skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Man the anti-crypto hate on HN is stronger than usual today!

> NFTs don’t prove ownership — ordinary legal contracts are just as good, and in fact better since they are heavily regulated and can be taken to courts for a central resolution when problems arise

Blockchains allow strangers to transact high-value amounts across borders, quickly, securely. The fact I can move $1 billion USDC, $1 billion in BTC, or a $1 billion-valued NFT in seconds is why it leapfrogs the slow, manual, corruptible legal system. Can blockchains be a replacement for everything the courts provide? No. Can they allow moving digital goods quickly and safely across the world? Yes, because that is what they are designed to do.

> Blockchains (which NFTs rely on) are in the best case no more secure than ‘normal’ relational database storage systems, and in most cases are less secure

This is so fantastically incorrect the author has no business speaking authoritatively on this subject. Bitcoin is incorruptible. If you disagree, go and try! A relational database only needs a central party to fail. Does everything need a blockchain? No. Tweets go in the relational database, financial assets go on the blockchain.

> Cryptocurrencies have no innate value and are only useful as a pyramid scheme, something big crypto influencers are knowingly using to profit from those who don’t realise it

This book will refute the point https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Standard-Decentralized-Altern... TLDR Bitcoin is the hardest money ever created, politicians / society cannot manipulate it, therefore store wealth in bitcoin.

> Both cryptocurrencies and NFTs cause high environmental damage, and there are no viable systems to deal with this problem due to security considerations

Layer 2 solutions like Arbitrum and Optimism are live now that scale Ethereum without centralization. Proof of Stake chains like Cosmos, Avalanche, Polkadot, etc. are live now. ETH2 moving to PoS will happen soon.
DeBoer says he’s bringing the Harris thing up because other people keep using it to attack him.

He can’t control what other people do, and if they keep bringing it up, it’s not unreasonable for him to respond.
> As society grows, so does the vacuum created by places the law is hazy on. And so does the number of bad actors, from thieves snatching Amazon packages off doorsteps to jihadist suicide bombers.

I'm pretty sure the law is not hazy one bit on either of those issues.

The original claim was that social norms was enforcing some kind of behaviour, and that individualism has eroded those norms thus permitting previously forbidden behaviours, and therefore led to us deploying surveillance to "pick up the slack" to enforce such behaviours.

I'm still not clear that those norms were necessarily good, that eroding them was necessarily bad, that all of those behaviours should be forbidden, and that therefore this is why surveillance arose. Presumably, surveillance is used to go after those breaking the law, not those breaking social norms, so this just seems like an elaborate non sequitur.
They are obviously going to use solar panels. This is something else. This is about creating an industrial base on the moon which is going to require more than just solar panels.
I'm not convinced this dialog is in good faith, but no, my argument is that it is a way for artists to get paid, at a much larger scale than they have in the past. Personally, I think artists getting paid does change the world for the better, but I suppose that's open to disagreement. I'm not sure which part of that you think is a scam - are the people buying the NFTs being misled? Is the product sold not what was claimed?
That requires desiring ethics oneself and acting on it.
Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan is now running DirectX games faster than DXVK
> Optimizations in FMACs can lead to LSB differences. IEEE doesn't specify how an FMAC is to be implemented, only the format of the number.

Quoth the spec:

> Each of the computational operations that return a numeric result specified by this standard shall be performed as if it first produced an intermediate result correct to infinite precision and with unbounded range, and then rounded that intermediate result, if necessary, to fit in the destination’s format (see 4 and 7).
> There are “black people” who are light skinned, and there are people darker than “black people” who are not considered black.

Wtf? That's literally the opposite of true. What's next, will you claim that there are "blondes" with brunette hair, and "dark-haired people" who are considered redheads?
M1 on Monterey. White in Chrome, renders normally in Safari
you can make something up at the speed of thought. refuting it takes time and effort. peer-reviewing even longer.
Let's say the software solves some problem, call it P. We want to know the total energy cost for humanity to solve P. The people who are designing the software are using energy while they work on solving P. We need to include that energy usage in our total.

If two different implementations use the same amount of compute, but one took 10 times longer to design and ship, then it is a less efficient solution, no?

Those people (and their energy usage) could have been working towards solving some other problem or doing something else worthwhile.
One of the best points he had for me, was that the lack of charge backs awards malicious actors in any of the eco-systems of NFT.
Portugal's Startup Ecosystem [pdf]
> I still don't know what the point of transparent windows is.

But about half of Linux YouTubers proudly display them. (Between you and them, the clueless one isn't you.)
However noble gases don’t have the lowest ionization energy per unit molecular mass. Bismuth, Cesium, etc do significantly better on those metrics than even Xenon does, and Xenon is better than Krypton.

http://aerospace.mtu.edu/__reports/Conference_Proceedings/20...

EDIT: and iodine, ie the subject of this study, is also significantly better than Xenon in this metric:
“ A possible alternative is iodine, which is much more abundant and cheaper than xenon and can be stored unpressurized as a solid. In addition, both atomic and diatomic iodine have a lower ionization threshold, and diatomic iodine has a relative mass that is almost twice that of xenon.”
What is crazy is that we're going to chuck 4 Shuttle rocket engines which belong in a museum into the the ocean after a pointless flight of a pointless rocket.
That doesn't make them "less secure," and there are many ways to improve blockchain wallet security (which is independent of blockchain security) beyond a single point of failure.
I wonder why they just didn't take a cue from OpenBSD's arc4random solution years ago, instead of this drawn-out contortion.
Really? Most individual people don't lobby because they don't have the money to do it. That's why it's almost always a corporate lobbyist. Why do you think it's a good system to have concerns heard only for those who have financial wealth? That skews government policy towards elites and the wealthy, and favors corporate benefit and health. Do you really believe the government is in service to corporations or to the American people? Even when it is an individual, it's almost always a billionaire like Bezos or Bloomberg who is trying to STEAL American taxpayer money so that they can go on their stupid space trips.
Kyle Rittenhouse Found Not Guilty on All Counts
I think point of OP is that people and culture matter more then the process.

Whether that is an estimation or popular ways of organizing: Scrum, kanban, waterfall.

If you have good honest people who care more about the project goal then their personal position it works, if you have a culture of "my position" means more then the end goal and the people I work with, nothing works.
This is such a libertarian hyper dream.

In this world, unless you live in the wilderness without tools and supplies, everyone depends on others to some degree.

Crypto is an attempt to greedily cut others out and play god. The more plebs you convince of your world view, the more powerful you become.

Meanwhile you do nothing of value for society. Just waste brilliant minds and power.
You only technically "own" art with an NFT.

The Mona Lisa is actual oil laid down on canvas hundreds of years ago by a foundational artist. I suppose it's a philosophical difference, but pretty much everything about art is gonna be.

I guess NFTs are fun if you're crypto-drunk?
Sci-Hub: Researchers File Intervention Application to Fight ISP Blocking
There is something missing from this press release.

In their new study, he and his colleagues used techniques they developed previously to first freeze a cloud of fermions — in this case, a special isotope of lithium atom, which has three electrons, three protons, and three neutrons. They froze a cloud of lithium atoms down to 20 microkelvins, which is about 1/100,000 the temperature of interstellar space.

“We then used a tightly focused laser to squeeze the ultracold atoms to record densities, which reached about a quadrillion atoms per cubic centimeter,” Lu explains.

They're freezing lithium 6 vapor and increasing its density. But lithium 6 is normally a solid at room temperature. Solid lithium 6 would contain about

(6.02 * 10^23 / 6.0151 [0]) * 0.460 [1] = 4.6 * 10^22

atoms per cubic centimeter -- a density 7 orders of magnitude greater than what has been attained in this work. Is there something special that prevents this frozen atom cloud from condensing to an ordinary solid? Is it just a very short lived state observed before it condenses to an ordinary solid?

[0] Atomic weight of lithium 6

[1] Specific gravity of lithium 6: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1063/1.1743927
Possibly. I mean, would maintaining legacy applications count towards growth?
Actually they are focusing on the STEM fields now saying they enroll too many men.
But if an employee at the bank removes a zero from a field in the database and lowers your balance there’s nothing in the protocol to prevent that, external controls have to be added to keep that from happening, like checksums, auditing, and monitoring. Blockchains provide that security in the protocol but of course have other problems. It’s all trade offs and different use cases.
He thinks that being able to download every NFT's as a torrent is an own. But nobody cares about this.

Also, to me this is not a '1,000 word essay' but a 'carefully crafted attempt to gaslight people without any substantive claims'. Since I qualified it that way, there is no need to refute it. :)
Sorry, i don't think any of us can relate on the difficulty of moving a billion $ daily. Lol

I would think that moving it with checks & rules, would be a feature on such amount of money.
> That's what I hate the most about "modern" UIs, designers make them look pretty and degrade usability, instead of just making them pretty.

What's worse is, (at least IMO) they aren't even particularly pretty.
A relational database can also be stateless and lawless if you try hard enough. But I think that the point that a lack of recourse is inherent to the technologies ideology does ring somewhat true.
I'm so glad someone appreciates it :). It's an additional step in my release processes which is currently by hand (not sure how to automate it), but how could I not?
A simple example:

You wouldn't trust your NBA Topshot ownership to .. the NBA? Of course you would - SQL DB strictly better.
My Own Private Binary: An Idiosyncratic Introduction to Linux Kernel Modules
The preface to your link was:

> We're just starting to rebuild critical functions using new ways of thinking. One of my favorite examples:

Which I think any rational person would take to mean that you believe the linked project was enabled to do something revolutionary[0] by the technology of cryptocurrencies. But that isn't what the project does. The technology of cryptocurrencies is irrelevant to what they do, it's the hype they're taking advantage of.

[0] "new ways of thinking".
> Proof of Stake chains like Cosmos, Avalanche, Polkadot, etc. are live now. ETH2 moving to PoS will happen soon.

Just curious, is there a reason you've ommitted the two largest (by market cap) PoS coins (SOL, ADA) from this list?
That bank employee is going to find themselves on a trip to federal prison.
Really bad time to post it though, Friday afternoon, EU's already gone home, US are just finishing up.
Because the retail market is big. If you personally buy or sell, you don't care for the "perfect" price.
Casinos?
Basic research has nothing to do with the pork barrel boondoggle that is the SLS. SpaceX in the last decade has dramatically outdone NASA et. al[0] to the point of embarrassment. If building rockets and going to space was a football game, NASA vs. SpaceX is looking like Cumberland vs. Georgia Tech (0-222).

Frankly as someone who is on 'team USA' I'd like us to suck a lot less at building rockets[1].

[0]Who not only also benefit from all the same basic research, but have more direct and firsthand access.

[1]Among other things.
Texas Plans to Become the Bitcoin Capital, Vulnerable Power Grid and All
There are lots of people afraid to say what's on their minds for fear of getting cancelled.
Like others here I recommend AWS SES. But you will need to manage DMARC, DKIM and SPF.

Another very well done service but maybe a little expensive is Postmark. I really like their simple and clean interface, their working code samples, and their focus on good delivery. I am a happy customer and I recommend them.
If you don't like them, don't work in the field.

But NFTs have a demonstrated a wonderful product market fit, as better said in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29279991

You may not like it, for many personal reasons (traditional explanation: "What didn't exist when you were 25 is an horrible heresy"), but I disagree with most of what's said.

On a more personal note: you shouldn't try to force your tastes down other people throats.

Say you don't personally like NFT or crypto, but not that they're "bad".
Seems to me there's a conversation about the technology and conversation about how people react to that technology. Would be nice to talk about only the technology, but I guess in this case the social dimension is impossible to separate.
not the OP but probably to instantly launch another bloodbath in Europe to get some "respect"? But then again, it always amazes me how strongly opinionated some people can be when they don't even read which person this whole post is about.
> Miners setting up shop in the Lone Star State can often count on a 10-year tax abatement, sales tax credits and workforce training from the state, depending on where they are located and how many jobs they add. Even without formal incentives, the cheap power prices and the state’s hands-off policy toward business is often enough of a lure.

> The pitch is working: The grid operator Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or Ercot, will account for about 20% of the Bitcoin network globally by the end of 2022, up from 8% to 10% today, according to Lee Bratcher, president of the Texas Blockchain council. Right now, Ercot has somewhere between 500 and 1,000 megawatts of mining capacity, out of about 2,000 nationwide. The state grid will add another 3,000 to 5,000 megawatts of mining demand by the end of 2023, he said.
Maybe if you only pay attention to national general elections. We didn't get here overnight and yeah, one election can't fix this either. That's not an excuse to have a defeatist attitude though! Just being informed can help you see there's more to it. Based on your comment, one thing I would suggest you get more involved in primary elections.
A Systematic Investigation of Commonsense Understanding in Large Language Models
That is you frustrated with what people are paying on the open market. Nothing stops you from shorting the stock and in fact many sharp people have, with varying success.

Again, that's not what a scam is and it has nothing to do with the 'end' of silicon valley.
> Saying it’s “up to users to decide whether to trust those” is simply saying that the problem is currently not solved.

Again, Internet security is mostly based on trust and there's no way around that: when you enter a URL on a browser, you need to trust that the domain belongs to who you think it belongs, and the only way you have to do that is to trust its TLS certificate... which you do by explicitly trusting your browser to only recognize reliable TLS certificates signed by a legit root certificate authority... unless you decide to whitelist TLS certificates yourself by obtaining the domain's root certificates out-of-band, something nobody seems to think necessary to do, even the most security-conscious government agencies probably go to that kidn of trouble.

Basing package ownership on the same kind of mechanism is the best you can ever do... if you consider that as not being a good enough solution, then you should never use the internet with consumer-grade browsers at all, let alone use package managers in any form.
>Why are they mandating the shots in February instead of now?

To claim success https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/austria/#g...
This feels more stream of consciousness (hyperventilation?) rather than a coherent argument against crypto-assets. For instance, the entire section "Why cryptocurrencies don't work" seems to defy the reality that they are in fact functional (at least to some degree).

E.g., because they can't be clawed back -> they don't work? What about that thing we all used 30 years ago called cash?
Being lawless is a feature, not a bug. This is why, despite the many apparent flaws, bitcoin usage just keeps on growing with people living under authoritarian regimes, for instance. The money is yours and no government can confiscate it.
Definitely true, but it feels like proponents have a heads i win tails you lose mindset to these anecdotes. When things go well, it's bc of the drugs, and when things go poorly, it's the underlying issues.
I was just naming some that popped in my head. There are many more as well, like those.
GitHub 503
The market wants to not think about it.
I really enjoyed this read.

I deeply enjoyed the tone of this article, and the insight inside is tremendous. Although the companies mentioned are no longer around in the same sense, this piece touches upon some universal threads that are as true today as they were when this was happening.

Thank you for sharing this!
Didn't Rivian go public with exactly 0 revenue and is now the third most valuable car maker on the planet?

I don't think securities laws do what you think they do. I'd rather people wade into the unregulated world where its buyer beware than to get the stamp of approval by regulators. These people are basically crowd sourcing buying a cultural artifact and it didn't work out. Who was harmed?

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/16/cars/rivian-value-tesla-t...
What's the value in millions of these auto generated pics?

Ps. Those pics are mostly avatars too... ( I think monkeys were popular)
The human effort saved by using a less compute-efficient but easier-to-work-with programming language could be redirected to attacking climate change from another angle.

We'd have to look at the details to see which one is more effective overall. Although my gut says that "not programming in C" is generally the correct approach for your average piece of software.
Unlikely -- COVID also causes pericarditis, to a much greater degree than COVID vaccines.
I'd rather work for Palantir, and their product is FaaS (fascism as a service).
Owned a 90 once, fun and interesting but overly romanticised vehicle I think.
The med schools are accredited by (a body completely governed by) the AMA. Number of seats is part of the accreditation.

The AMA does not want more competition and lower income per doctor.
> Why wouldn't it?

I explained in my comment: There is a shortage of doctors. Unless you know 50,000 people with medical degrees searching for a job, you are going to have to fix the situation that created the shortage rather than just wishing more doctors would appear.

This is what dasudasu was doing. They identified a cause of the shortage (doctors are encouraged to work 60% of a work week) and your response was "so what, more doctors will just appear". More doctors have not been appearing.
Yeah, having done some work on this in the past I think both are true: the standard should decode deterministically, but it's also quite complicated, so most of them are buggy.

(A colleague of mine filed something like 30% of all the bugs on the H265 bug tracker, for instances where the reference implementation produced different results than the textual specification. Because we'd written a parser for the English text ..)

There is also the concept of a "profile", a set of features which an encoder/decoder may limit itself to on small hardware. http://blog.mediacoderhq.com/h264-profiles-and-levels/
If I understand this correctly, couldn't this explain dark matter?

The article didn't say how dense this cloud was, but if it was still a cloud it couldn't be that dense right? Surely something that could exist in the cold vastness of space.
Ultimately you need to trust the blockchain, which runs on computers. Which is the commenter's point.
The point isn't to not depend on anyone else for anything, instead it's to unwind some of the dependency assumptions we've built up over time.

Many in the world don't have access to a financial system. If they have internet, now they do (assuming they can find some way to onboard). Beyond that, plenty of financial tools only were accessible to the ultra-rich/institutions. Many of those are now accessible to everyone.

May be worth taking a step back to see why brilliant minds are intrigued.
> The author is making an "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" error.

Quite the opposite, the theory he's questioning has no evidence, merely a good story justifying it. In the absence of actual evidence of the motives behind these designs, you should be agnostic, which is what the author is doing.
What processor does your iPhone have? Maybe it's a hardware decoding difference. It renders on my iPhone with a A14 Bionic processor.
> So why didn't people [just give money to artists]?

Because there’s no way to make a speculative profit off a donation?
Nobody talks about it because Citizens United v FEC would need to be reversed to change anything in a meaningful way.

Reversing that Supreme Court decision is about as likely as admitting Puerto Rico as the 51st state, it won’t happen.
What's new from GitHub Changelog- October 2021 recap
If they get caught. The point is that blockchains can have value, I don’t know anyone reasonable who doesn’t believe this. Git is technically a blockchain.
Awesome response, thank you!

This is probably a dumb question because I don't have much experience with GraphQL, but how important is GraphQL to your project?

For example, if your client makes the same dozen or so queries day-after-day, would it ever make sense to use that knowledge to write a more static API? There seems to be a lot of text parsing and object serialization and deserialization with GraphQL and it makes me wonder if something more RESTy would be more efficient?

Is computer time and space too inexpensive to worry about these things?
Did your contract say anything about that?

If I start a consulting company and want it to grow, then sooner or later I have to play the same game as the big players: Principals come and close the deal, Juniors do the actual work, billing reflects this.

What I'm curious about for the agent model is someone who actually proposes to do the work, and does it. In that case, popularity raises the rate instead of dividing the time. Having Brad Pitt act in your movie costs more.

If you really are an independent "IC" and are a "star" then you will have offers you want to turn down, right? And dealing with that will be a drag too, right?

Hollywood Stars still use agents last I checked.