skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Parent talks about the „Lightning Network“ — a Layer 2 scaling solution for Bitcoin. Beware: I am still a crypto noob but I am still going to try to explain how I understood the system so far. Edited: Minor terminology and typos.

Roughly speaking the Lightning Network works similar to a „current account“ that businesses have between each other but does not require the actors to trust each other. The parties initiate a transaction by each one sending Bitcoin to a public multi signature address. The resulting transaction cannot be spent by any one alone. Now, this unspent transaction serves as an initial balance and opens a channel between the parties on the layer 2 network. Bitcoin may now be wired back and forth between the parties on layer 2 w/o needed to be settled individually on the Bitcoin block chain. Finally, if all parties agree by signing a second, settling transaction the resulting balance is written back to the Blockchain to whatever address the participants initially agreed upon. Theoretically, there could have been billions of Bitcoin transactions over the years on the Lightning Network which would be eventually represented by only two transactions on the chain.

Now, taproot improves this scheme by introducing Schnorr signatures. Up to now every member of the multisig transaction I just talked about needed to contain the public keys of all parties which in turn needed to be verified against all their private keys. Since transactions are limited in their size, this limited the applicability of multisig transactions. Now, Schnorr signatures allow for aggregation of public keys so the transaction only needs to contain a single number instead of hundreds or thousands. Of course, this also speeds up validations of transactions.

I hope this all made sense. I have yet to see practical applications of a Lightning Network „scheme“ but I heard El Salvador is using it for cheap Bitcoin transactions (although not applying Schnorr signatures yet).
We are literally talking about a battle that scared Osama Bin Laden so much that he wrote his last will and testament during the battle.

Bin Laden thought he was going to die in that battle. We were close: just a little bit more would have done it.

Sure, we didn't know how close we were until afterwards. But when you consider what we did accomplish with just 100 boots on the ground + air support, it really makes you wonder what we could have done with 800 or 2000 men instead.
TFA suggests that Xerox was offering the option of lossless JBIG2 compression but they implemented it incorrectly -- they didn't include the delta blocks that described how individual image blocks differed from canonical patterns.

Which brings up another point: How did Xerox's SW development process take place? Was it done in-house with frequent code reviews or was it outsourced to a low bidder and then thrown back over the wall with no real quality assurance process?
MKBHD had a good video about this topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaaJyRvvaq8
It might be old, but its still true. I'm not anti seat belt (I track cars, and I understand safety), I'm anti seat belt laws, since it gives the police a ready made excuse to pull you over for yet another reason.

I think the proper way to encourage seat belt use would have been to allow insurance companies to not cover injuries to insured motorists who were found to not be wearing seat belts at the time of the accident.
Lisp isn't a functional language, there isn't any need to refactor an iterative solution to a problem.
Hopefully the community has something more interesting in their life to care about.
Museum of Other Realities
They have bajillion different clients. Web, iOS, Android, PS4, various TVs, and more, all of which are being used by people on all sorts of devices in all sorts of different versions.

Probably they will either begin at some point to return the value “0” for dislike count for others than the uploader at some point or if not they will probably freeze the value at its current. Maybe it’s already frozen. Did anyone try to see if the number is changing as seen publicly by one account when new dislikes are added by other accounts?
I mean, it would've been the newest version at publication a year ago. Nobody expects Google to update these slides over the next year either.
This reeks of "oops we're sorry" described by Johnathan Nightingale (former General Manager and Vice President of the Firefox group) in his thread on how Google was sabotaging Mozilla: https://archive.vn/tgIH9 (or direct link, https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871237240852480)

- "I'm sorry for the misrepresentation of Safari Tech Preview's compatibility score".

This was intentional. Show these numbers at a large dev summit. Post an apology on a personal blog a week later.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29228083 (the mistake was noted before the summit, but wasn't even mentioned)

- "it stated that Safari had jumped from a score of 64 => 85, when in fact what we should have had on the slide is is 64 => 92."

Yup. It still shows 86

- "I hadn't seen any negative press or negative developer sentiment to this slide, but it clearly irked the Safari team."

Any negative news presented by Chrome team is uncritically taken at face value and accepted as truth. This is very well known to the Chrome team and they are very happy to exploit this.

- "Compatibility is a shared ecosystem problem. It makes no sense to me that we try and score 1-up points on Compatibility. Just because one browser might be on spec, it also means that same browser might also not be interoperable with other browsers and this means that developers have to deal with the difference irrespective if a browser is "technically correct""

Chrome should stop pretending they are good guys. They are not. They keep implementing increasingly Chrome-only APIs and ignoring any and all concerns about those APIs from Firefox and Safari. They couldn't care less if Chrome wasn't interoperable with other browsers because in their minds Chrome has already won.

- "Longer term, I'm going to be directing my teams to focus more on broad browser support in our work and less on newer Chrome-first (/only?) features and I think our wider story should all be based on what users have today, and less on what they might support at some point in the future."

This will never happen. "You have to run twice as fast just to keep up with Chrome" is an insanely successful strategy for Chrome. If anything, Chrome-only work will only accelerate.
You're downvoted but i could legit see a scenario where it refused to take you certain places if there was a lockdown order. Since some countries are leaving those in place for people not vaccinated, its possible.
The stationary feature has existed since the “Classic” days. Probably MacOS 7. So it comes from the HFS era.

It would be more accurate to say when you open a file with the Stationary flag set, a new of copy of the document is open in the default application. I don’t think a file system copy is created until you save.
PinePhone Pro First Impressions
But we do live in a simulation - a simulation generated purely in our minds based on the input to our senses that come from objective reality. We certainly don't perceive objective reality directly, otherwise our senses would be overloaded with all the information. We evolved to filter out many of the things that we didn't need to perceive in order to survive. Our mind does enough simulation that it's able to rewind the clock to fill in missing details (like the whole "when I look at a second hand, the first second takes longer to tick" thing, that's your brain literally lying to you about what it saw and retroactively filling in the blanks).
We can make a car so that it knows it's raining, it can tell the tires are getting poor traction, it knows its location, it knows it's in a school zone, it knows the prevailing speed limit, it has cameras and can see there are children crossing the street ahead, internal cameras sense that the driver isn't paying attention, the stereo is loud, and yet -- the car should ignore every one of those inputs, because if the driver presses their foot on the accelerator pedal, then that means it should increase its speed, without any other consideration, because of "freedom?"

It's absurd.

Why would you manufacture a means of conveyance that behaves that way? You certainly wouldn't ever allow one on a public street, not when you have all the tech I described above. That's a bad product. I mean, it might describe an ATV or something -- a vehicle you use for fun off of public thoroughfares. But it's not a serious vehicle that meets the standards for operating on public rights of way.
I work at FB right now, and one of the more stressful things are the timelines for promotion. I think you have a year and a half to go from New Grad to E4, then 2 and a half years to go from E4 to E5. If you fall behind on those timelines, your performance reviews just start getting measured against E#+1 until you either get promoted or more likely fail. A lot of pressure is placed in those early levels to get promoted quickly and efficiently, with not a lot of opportunity to coast. As someone who's very ok with the compensation and responsibilities at E4, I don't really want to get promoted and it's exhausting. It means that "meeting expectations" isn't enough. I need to be exceeding expectations so I can prove I'm working at the next level. This often involves seeking out ambiguity for ambiguity's sake and making projects unnecessarily formal.

The other main "issue" is how incentives are structured, although this one seems to be working as intended. By focusing so heavily on personal performance and impact, Facebook can pretty reliably delegate project planning to their engineers in a bottom up fashion. Engineers will then adjust to ruthlessly prioritize only the most impactful work on the team. Velocity also gets highly prioritized. You don't have to assign many tasks, since engineers are afraid of the mythical "poor performance review". This leads many teams to feel chronically understaffed, and bad for choosing impact over polish on many projects. The flip side is that if your team is overstaffed, it's a struggle to find enough meaningful work to get more than a meets expectations (which may be too low depending on what level you are).
You think that's that easy?

Maybe now, not really sure if there are now changes (hopefully, since Microsoft is dropping IE), but in a time where browser plugins are abound you can't place an ActiveX plugin inside Firefox (or vice versa).
The owner of the channel can still see the dislike numbers, just the general public can't.

Not sure what they'll do on Dec. 13th[1] when the YouTube API no longer allows developers to access this information.

[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/134791097/update-t...
> I don't know a single highly experienced multi-lingual developer who does not reach for a dynamic language when they need to deliver something quick and easy.

Hi, highly experienced, multi-lingual developer here (Python, Ruby, PHP, JavaScript, Java, Go, C#, F#, OCaml, Elixir/Erlang, ReasonML, SQL, Smalltalk, Objective-C, Swift, leaving off quite a few prior Web 2.0 ones for brevity) nice to meet you. As you can see, I've done just about all of it: every paradigm, every syntax. It all honestly blurs together after a certain point, and it just becomes easier and easier to pick up a new language the more you learn.

Anyways, these days, I never reach for a dynamic language when I need to deliver something quick and easy. The difference is just too marginal. Not worth the downsides (and the downsides are immense!).

Because, as my experience has taught me, invariably one of those quick and easy ones will turn into something that becomes business critical, lives on for years after you are gone, and will be much more difficult for other, typically more junior, developers to update or enhance your code. Static typing is not only marginally less productive these days with all the great tools and IDE's out there (not to mention Go which has one of the least obtrusive static type checkers I've seen, or, even better if the org allows you, a language with a HM type system), but for a marginal improvement in productivity, you pay a heavy long term cost. Not worth it.

Dynamic languages are great for rapid prototypes. After that, convert it to a static language. Your junior devs that join after you, who aren't familiar with the entire ecosystem your work has will thank you.
SourceHut and its founder are the promulgators or a never ended stream of strong opinions and principled edicts that do little but alienate people. Drew’s solution to every problem is blocking and blackholing [0] which makes him seem weak and petty and suggests that by refusing to work constructively with people he’s mostly interested in strongarming and asserting dominance. I find it pretty hard to take him seriously and run from anything he’s associated with, even when I agree. There’s this concept called “non-violent communication” that he would be well-served to explore.

https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora/issues/19...
> I don't think this attitude is helpful - it's going to leak out in your interactions and poison relationships.

Strongly agree. Keeping ourselves humble and remembering that nobody is infallible is important.

However, taking it to the extremes this article suggests (“Everyone is stupid”) is exactly the mindset that leads people to ignore experts, discount research, and promote their own feelings above the science.

The mindset is great for an ego boost because it’s an easy way to take everyone else down a notch and make everyone feel more or less equal. But when it comes to individual topics, everyone is definitely not equally informed. Pretending they are is a mistake.

The real skill is learning to identify who to trust and who to dismiss. It’s easy to mistake confidence and slick presentation or even angry contrarianism for being right these days, but learning how to look past that is very important. Putting blinders on and telling yourself that “everyone is stupid” is not a good way to do it.
> I dont want a machine that thinks it knows better than me.

I'm against requiring something like this universally, but drunk driving is such a big problem because intoxicated people feel overconfident in their driving abilities. That's definitely a case where the machine would know better than you.
What does impartiality mean? BBC no-bias policy being pushed to limits
Well given that this uses WebRTC, not surprising
Of all the things to waste your time on. I know, its just my opinion. Feel free to disagree.
I think the removal of the Dislike shows one of the key problems of Social Media. They want to act as old school broadcasters in the information age. The Dislike button made companies immediately aware of the success of a campaign, something that terrified the heads of marketing.

The idea is that once you remove the risk of executives to be exposed to bad publicity will go away. I don't think it will work but it shows the users are not the real clients, the users are the product.
https://www.refactoringui.com/book and https://hellowebbooks.com/learn-design/ are good introductions for non-designers. Color selection, a bit of font theory, spacing, best use of icons.

refactoringui is by the author of tailwind CSS framework. Later launched https://tailwindui.com/#components It costs money, I use the screenshots for inspiration only.
Well, assuming this isn't an editorial mistake (as others have mentioned), this isn't entirely ironic. It's entirely reasonable to argue that ordinary copyright on creative works is fine, but software copyright goes too far. I tend to agree: software has several qualities that make it a poor fit for the copyright regime, especially with Disney and Germany pushing for longer and longer terms. In fact, it's where I point to when people ask when and why copyright went from an obscure regulation on publishers to an all-encompassing leviathan.

Remember that even RMS/the FSF[0] follows this logic somewhat[1]. The GFDL is quite possibly one of the worst licenses you can choose for Free Software documentation, specifically because Stallman wanted the ability to force GNU-and-Linux distributions to ship FSF political screeds along with their software documentation. It's very restrictive and the few people distributing actually-Free content with it switched to Creative Commons the moment they could[2]. You can license a document under GFDL without Invariant Sections or Cover Texts, but most people just use CC-BY-SA instead.

[0] Given recent events I consider them synonyms.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.h...

[2] Notably, Wikipedia, who had to beg the FSF for a GFDL update to port their content to Creative Commons.
Gödel's incompleteness isn't a practical obstacle to proof assistants - it will never stop us formalizing proofs and searching for new theorems. It's irrelevant to their operation and will continue to be for all time.

If Gödel's incompleteness applies to the theorem you are trying to prove then it means that the theorem has been very carefully set up with reference to the axioms that you are using in order to be unprovable. It's not something you will stumble across otherwise.

Think of it like this: imagine knowing that maths will stop working if a certain very specific enormous number appears in your calculation. This would keep mathematicians up at night with worry but it would have no practical effect on anyone else because the enormous number simply never appears.
Some would argue VSCode is there as well. I know a lot of my coworkers swear by it.
Securing your digital life, part three: How smartphones make us vulnerable
I spent a lot of time trying to figure it out and I have some theories.

First, we underestimate how difficult it is for managers to learn which employees are good ones and provide value. There is a lot of reasons for this.

Maybe they aren't very good engineers themselves in the first place? Maybe they have some skewed measure of what value is (for example they just count closed tickets or lines of code written or some other measure that has little to do with real value?)

Second, some people create a lot of shit that will come around as technical debt later. But understanding technical debt is incredibly complex task for the manager. I have never seen a manager that has good understanding of where their technical debt comes from, forget about pinpointing exact people that are causing it, except for very special situations (like me pointing out a PR and explaining line by line why this is poor development).

They can and do close tickets a lot. They do that because they feel insecure and need justification for them being there. But they will do quantity over quality and will tend to pick simple problems that will not expose their lack of capability.

You can solve a lot of problems by simple trial and error. Which tends to produce poor code.

Yes, they tend to close a lot of tickets. But they also tend to create more problems than they solve.

Most corporate projects I worked for do not require any complex coding. You can get by ctrl-c/ctrl-v-ing existing code. A difference between a good and bad employee will not be in whether they can produce a code that works now. The difference might be whether they can:

- produce code that will work correctly regardless of the changing circumstances,

- produce code that is as simple as possible but not simpler than necessary,

- notice problems with the codebase and take initiative to fix this on the spot (sometimes without anybody else even being aware of),

- notice opportunities for improvement that somebody else will be working on,

- drive communication to ensure the feature that is being built is really what the client needs (rather than what the client wishes), then to confirm satisfaction,

etc.

Additionally, these people tend to create an image of being overworked which looks plausible from manager's point of view. It does not help that other developers might be aware of this but will not say a word to the manager (as it might be considered "snitching" or they might feel they shouldn't do that which somebody else might do for them).

These things are not easy to understand when you are a manager and you are also surrounded by your team that guards every word they send your way.
- Go to someone's place after a nice date last week
- Have a few drinks
- They turn out to be dangerous and you fear for your safety
- You run to your car to escape while they're in the bathroom
- "Your BAC percentage is above the legal limit. Please try again in 30 minutes"
"everything to do with scarcity of housing"

No - the initial premise here was that people should have to accept "affordable housing" in their neighborhood. You can build affordable housing elsewhere if scarcity is the problem.

"On the other hand, acting against socially good measures with sole purpose of profitting from them is evil."

What do you mean by "profitting from them"? Is it profitting if I pay more for my house so that my kids don't encounter drug dealers on their way to school? And that would then somehow be evil?

In general it seems absolutely normal to want to protect the value of ones investment. Like if you pay a premium to have a view to the lake. Then it isn't "evil" if you want to prevent somebody to build a skyscraper between your house and the lake.

It would be evil to sell somebody a plot of land with promise of view to the lake, and then build a skyscraper in front of their house to block the view. That would simply be fraud.
This is not straight incompetence though, as that config is not there by accident. It’s more in line with “screw that 1 per 1000 users”, for whatever reason.

Malice might be too strong of a word, disdain could be closer to what we are seeing.
They also only work with frames that have been specially designed to allow fitting a belt, as I understand it. Chains can be easily broken and joined in the shop (or even on the roadside), but not so with belts, so the frame must come apart to get the belt going through the rear triangle, which substantially complicates frame building and design.

I don't mean to suggest this tradeoff isn't worthwhile to people who want clean, low-maintenance bicycle drivetrains for working or commuting, but the extra cost of manufacturing makes it harder to persuade cost-conscious consumers.
Quick note: right now, most of the high-cost areas being discussed have zoning rules prohibiting dense housing near transit centers. Defined city limits come with restrictions on how densely housing can be built.

So the starting point isn't introducing density requirements, it's simply removing density restrictions.
I spent 7 years working with C#, I like C# and I think what they’ve done in the past few years is amazing.

I’m much more productive in Python. Not as in “I feel” more productive, but as in measurably more productive.

Where Python falls short of something like .Net and C# is that I probably wouldn’t have been more productive in Python if I didn’t have 7 years experience with a rather strict environment, and as far as using Python on major projects, well let’s just say that there is a reason people use TypeScript instead of JavaScript and Python doesn’t fall into that category.

But for most programming and for most minor systems or services, Python is just wildly good.
They did their duty to not reported what was an obviously planted political false story.

Yeah, they should be strongly congratulated for that since nearly every other outlet repeated that literal fake news.
I see what you're saying, but parental leave is a direct cost, but there are subsidiary costs, such as the lost productivity as well as the lifetime resources to raise the newly born child that require more people to subsidize.

If a child were something that required no ongoing resources to provide for, then yeah I'd agree with you.

That being said I didn't really properly articulate that, so the way I described it I'd have to concede that perhaps it's not a Ponzi scheme.