skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps the downvotes were harsh (I was not one of them, can't downvote :), but the question was "what problem does bitcoin solve?". I'm having a hard time seeing any problem in the parent's comment. Instead of identifying a problem, poster is encouraging us to go on an adventure.
I think you are right the crypto can solve some problems, perhaps even useful and interesting problems. But I don’t think it currently solves useful problems dot average people.

I know that was not your claim, but it could be read as such and many people think that way of crypto.

Not saying that will not change in the future.
Ok, so similarly "dead" (or not) as PHP.
It is easiest to trick people by saying "other people love this!". Engineers believe in crypto currency, so HODL! Or, the kids today view NFT's as hockey cards, they gonna soar like crazy! You might not see the value in this, but others do and that will make you rich!

Basically it is a way to make people turn off their sanity checker "Oh yeah, I don't see the value, I guess I just don't understand, but I still want in on this opportunity!".
Doesn't the common method of obtaining Bitcoin force the same system on you.

If you are buying from coinbase like most Americans you are forced to provide identity to buy, sell or receive over various levels. Same on the other exchanges. Exchanges do freeze accounts.

How does a regular person who doesn't mine get around these same controls?
There was Microsoft's Mixer but it failed.

I agree there should be something like it. Maybe from Amazon.
Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution
«No one has ever tried to censor me»

No offense, but that's a very egocentric view. You may be (probably) a middle/upper-class westerner who has never encountered censorship, but I assure you there are billions (literally) of people on the planet for whom censorship is an issue.
What problem does Bitcoin (Or blockchain, if you prefer, I'll take either answer), solve?

Blockchains solve an unusual problem of how to get trust between untrustworthy parties. The underlying problem is "how do you make a secure distributed ledger that all parties can agree on". Using the previous entries to sign new entries is a good solution.

The problem is that Bitcoin has nothing to do with that problem.
I like this framing. I think there's a rebellious undertone to some of the aforementioned "worshippers" -- and at least as many are definitely there for the money-pump effect.
BTC does not require every single transaction to be processed on-chain in the way that you describe. Please refer to the Lightning Network.
There's already a mechanism for that, it's the legal system. We don't need another shadow force of executioners.
> I don't think the intent is malicious, but the system is definitely leaky. My homeserver config doesn't mention vector.im (perhaps it's a hidden default somewhere?), I checked.

IIRC, identity server is something primarily set on the client (element.io here) rather than the homeserver.

It really needn’t and shouldn’t ping an identity server as part of the sign-in process (esp before/without privacy policy agreement)

FWIW it seems the issue is that there’s a fallback process for identity server; if neither your account nor your homeserver has one set, it defaults to the client default. if you host your own Element-web instance you can change this.

https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/blob/develop/docs/c...

Or check out ma1sd. You don’t need to enable all the bells and whistles if you don’t want to.
1.5 M might be a nice number to start with as a bounty to anyone who demonstrably cracks the online voting system. Perhaps premiums paid if the vote tally numbers can be manipulated to be special numbers…pi, or a repeating pattern like 837-5309.
The computer made a huge improvement. Have you ever written and edited a significant document with pencil and paper?

The bigger point is that it's very easy to point to huge improvements computers have made or to new things computers enable (e.g. collaborative document editing with many authors around the globe and version control). It's much harder to point to things that crypto improves or enables - except for illicit activities.
I had to do the same with uber eats until I stopped using it.
They do everything they can to make sure there's no recorded timestamp of when you place an order so it's that much harder to dispute a bad delivery.
I use vimium (or was it vimium C?) on a chromium browser. My biggest bugbear with vimium is that it doesn't work in the browser's native pdf viewer. PDF viewer for vimium C exists but its definitely not as good as the native viewer (better rendering, allows annotating and saving etc).

My browsing consists mostly of pdfs so it makes the whole vimium experience pretty moot.

Also many modern websites have weird scrollbars, or the scrolling content is not the actual body but some div inside the page, and vimium doesn't seem to handle that well
GitHub: Right-to-left language support in Markdown
A TPM is useless without a keypair that the manufacturer signs for you. If any particular manufacturer would give you the option to just buy the keypair or make it possible to dump it somehow, they would surely get blacklisted.

This whole "trusted computing" thing is treachery to the highest degree.
It doesn't have semicolons at the end of the lines, it looks more like VBScript or VBA to me.
That’s when lunch time means high noon.
This appears to be a semantic deflection. Are you arguing that less than 0.1% of the world's energy consumption equates to a "massive environmental impact"?
That's what PAs are for. No need for a chief of marketing to impersonate Emily Post and offer conveniently priced solutions to non-existent problems.
It's been a long time since I've bought a new camera, but I'm amazed that this would not be the case. My 2008-vintage Pentax K200D has the option to save JPEG and associated RAW images with every shot, as well as (IIRC) a button that could be configured to just do it when you're planning on having the need. Pentax has some great features for the price, but this was far from a fancy DSLR at the time.
Of course I can :) Thanks for pointing it out!
This is extremely common in Universities where you share 2-4 public IPs that you can usually ask ports to be forwarded to a internal IP, and often there are resources (Like say Servers with GPUs) available on a interally reachable IPs using a easy to use hostname served by the internal DNS server.

Ofc this change won't be that big of a issue, things would just need to change a little, using Split-DNS was already a pain when students wanted to say use DNS-over-HTTPS and didn't want the University DNS servers to know every site they visited.
Reading the comments here I wonder if there can be an opensource project doing the spec implementation, or define a spec for implementation. I can see people frustrated with Power Query or constant changes everywhere.
It think there is a reasonable argument that in PHP and JS there are an equal amount of issues. Inconsistent API, inconsistent language, bad data types, same speed .. just to name a few.

Not that I would not also prefer node over PHP ... But that is mainly because of C/C#/Java familiarity and frontend code reuse/familiarity than anything else.
The fun part about WhatsApp is that it uses XMPP internally. It's just not federated, and probably modified to the point that it's not compatible with anything else. But I do remember seeing JIDs in logs while reverse engineering it several years ago.
oh if we are on that kind of position then crypto is ok for anybody.. anyone can try to create value from nothing and make people believe... actually they did already ... someone created facebook make people believe that it worths billions... but if someone claims that this is a revolutionary monetary system then I'd become suspicious..
That's what happens with many of the Unsubscribe (from mailing lists, that is) buttons unless they are provided by a reputable third party such as Mailchimp etc.
Nice example of American football, since players have brain injuries, should we ban it too?
Liquid which may possibly be drink
Wie benutzt man eine Sexpuppe?
I've been using this language since 2002. Still good for most kind of tasks in web.
no, it's not tautological at all. There are categories of suicide that are clearly defensible, like euthanasia for end of life patients who have made the decision that any quality of life is irredeemably lost, for example.

But the 38 year old husband, the subject of the article, who was in an unstable mental state to the point where his wife felt threatened and left for the safety of their children was certainly not in command of his mental faculties.

Someone who is schizophrenic and bipolar and experiences a psychotic break after drastically changing their medication regimen is not in a sound state of mind, and they would be the first to admit it once their condition improves.
Yeah makes sense. Basically just trigger peoples' FOMO response?
But, when using GitHub, isn't the missing puzzle piece here (which Graphite and other "stacked review tools" mentioned here attempt to solve) that you then cannot just merge those individual PRs one by one – you either have to merge the whole PR or nothing? Which leads us to the second option: to use multiple dependent PRs, which causes its own issues explained in other comments.
> when human labor was the most valued thing in the world

Try hiring sofware developers with skills that aren't entirely copy-pastable from Stackoverflow and getting them motivated enough to not cash out after six months, and then tell me it isn't.
Group chats, nicely working and with fallback for legacy clients. They are usable (without all features, of course) in Gajim/etc without doing anything:

Web client: https://xmpp.redsolution.com/upload/4bddf4f264f5c6577f16551f...

iOS client: https://xmpp.redsolution.com/upload/4bddf4f264f5c6577f16551f...

Message formatting (from web client, but is supported by all, actually):
https://xmpp.redsolution.com/upload/4bddf4f264f5c6577f16551f...

Device management. Newly connected device is given a token, with a mechanism to prevent token duplication, and tokens can be revoked, resulting in device disconnection:

https://xmpp.redsolution.com/upload/4bddf4f264f5c6577f16551f...

https://xmpp.redsolution.com/upload/4bddf4f264f5c6577f16551f...

This all is a work in progress, and we're aiming for an iOS version release in december or early next year.
I worked on a project that used dask to distribute integration tests. It worked, but it was painful and unintuitive.
You can authenticate to a TPM via HMAC and a shared secret key, so also the two other points can be addressed with code.

The catch is that the other elements need to be able to store the secret, and they need to "pair" to the TPM when the motherboard is assembled. Also, scenarios concerning the legitimate replacement of the CPU need to be addressed. Those are all key management tasks that manufacturers are not good at in general... so here we are with unauthenticated sessions...
Well, you've got a point about multi-display. Once that came around, it lost its appeal.
The tools are claimed to be Free with a capital F, is this really true?
Two toddlers, one girl in elementary school.

By default, minimum limits. I want them to build habit and willpower themselves so they don't indulge as adults like many of my friends did in college.

No limit on TV. But I remind them there's a cost. Sometimes we play outside and leave the TV watcher. Sometimes we go upstairs and play in the bedroom. The family has fun without devices, but if you want to watch the same movie again, it's up to you.

Phone has tougher limits. Screen time before 5 PM on a weekday, 6 on a weekend. The earlier you wake up, the more screen time you have. The TV rules still apply: if you're on your phone in your bed all day and we had an awesome breakfast together, it's your fault for missing out.

No devices before a shower. My kids all get showered by 8 AM now, without any fighting. We had a lot of arguing and dragging them to the bathroom before this rule.

If your homework isn't done, stricter phone restrictions, or TV only. Homework causes stress and TV is a great cure, so I think it's fine. Gaming causes stress though, so they have to watch out.

YouTube has a lot of great stuff. My eldest learned every flag and capital city all on her own from YouTube, by 8 years old. My 3 year old knows her alphabet, and the 1 year old can recognize letters and numbers. But it only works if you let them.

The real restrictions are on what they watch and now when.

Kids imitate things a lot. So they can pick up really bad habits from a lot of popular YouTubers like screaming and panicking. Or sometimes even Peppa Pig can be a bit too sassy.

Pay to win games are also a problem. They purposely build addiction and then charge you later. They tend to not sleep, eat, etc and quit the game feeling miserable. You still want to expose the kids to them a little so they build immunity to that crap, but keep a safety valve on.
That's how you break the web
Shopping for bike parts is the hobby? is this caused by soulless consumer culture where retailers present themselves through advertisement as the source of dreams? At least here in Japan .. Outdoor is a section in the mall, not a place you go.. and you cant just go climb a mountain in your old clothes, you need all the gear, and the gas stove to make the high altitude coffee at the peak, because someone said that tastes better..
This is a tenuous correlation between human activity and CO2 emissions (which imo are questionable due to sampling errors).

The variance in CO2 measurements are within the range of random noise.

https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth103/node/1018

That said, clearly nature overtakes the regions no-longer inhabited. That said it doesn’t seem to have impacted global temperatures in any meaningful ways based on the papers own questionable arguments.

Look at the first paragraph:

> decline in global atmospheric CO2 concentration by 7–10 ppm in the late 1500s and early 1600s which globally lowered surface air temperatures by 0.15∘C

For reference, the CO2 concentration was between 280-290 ppm at that time (from ice core samples, which arguably are somewhat regionally specific). It’s around 400ppm today. A 7ppm drop is within the expected range, likely even something you may see within one years standard fluctuations (today, anyway).

https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/weekly.html

This paper is effectively not stating anything meaningful.
The identity server can be and is self hosted by a lot of people.
The same metric exists here. Various cancer survivor rates are measured by the average number of years someone survives after diagnosis, regardless of the rate of remission. How many years of life does treatment buy a patient, given the kind of cancer and the stage at which it is discovered?

Your argument is "more people who are suicidal enough to warrant involuntary commitment end up killing themselves than people who don't reach that point, therefore commitment causes (or at least does nothing to prevent) suicide," which is absolutely illogical.

This is beyond "I don't understand 'correlation != causation,'" and is into either "willful ignorance" or "I enjoy hearing myself talk" territory.
I hope they get that stuff on par with the rest of the Renesas quality quickly. So far I've been very skeptical about the whole Dialog acquisition. Plus Silego is a whole different story altogether ...
Complexity, humans are not good at complexity beyond certain levels. One good example of such model is in React + Redux story. Based on single variable your view might have 10/20 changes and to this day I see people debating what is the right way to do it (React hooks vs Redux is latest episode).
Related article on the take that bitcoin is art, https://www.epsilontheory.com/in-praise-of-bitcoin/

I think it would be more accurate to compare it a monument or artifact, specifically because of the amount of real world energy that has gone into creating it.

It's currently a half terabyte immutable linked list filled with a rich history of transactions and hidden messages/graffiti that can't be copied or changed without an commitment of energy and computation resources equal to the sum of what's gone into it for these 11 years.

That's something that starts to rival the Great Pyramids (pun intended).
Amazon or Discord presumably.
> What problem does Bitcoin (Or blockchain, if you prefer, I'll take either answer), solve?

Getting techies without connections to Big Finance rich.

A case could be made why that's a good thing for society. (Would you rather some entity like HSBC hoard the wealth instead?)
Filechain might be worth a look, distributed storage to allow people to rent out unused storage capacity in exchange for coins and based in IPFS which isn't blockchain but is neat.

Or Internet Computer, which is more or less a blockchain equivalent of the internet allowing you to for example host a website on it versus say AWS or GoDaddy, which has some potentially very positive benefits for data security and users being able to manage their own data as practical benefits.

https://messari.io/article/an-introduction-to-dfinity-and-th...
Learning is always good...
Hack isn't PHP anymore...
Razor is awesome... It has this productivity of PHP while being consistent and have the benefit of being conceived later.

Only thing which hurts there: not everywhere deployed like PHP is :)

And technically you need a 2 files boilerplate. But that will vanish within the next year when I understand the .NET team right.
You can say that..but it was a problem. It was not trivial, despite what the spec says or what is claimed now. If it was, more people would have used it.
Don't recall, I think it was somewhere on the Lisbon metrolitan area.
> That is the most stupid thing I've read in a while.

Arrogance.

It takes 10 lines of Python to compute a multiplicative inverse mod p, using arbitrary precision integers. [1] Try doing the same thing with nothing but x86 assembly and Volume 2 of Knuth's AOCP.

It's a useful, humbling exercise.

[1] https://karpathy.github.io/2021/06/21/blockchain/
Has it's own share of alchemy. Remember, the water has to remain vitreous. This is sometimes quite incompatible with the environment proteins want to exist in in their natural state.
Run it against https://bot.sannysoft.com/ to see how it stacks up

Most anti-Puppeteer tech analyzes the state of various browser Javascript objects, and if you run Puppeteer in headful mode with plugins like https://www.npmjs.com/package/puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth you'll bypass most detection.
I still hand-write my CSS with no preprocessor. This isn't always sensible and I wouldn't do it at work, but it forces me to keep my classes neat and tidy.
lol. Beware of the botanist chicks.
How exactly do these services detect Puppeteer?
> What is useful about Bitcoin?

No quasi-governmental agency can unilaterally decide to print gobs more of it & drive inflation through the roof...

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1
Air: Creative OS for Marketers
The challenge of programming is not really about writing in a programming language - it's about thinking, problem solving, and organization.

What low/no-code does is remove the setup and tooling barrier. I believe it's this barrier which scares most people away from programming. After all, even as an experienced software developer, I find some languages more intimidating because of the many tooling choices and setup options required before one can actually do something useful (front end development, anyone?).

Ruby on Rails did this for web development 20 years ago. It's way more complex now (partly because our expectations and desires are so much more complex), but when it was new it was essentially low-code compared to alternatives. And just with modern low-code systems, people who aren't good at thinking or structuring often create bad or unreliable things.

I'm sure more than a few of us have seen some of the monstrosities created by users with Excel. On the other hand, some non developers have created brilliant solutions in Excel. The same will be true of official no-code tools.

Where no-code can really benefit most, is by allowing some end users to attempt to solve their own problems. Chances are they won't end up with complete solutions, but they may end up with a clearer picture of what it is they want; and then they can go to professional developers and better communicate their needs. Maybe we'll end up throwing away less work as our solutions will better match the users' needs.
Regarding the Black Death:

https://sci-hub.se/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...

The tl;dr is that the forest regrowth appeared to contribute to an ongoing carbon sink event.
I told the person at the The Economist's live chat that I was unsubscribing due to that dark pattern. The other reason is that even if the content is great their app isn't. The saved articles feature isn't shared between different devices. Another reason is that you need to get into an article and then get out instead of doing continuous reading. Ended up reading/annotating downloaded PDFs because it was a better experience than using their app.
> Blockchains solve an unusual problem of how to get trust between untrustworthy parties.

People keep repeating this, but this isn't true. It doesn't solve this problem for the general case, it only solve this under very special circumstances and it has yet to be proven that these circumstances allows blockchain to be useful for anything but as a currency. This is what the crypto proponents doesn't understand, they think like you do here that you can just slap blockchain on stuff and now it is trustworthy.

The interesting thing is that it is people believing that blockchain makes something trustworthy that is its real value. If you can slap blockchain on a scam to make people believe it is trustworthy, now that is worth many billions of dollars! That is the true value of blockchain. And it wont be valuable as anything other than as a scam as long as people can't tell the difference between a blockchain scam and a real blockchain business, and since it seems basically nobody who is pro-crypto can do this I don't see a bright future for it.
Hey thank you! That is a really great interview, lots of stories I'd not heard before, Ron in great form at 84. Best one was about Ron being inspired, by JJ Johnson hardly moving his trombone slide, to find a similar 'lazy'/efficient/minimal-effort style on bass.
How's the current mentality towards vaccines in Singapore?
We support one click GA import. Shoot an email to aayush.jain@cliff.ai - happy to walk you through
I really like Python. It's what I reach for when I need something working quickly. I have a whole folder of one-off python scripts I wrote over years that I occasionally still use.

For very large projects, however, I advise against it. The dynamic type system bites you a lot in my experience. I prefer static typing.
In the pilot of House, M.D., a patient is treated with Albendazole for a parasitic worm infestation. Not a fluke, but closely related :)

Albendazole is also considered for treating covid.

edit : hm, I think I remember Dr. House making the fluke joke ...
While there is a legitimate argument to be made in favor of either restructuring or banning American football, it's clear that the moral culpability relating to these systems aren't comparable. A fundamentally very small population is vulnerable to the TBI risk of American football, and the vast majority of that population willfully decides to engage in that risk with knowledge of it. However, the environmental and economic (supply chain) externalities of Cryptocurrency are imposed upon those who don't opt into the system, and also operate entire orders of magnitude higher in scope.
> My browsing consists mostly of pdfs so it makes the whole vimium experience pretty moot.

This is so strange, what are you doing that is mostly in pdfs?