs. This can build resentment among employees (making them quit earlier), increase fatigue (this requiring even more overtime to fix issues caused by fatigued employees), build dissatisfaction (resulting in loss of motivation), etc.

In other words, if you're finding yourself plumbing leaks every week, a better solution for the long term might be to replace the whole pipe :)
I do, and it IS powerful, but lots of the things that it's really good at in a finance context I tend to solve with SQL. But that's because I am -- or used to be -- a programmer.

If you've never programmed, "just use SQL" is super daunting. OTOH, Excel gives you access to that kind of data query power without writing code, and the people who are good at it can do pretty amazing things with it. It's a different way of solving that problem.

It's a powerful tool, and it's a well-built one (again, it pains me to say, bc I grew up hating MSFT). If you're on a platform that has access to a native app, exploring it can actually be fun.
At the end of the article, he references "The Gap" by Ira Glass. Someone made an excellent video, based on that[0].

Worth the watch (IMNSHO). It's very short, and very encouraging.

[0] https://vimeo.com/85040589
I'm not sure we'd have a working exchange where to see them tank...
1 private and around 10 for work.
I hacked an office telephone to play Doom
Why does everyone think that the person receiving money knows how to spend it better than any other person?

Notice I didn't say "earned" because the entire premise of some is that one cannot morally "earn" a billion dollars - that something is fundamentally broken in our society when wealth can become so centralized.

Some people make fun of the idea that government is a decent decisionmaker for spending money on society, whenever raising taxes on the wealthy comes up. Where do you draw the line? Do you think they currently are taxed perfectly? Do you think no one should be taxed? How would the infrastructure these companies relied on get funded?

Oh, I see you committed another trope of comparing the earnings of anyone on this thread (and about 95% of the country) to a billionaire. The floor for living comfortably, or even somewhat luxuriously, is a much higher proportion of the wages of a middle class household than it is for a billionaire. I make 0.02% annually of just this bonus. Don't you think that makes a difference in the equation?
I'm not surprised, just amazed people would say it's "(more) valuable" and the UK must be "doing something right" without a second thought as to whether they're confusing financial value with moral value, or whether the transfer of money really represents a transfer of value.

Spare me the Econ 101, Harley Street is a status symbol, the doctors there are not more highly paid because they're objectively safer or more skilled.

I guess we could call Africa's history of conflict, exploitation and colonialism, and usurious loans from the World Bank to leaders who aren't interested in their citizens' welfare, a distortion of the local market.
As I understand it, honeycomb popularised observability before it got redefined by other vendors to match their offering. So I think you're the victim of other vendors' marketing here.
> How many Tim Cook's do you have lying around?

I don't think these people are as special and rare as you think they are.

There are plenty of smart people on the planet.
Because NY has chosen to not have spots, to build other things. There is plenty of physical space if every building dug out an underground car park during construction.
Fundamental physics sees worlds in grains of sand and infinities in hours
Thanks. I'd heard of this before, but my first thought when seeing three numbers describing time is work/play/sleep (commonly 8 of each in the west from what I understand), and it wasn't quite sounding right to me for this context.
The issue with plain SQL is simply that you can not compose queries at runtime.

For example let user decide which columns to select, in which order to fetch the rows, which table to query etc.
Or not even let the user decide but decide based on some config file or the system state.

You end up with a bunch of string manipulation that is fragile and does not compose well.

What solution is there except from simulating SQL via your languages nestable data structures?
You dont need to store it anywhere physically waiting for the next person
Hello, the idea is very cool. The website looks squished on mobile
Probably because they are more than one company
70s actually. And the world hasn't changed - if you want efficient, performant code that manages resources (not just memory) correctly, you don't want GC.
> Why isn’t IPv6 more popular? ... and an arguably overly complex design.

I really don't know where this ridiculous claim comes from. Yes, IPv6 addresses look more complicated but various other things about the protocol are drastically simplified — no more on-path fragmentation, simpler header formats and fewer required header fields, correctly implemented link-local scopes, previously separate ICMP+ARP+IGMP protocols consolidated into ICMPv6 (which handles neighbour discovery, router advertisements, path MTU discovery and multicast group membership amongst others), no more broadcast, and in many cases clients will quite happily get along without DHCP. If anything, it is considerably less complex.
Fair - I think my point is more along the lines of seeing one and getting a detailed look at the features. That was reserved for car shows, but now there are hundreds of YouTube videos that go into a lot of depth.

And immediacy - before you’d have to wait if you didn’t have car and driver handy or the movie with the Maserati in it wasn’t rewound. Now it’s 30 seconds and you’ve got more information about them than you could look at in a lifetime.

Growing up, I didn’t know what certain words in songs were (because I couldn’t hear them clearly or just hadn’t heard the word). It meant finding album notes, looking for the lyrics (if they were there), then trying to use context clues to put it together.
No I'm good. Actually a pretty nice way to keep up with actual family and friends.
It is a notable distinction when the currency’s volatility looks like this:

https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/ETHUSD/

Also, important distinction because this could easily be the dad and kids moving ethereum around between their own accounts.

Saying it was sold for $255k conveys a much stronger probability of it not being fake or a fraud than saying it was sold for 80 ether.
Market cap is not a real sum of money that actually exists and coupd be retrieved. You, the sharegolder, oan the company, and pay Tim Cook out of revenue. From that perspective salaries of upper management are not so trivial
I don’t know about that, but I am using stlab::copy_on_write in production and it’s amazing. It’s like a cross among a T, a unique_ptr<T>, and a shared_ptr<const T>. https://github.com/stlab/libraries/blob/main/stlab/copy_on_w...
And Yahoo.
I unironically expect better from a CIA sponsored (according to ABC News) sexapp since I paid for it.
I recently built a janky system which runs nmon (plus a few custom rpi stats) every two minutes or so and pushes the output file to a watch folder. Another service uploads to server if network available. The server then ingests into timescale. Have been running it on two rpis and a few aws servers for the past few months.

Edit: I’m using grafana but was considering checking out apache superset.
I wrote an entire article about why I didn't do that: https://death.andgravity.com/own-query-builder#sqlalchemy-co...

In general, SQLAlchemy is an excellent choice; in my specific case (single dev with limited time), the overhead would be too much (even with my previous experience with it).
GoDaddy is expensive. If you are making money it doesn't matter. If you have them just parked for a future idea, it's a serious money drain if you have many domains.
Well, kidnap as it travels over international waters, so, well, that's not exciting, the title can just be "Who Would Kidnap Precious Cargo?" (answer: sea pirates).

I thought it'd be about a telescope already in space, and how some entity managed to send signals to it to move it (from the HTML title as it currently is on my browser: The World's Most Powerful Space Telescope Is Moving). I was wondering what they'd do with it and how they'd hide it. And also why.

Thinking about it, obviously radio comms to (and probably from) the satellite is encryped, I wonder if the Bad Guys could hack into the ground station and steal the encryption key...
I wouldn't have guessed (/remembered) it had been ten years of Cook, but what I do remember is people saying exactly that when he took over.

I suppose at some point all companies die/fade into obscurity/are different companies in all but name; maybe in 2080 or whatever we'll be able to say - ah, yep, knew it, Apple was for the dogs as soon as Jobs left, was only a matter of time!
What Is Civilization – By Will Durant
Having interviewed new grads from the west and new grads in China, I can guarantee you that a lot of the new grads in China had had exactly the education the OP described and were completely unable to do anything. It's not just venting, it's the reality.

There are some great universities in China and there are definitely some who know their stuff but the average mid level university in China? Nope, completely useless.

To be fair, this was in 2009 to 2014. I have left China since.
Microsoft Azure cloud vulnerability is the ‘worst you can imagine’
My point is it's a niche product. It's something only a few people actually need and use and something that has plenty of 'more powerful' alternatives.

It's not something most people would choose their operating system for.
Setting a window to be "always on top" saves me more time than all of window's productivity features combined.
Someone on Reddit suggested stored procedures, which seems like a good alternative.

Alas, SQLite doesn't have them, so query building it is.
Why is it gambling?

I mean, in which way is it different from US kids selling lemonade?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemonade_stand
10-15 depending on whether any expired since the last time I looked.
Certainly some software looks routine and feels repetitious while you are doing it. But very little if any software is amenable to determining its manufacturing tolerances. That phrase is jarring because the idea of manufacturing tolerances for software does not make sense. But manufacturing tolerances are fundamental to statistical process control, which then builds on statistically valid sampling to determine if part of a process is failing. (Or it can determine that a quality issue is something other than a process failure.) But it depends on setting and using manufacturing tolerances wisely.
How many people can make predictable, iteratively improved products? The difficulty is in marketing.
I agree with you but you can't just throw around the phrase "sure it costs some $" as if that isn't a driving force in everything a big company does. My company is going hard into Azure and I'm making the same recommendations as you suggest, but it is a hard sell precisely because of the cost.
Your point is valid, it make sense just speak SQL to DB in some scenarios . A good ORM will enable people to do that easily as well.

However, good orms like LINQ in C# really shines in a lot of places.
"people are paid not by the value of their work, but by their scarcity"

When will we learn to stop making these silly arguments about "scarcity" and understand that the only thing that matters is a position of power?

Einstein and Steven Hawking were unique and advanced the entire human civilisation, whats their net work? Is anyone except the mentally ill going to suggest we have more Einsteins that Tim Cook's lying around?