skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> spark is dramatically overkill for the data sets dask is meant to work on

I disagree with this, I have used spark standalone/single node both locally and in the cloud for numerous use cases because you can easily cook up spark sql or pyspark cleaning and ETL scripts for small data (a couple TB) and reach high throughput (>260mb/s). I am also someone who reaches for dask (and prefect) first for small data but in cases where the data is medium sized (100gb-10tb) I always reach for spark first, its simply easier to write fast code with spark (especially spark sql) without needing to think hard about optimizations. I also have not run into any operational issues running a spark standalone instance for a few hours or days to process small data I would use dask for.

I reach for dask first for most small data (<100gb) because its better integrated with python libraries like prefect that improve the dev experience.
So, I'm just a guy, been a software engineer most of my life, from age 7 or so when dad first showed me how to punch some commands in DOS. Probably like many of you here. So, when you read what I am about to write, please don't attack me, please read it with an inquisitive, truth seeking perspective. I come in peace, if even you don't like what I am about to say.

When I first got into tech, the technology amazed me, not the problems it solved. The tech was enough, it was not a means to an end, it just was. As I got older, and started owning projects, managing teams, etc, I realized that technology should be in service of something, not just a thing to exist in and of itself.

So, how does that relate to this? One question I have constantly asked, and never gotten an answer to - What problem does Bitcoin (Or blockchain, if you prefer, I'll take either answer), solve? What problem does it solve that no other distributed system does as well, if not better? I've yet to see the answer.

inb4 payments: Payments has been the closest answer, but then you realize that payments infra is bogged down by regulation, not by technology, and that any technology that goes to replace existing tech will get regulated down into the same place.
To some point yes, but I ended up buying a boxed DVD set of Buffy when netflix removed the show. Dealing with DVDs are super annoying when you don't have a DVD drive in your computer, so it was back to 2005 for me.
There were several members of the core team, pre-XMPP effort in IETF, who wanted to change it to have framing. If not a length-prefixed model, a nil-separated one.

There were ideas to separate out the addressing/routing from the actual messaging, so that servers did not need to process XML and so that messages did not necessarily need to be XML.

There were even some very preliminary ideas on using the servers to potentially negotiate peer connections for arbitrary traffic.

Back in the early 2000s there were a _lot_ of self-hosted Jabber servers though, and there was push-back from early commercial interests on any protocol-breaking changes resetting adoption to zero. This resulted in Jabber 1.0 pretty much becoming the basis of the XMPP RFC, with XMPP adding new authentication techniques and internationalized JIDs.

Later on, there were efforts to establish alternative transports to accomplish some of these alternative transports and forms - HTTP endpoints to poll for messages, JSON mappings of the core messages, etc.

I would argue against PSYC's claims (or would have, back in the day) that the usage of XML in XMPP is not proper, however. Its proper, it just wasn't the best idea.
Philadelphia and Atlanta on opposite ends.
Trust isn't the reason that criminals use blockchains. They would happily transfer money the same way normal businesses do. They use blockchain cause they are locked out of the normal banking infrastructure.

For the same reason normal people don't use blockchain to transfer money. They are able to use the banking system or Venmo or whatever. Using a blockchain is more complicated and usually more expensive than the alternatives.
Ask HN: $5/mo VPS pay crypto for postage Rails app
I'm looking for advice. My app, at https://coinship.pro, takes crypto for USPS (soon worldwide) shipping, via 3rd party API at http://goshippo.com.

Can you recommend features the app needs? I'm also interested in partnering with a marketing specialist, and possibly another developer, if you want to work on the app significantly. The Shippo API has dozens of carriers worldwide. It has no revenue as yet. I'm not sure where to go from here. Thank you.
It does not violate the spec, but it violates the expectations of a lot of XML tooling for sure.
«What problem does Bitcoin solve»

Easy: it's censorship-resistant. You send a transaction and no middleman, no financial organization, no one can prevent you from sending it. You can transact with anyone, anywhere, 24/7/365, however much you want, $100 or $100 million. No other system does this.

On the other hand, with legacy systems, Paypal can freeze your account, Zelle limits your sends to $2500/month, a credit card company can deny your transaction, a bank chooses to not process your international wires on "weekends and holidays", etc. Limits everywhere.
TerraPower To build first Natrium nuclear plant
Once, I accidentally grew a bed of salt crystals in a plastic tumbler left on a windowsill. Sadly I can't find the photos but they were closer to rectangular and clearer than the "bad" examples mentioned in this post. Diameters reached ~500mm on the large ones. Was I vastly luckier than I realized at the time, or is it all a bit easier to get right if you're not aiming for completely freestanding crystals (vs. a bed)?
The main use case in El Salvador is having instant payments better than credit cards without needing a bank account (which few non-corporate merchants can get)

But the main use worldwide is remittances without paying %30 fees.
That post, as he explains, was a response to comments people made about his original Kenny G rant video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-mjt1ypiF8
(⊃0⍵0)⊃ ⊂{⍨⊂}
Gah, that is correct, thank you.
If their tools are anywhere close to decent, it would be an instant success
Coinbase's UI problem and Cryptocurrency scams
I wonder if any other system will ever be as good as SPL USDC for international remittances. As soon as people in any country can wire money to any other country without making any phone calls or paying more than a penny, let me know.

To be clear, I operate a business, and we accept payments and pay bills this way. We would like to pay more of our bills this way!
Matlab isn’t umm... no code! It’s a programming language! Stimuli I is a bit more no Cody... but it’s effectively a visual programming language
> If you like bitcoin, you must think the gold standard was a good idea.

Yes, it was.

> Because people really, really, really want it to.

Exactly. People are sick of government induced inflation, and the government devaluing people's hard work at a whim to pay for their debts they go into through incompetence. Since the government won't go back to the gold standard, the people are taking things into their hands.
I'm in Vietnam, all banking process here requires a human that u need to talk to in case of 99% use case.

Your account to login is blocked ? Call someone. Why should there be username/password checking in first place ? It's solved by Bitcoin right ?

You want to withdraw some money which is larger than the threshold from ATM, you repeat above my process.

And of course many more.
Call to someone in a hopeless hope that they'll call you back. Luckily there's someone who's ready to help your issue, then u repeat above process.
Whatever "earth systems" means to you will be definitely affected by massive ecosystem changes as well.
The most amazing thing about bitcoin is that it turns every disadvantage to an advantage.

For example, the bias you are talking about means that the open minded and more virtuous people will adopt bitcoin earlier, and those who profit from the existing exploitive system much later.

This produces a massive wealth transfer from evil to good.
I don't see how derping around with a computer can have less friction than checking some boxes on a piece of paper. Either way, if I vote for minor offices, researching them even superficially takes longer than filling in the ballot.
Firefox opens new tabs saying “We care about your privacy, look, LOOK!” every time you start, sometimes two of those tabs (release notes + privacy). I wish I could just deactivate those built-in ads.
> (2) move money out of authoritarian countries

To move money out of an authoritarian country, you have to know someone who wants to move money in. The only reason it works at all is because the total amount of Bitcoin doing this is comparatively very small compared to local corruption and mining which can support this use case.

To make this transaction someone else in your local authoritarian country has to have Bitcoin, and be willing to exchange it for local currency. It's no huge surprise a lot of mining power ended up in China, because of course this is a transaction you do not want to do in China: you want to originate Bitcoin and then get some Americans to pay you nice clean USDs into bank accounts outside of China.

Which of course works because electricity consumption in China is relatively unsuspect (or was: naturally China has cracked down on this and is having ongoing power shortages to boot).

Which of course creates a weird compromise: if Bitcoin is good at getting money out of authoritarian countries, then either you're outsourcing to someone who can move currency around locally, or you are outsourcing an increasing fraction of the Bitcoin mining compute, and thus control of the network.
> bogged down by regulation...

Except for this bit though. Eventually it too gets regulated and has been.
Okay, how about you give us an example of its utility aside from being a speculative instrument
> What problem does Bitcoin, solve?

Moving away from an inflationary currency that the government is able to keep printing more of and devaluing everyone's hard work, to something closer to the gold standard.

Of course, things are very volatile now, but hopefully in the future the price of the major crypto currencies stabilizes.
This is like asking "what problem do computers solve?"

I recommend you have a look at the ecosystem where literally thousands of problems are being solved in new ways, and more every day than it's possible to keep up with.
Don’t mock the metaverse. It's already here. It’s just not evenly distributed
>forcing voters to

And

>increased turnout

Are somewhat or the orthogonal concepts.
I had my son right before the pandemic. Caring for my new son during Toronto lockdowns in a tiny apartment was pure hell. He is the one thing keeping me going (and my wonderful wife, of course). My one hope is that we can put COVID-19 behind us soon enough so that he has no real memories of it and can live somewhat of a normal life. I want him to be able to meet people in public and see faces without masks. I want him to play with children his age and make friends in the neighbourhood and have sleepovers and playdates. I want to bring him to the toy store and urban playground without ridiculous rules about distancing. What is "normal" going to be post-COVID-19 even? Questions about the future and overall uncertainty keeps me up at night.

I ended up buying a house in my hometown. I work permanently remote now. It's a healthcare company, so it's very busy, stressful, often chaotic - but it is rewarding work and I feel like I am making my own small difference in the world.

My wife wrote a letter to my son about out life during the pandemic yesterday. We will give it to him one day when he is old enough. It made me think that I should create an email address on my server that is specifically for him and write him letters like this so that he can know what life was like and everything he went through. I just want to do everything I can to do right by him. I pray that he will forgive me for any mistakes I may have made while trying to keep him safe during this pandemic.

It means a lot that HN has been so kind to me. It's hard to find kindness these days. People are afraid, angry, in completed despair...but kindness is what we need. Thank you.
Regarding the meaning of "the same bits of a NFT with a different token"...

...what I'm understanding is: the NFT is sold on (say) Ethereum. And then later it's relaunched on (say) Cardano.

Did I get that right?

Here's another oddity about NFTs. If you change a single pixel (unnoticeable by the human eye), you get a completely different NFT.
Were the conditions significantly different from what the author described? I would imagine if it was relatively cool but also humid, you may have just matched good conditions for growth.

So you probably did get lucky, but depending on the conditions maybe not extremely lucky.
1) You're right, and perhaps its a position of privilege to say this, but this does not seem to be a real problem worth solving? I've transacted a lot of money, both ingress and egress, buying a modest home, a car or two, paying off student loans, etc. No one has ever tried to censor me.

2) Beyond censorship, one needs safety. It may not be censored, but its certainly traceable, so how useful is the lack of censorship without anonymity?

3) If we take it that it solves this (both 1 and 2), then moving on to the other part of the question, how does it solve it better than any other distributed infrastructure? You could build a censorship resistant payment system without the insanely excessive hoarding of base wealth (like the gold mining analogy in the payment article), and without the insane environmental impact.

4) Let's say it solves 1, and 2, but we can't do better and I am wrong in 3. Is this problem worth the massive environmental cost to solve?
Smartcard can't do self lockout at HW modification and other TPM features so not equivalent. Still, it should be able to use as additional key to password only BitLocker, but then maybe lack of Smartcard driver at UEFI is a blocker.
More generally, I would say it solves "how do I do transactions when I can't trust the other party nor a middleman".

The reason this seems useless is that most of the time you can trust a third party, but sometimes (e.g. paying for illegal stuff) you can't.
Please be kind, and don't snipe or deride my question. Instead of hand waiving a recommendation, can you provide some answers?
>For instance, suppose we push 200 operands onto the stack

Then you're already doing something gravely wrong. The data stack should not be used like a data structure. That would be analagous to passing 200 arguments to a function.
>"I realized that technology should be in service of something, not just a thing to exist in and of itself."

While for me technology is just a tool to help me make what I want I do realize one can just practice / enjoy it as an art form. Nothing is wrong with it.
Oh I enjoyed that, thanks. Shared around at work.

Likely controversial, but I really like how Django does its settings. I think because Python code can start off just looking like a .ini file with variables and assignments, and get more complex only as required.

On the other end of my work, I'm a fan of having embedded firmware apply to as many devices as possible, and then specialise with configuration settings from EEPROM.
Life doesn't suck and trying isn't for suckers but school isn't life. Trying more than the minimum necessary to get what you want out of school is just waste. If you find some cool subject or project at school that you genuinely care about then by all means go all out. But doing great work when excellent will get you an A and all you care about is a grade is a waste of time and energy.
The way companies act about their data vs how they want/exploit their users data is telling.
Michael Burry was dead on the money that a crash was imminent in 2008, but he was still in serious danger of going bankrupt before it happened and his short would pay out.[1]

"The market can remain irrational longer then you can remain solvent" is a saying for a reason.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry#cite_note-Burry-...
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I know there’s little tricks you can play with your visuals/perception of time by looking at clocks and away quickly.
Could it be that MS is even planning to go one step further? They're not at all interested in preserving their own games, but they might be very interested in adding games from other companies to the XBox through the preservation clause.
> That’s because I forgot one essential reason bitcoin has survived:

> Because people really, really, really want it to.

My impression is that Bitcoin (and crypto) is now a religion. It's tied to a lot of people's identities. That's to say, a group of people think of themselves as crypto people and are proud of it, just as someone might be a Christian and proud of it or a Golden State Warriors fan and proud of it.

While I've personally used crypto and found it useful, it doesn't really matter what the environmental impacts are or how useful it is to a large swath of those interested in crypto. As long as there's a plausible argument for why crypto is good, it's enough for the believers to continue believing.

Not only that, crypto is and will continue to be cool and rich. As long as people like Tom Brady and Fortune 500 companies are talking about buying and selling crypto, it's a religion that will continue growing.

By acknowledging this, I realized that I should move past dismissing the religion, but rather think about how I should engage with it. Imagine I've never watched American football but a lot of people I know are really into it. I then need to think:

Is it a cool community that I should join? Is it something that's not for me but that I should try to understand? Or is it something that's so bad that I should try to stigmatize it? I think the right response for me is closest to the second option, but I'm not sure yet.

[edited to remove some earlier, more divisive comments that I didn't intend to make]
Recently, they had this annoying modal ad (with no "close when clicking outside" feature) telling me that I can make my browser colorful. I care about web-health and containers is far too much of a must-have feature to make me switch, but I’m finally starting to get annoyed.

Without containers, I’d probably bite the bullet and start using some chrome fork that doesn’t show me useless ads.
You will therefore agree that those who do not suffer from mental ilness have a have a right to kill themselves.

Anyway, I didn't consent to being born, why shouldn't I be able to choose to stop living?
The simplest bumbling incentive following often leads to exactly the same place as the most cynical machiavellian scheming.
> The fact that blockchains are used by criminals is definitive proof that it improves upon traditional financial infrastructure

Reminds me of how some people were making a big story about why Toyotas are popular with ISIS. I saw it as a big testimony to their reliability :P
It's actually fantastic with the right tooling. Keep in mind that the Linux kernel works this way too, with long series of patches.
How so? Ruby just released a new version with a JIT and new concurrency model. Rails is releasing a new major version later this year with a bunch of great improvements. Shopify, Stripe and others are putting a ton of improvements into the Ruby interpreter. Many large tech companies still use it. Many startups still use it. If nothing else, it's still a popular scripting language.

It's not as 'trendy' as it once was, but it's better than ever and still widely used.
On the contrary, the majority of people who called poison control were "worried well" who had no symptoms. And I think "not a lot in absolute numbers" is really underselling it: the total number of "reported exposure cases" was 459 in a country of 330 million people, up from 133 cases the previous month (before people started thinking ivermectin was a suppressed miracle cure). That's one out of every million people. Of those, zero died.

By way of comparison, every year, two out of every million people in the US die by falling out of bed.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211118005430/https://www.econo...
Opportunity cost.

Those "few dozen hours" reading PHP docs and tinkering could also be used to learn Python, Ruby, or Javascript, each of which are almost certainly better choices with broader applicability and more modern ergonomics.

Python gets you web backend + ML, Javascript gets you web backend + web frontend. Ruby gets you a multi-paradigm language with nice ergonomics and cats. PHP gets you job offers customizing Drupal and Wordpress websites.

If you already know a "scripting language most popularly used for websites", then you could choose to pick up Rust, Nim, Go, Swift, or Kotlin instead. It's much better to have a new kind of tool in your belt than a second hammer.

The world is full of so many choices. PHP has a lot of incredibly compelling alternatives. Unless your job demands PHP, you're probably better off looking elsewhere.
I'd say Microsoft already has this with Dataverse/Power platform? It runs on Azure SQL Server but it is not exposed directly nor uses SQL server's ACL. Instead, the available access points -- mainly its web API -- honor the permission system configured on the platform, whether it's coming from apps themselves, custom JS code or reporting tools like PowerBI. Users are of course AD users.

Model-driven apps on Dataverse are exactly how you'd imagine MS Access if rebuilt as a SaaS product, and they integrate with Office in various ways. One Azure tenant gets one Dataverse database-- it's certainly intended to host multiple apps sharing the database.

Main problem is that building meaningful LOB applications on this type of low code platform is difficult. Works well for a toy project, or ends up being engineered solutions maintained by IT -- neither hitting the sweet spot mark. I guess general purpose low code is hard.
> Maybe consumers becoming accustomed to streaming services and being held hostage by monthly fees?

Sounds bleak but likely to me.

Stuff got normalized.
Thank you for the list! For anyone interested, apparently Forestry is going to eventually be sunset in favor of Tina, but seems to be built by the same team: https://twitter.com/forestryio/status/1386274017187975168

NetlifyCMS has worked well for me, but I think Tina is what i'm going to try next. It's a good time for headless CMS options, so many to choose from!
Yes. I was very conscious of this state as a child and less so as an adult but when I am it is peaceful.
As for '4', you have an implicit assumption that I see a lot on HN. No, BTC doesn't have a massive environmental cost. Please re-examine that premise.

https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/
The core language itself and stdlibs, sure, it'd take just several dozen hours to pick it up. That goes for any high-level, C-family programming language around today, really. Can you do that and be nearly as productive in PHP (or any other language) as you are in your current daily use language? No: you need to invest in learning common design patterns, the library ecosystem, and tooling in order to be productive at a high professional level, and that is a task that takes longer and arguably never even really ends. Putting down real roots in a programming language is a large investment.
Scaling AWS Lambda and Postgres to thousands of uptime checks
there is no way to export the canvas. why ?
okay where’d you find that??