skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Voting is intentionally designed for it to be impossible to verify what your final vote is so that it's impossible for someone to use that to hold you to a particular vote. A classic example being a household all being forced to vote one way by the head of that household. With no verification possible you can freely vote without influence from others who would use that verification for their own ends.

This is also why taking a picture of your ballot will nullify it if you're caught doing so. Not as punishment, but so you can vote again with potentially different choices and a valid excuse for having no verification.
Does it escape data by default? It appear to be a low-priority for the author in the issues.
First of all, what you're talking about more resembles a Merkle Tree rather than a blockchain, because the "chaining" property is really useless in this scenario. Each election can publish the Merkle Tree of its results and you can be sure that your vote was properly registered. Or frankly, just publish the list of one-way hashes and their vote, and you can dispense with all the Merkle-ing.

But what about a Sybil attack? How do you ensure "one person == one or zero votes"? I could submit a jillion votes for Donald Duck and how would you ever know that those votes were all cast by the same person? Any sort of election scheme has to deal with messy real-world identity, and there's no cryptographic solution to that, only various weak social network approaches that are pretty much the norm.
There are govt programs to fund more "speculative" projects. See DARPA, IARPA, NASA SBIR, etc. if you don't mind working with the govt, that is.
They do though. A very small percentage of current holders of crypto have an understanding of the technology.

Trust will (continue to) come with time.
And until then? We just say "oh, fraud, oh well"?
I agree. For me the sweet spot right now is 2560*1440 at 1x scaling, and crisp bitmap fonts wherever possible.
Expert here. Worked in a Fab (Automated Material Handling Systems or AMHS group).

You might be suprised how automated it already is [1]. Notice the OHTs (Overhead Hoist Transport)[2] running on a system of highways and superhighways on the ceiling. Each of these OHTs carry a box inside it called a FOUPs (Front Opening Unified Pods)[3] carrying upto 25 wafers. That can easily be worth $1M+ per box. They have standardized JEDEC interfaces so any process tool can accept a FOUP and get wafers out of it. The environment inside these FOUPs is ridiculously clean and each one costs $15k for what most people would think is a plastic box with a door in the front. FOUPs are used internally. If wafers are shipped, they're shipped in a similar box called FOSB or Front Opening Shipping Boxes [4]. These boxes are the reason automation happens with standardized "APIs". We don't need to know who made the process tool to hand them a box of wafers.

Another automation feature are the AGVs or Automated Guided Vehicles [5] that carry the same FOUPs and FOSBs [5]. They also can be equipped with a robot arm that takes a wafer out of the box and hands it over to the tool. The AGVs run on specialized roads inside the Fab and remains docked on the tool during processing.

Usually, there are hardly any humans around the tool. Material (wafer) is fed by AMHS systems, picked up by the same. Fab is probably one of the most automated manufacturing places out there. Way more than Automotive manfacturing.

If you're looking to do software engineering, I would highly encourage people to go work in semiconductor industry. It is just a fucking cool place and lot of room for improvement still.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRlcZqqyBM8

[2] https://www.muratec.net/cfa/products/

[3] https://www.entegris.com/shop/en/USD/Products/Wafer-Handling...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOUP#/media/File:Front_opening...

[5] https://www.muratec-usa.com/machinery/clean-room/transport/A...
I cannot be the only jaded nerd to have looked at all the highly integrated "smart home" crap on the market and scoffed. I have absolutely NO desire to sysadmin my goddamn house. I've been in this game a long time, and I know none of that stuff is going to be made well, or coded well, or be able to interoperate well, and that means HEADACHES.

And people buy them! Like, they buy internet-connected LOCKS for their doors! Seriously, why would you do this?

One truth I've gradually learned over the last couple decades is that companies that decide to make a "smart" version of an ordinarily non-smart object invariably screw it up. They don't want to hire good devs, or good product design people, and they end up with a hamfisted mess. Even companies that make somewhat-smart devices can screw this up when they try and "level up" (the example I usually use is Garmin, who have shredded their reputation in the cycling community with unreliable software over the course of the last 7 or 8 years).

Do I have any "smart" things in my house? Yes, but ONLY A COUPLE, and I don't expect them to talk to anything else.

1. I have Belkin WeMo switches on some lights. I bought them because we were going on vacation and wanted to put timers on them, and it was one of these (with a nice phone app for configuration) or the traditional fiddly million-little-switch kind. They work GREAT. The software is now smart enough to peg the "on" event to dusk, which is neat (i.e., it means I no longer have to reset them twice a year for DST).

Do they talk to Alexa or Siri or whatever? No idea. Never set it up. Don't care. Not important.

2. I have a couple HomePods. One, an original model, is in the kitchen. It sounds pretty great for its footprint, and can do other things too ("hey siri, how many ounces in a pint?" or "Hey siri, give me a 12 minute timer") that come in handy when cooking. On the strength of its performance, I bought a smaller one for our bedroom/bathroom, and it's fine, too. Do they connect to anything else? Not really. That's fine.

(I mean, yes, they connect to Apple to work, but I'm comfortable with that. I mean I haven't tried to connect them to anything else in the house.)
If all transaction can be tracked, what prevents the [FBI\et al] from simply following the bitcoin trail until someone cashes out?
It's also going to give rise to a class of services to undermine this. You can just have your official address be wherever and so long as the tax benefits make sense financially you'll make more money with a fake address in a state with no income tax while mostly living somewhere else.

I think this leads to stronger evidence for property tax as the primary form of taxation. If you're paid in crypto and not paying property tax on that PO box that like 18 other people use for separate companies (address as a service or AAAS lol) the company won't know, the state government won't know either. Even if you're paid in cash it's hard to really track down.

So we will continue to wind up with different types of tax havens throughout the world. The long-term ramifications IMO are that nice places to live are going to charge very high property taxes and very high costs for obtaining citizenship, and you'll pay that for safety and security and for things that you enjoy (maybe it's walkable, maybe there are lots of parks, maybe the security is strong, maybe everybody looks like you or something).

I'm not arguing the ethics of this or anything, I'm not sure where I stand or what makes sense - just an observation.
> This is why I always have thought that election voting would be a perfect use case for a blockchain.

You mean, other than trusting elected representatives to oversee the election you'd rather trust miners?
Yawn.

Yes, there are straight Ponzi schemes in crypto. I seem to remember that 'PonziCoin' actually did quite well. Twice. Like, a quarter million dollars in eight hours well.

But there is also utility. Huge utility, recognized by multiple governments by now. And people working relentlessly to free us from depending on the beyond-evil bankers strip-mining every facet of existence on this planet for their own short-term gain.
Is rubber-hose cryptanalysis the concept of extracting info by torture? I guess... I mean, if you're willing to beat someone to get their SSN, you could probably do a lot more harm already just using that info to apply for CCs and loans in their name.

Maybe I'm mistaken or confused here, but in that specific case you could just give any random 9-digit sequence and it would suffice? A non-SSN voter ID would work just as well for a key.

Are people threatening others based on their votes these days?

EDIT: /u/ninjanomnom brought up a good point regarding heads-of-households, which I hadn't thought of before. I suppose some sort of method would be necessary to obfuscate your vote in some situations.
Bitcoin in particular is used as a store of value, or a form of "digital gold".

Everything is speculation (you hope it goes up in the future, but no one knows for sure), but large corporations are increasingly keeping a balance in Bitcoin, as are wealthy individuals and fund managers.

To understand its place in the world, you need to be a bit more familiar with government bond yield and risks, money creation/monetary policy, the macroeconomics of perpetually rising debt and negative interest rates.

Gold has a $11 trillion market cap, and its not because of industrial use or because it sells well as jewelry.
In my experience, the situation you're describing more often results in "sloppy" code -- it seems convoluted, non-obvious, poorly thought out until you realize when the pivots happened. Overengineered code usually looks neat at first glance, maybe even impressive, especially to non-technical stakeholders. Then when you actually dive into it, you notice a bunch of wrong abstractions that introduce layers of indirection without offering any sort of valuable flexibility. "This metaclass that implements a context manager could've just been a slightly longer than average function" type stuff.

A codebase that pivoted multiple times makes more sense the more time you spend in it, an overengineered one makes less.
some trivia from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0322802/trivia?item=tr0618399 "Another reason for filming extensively in Japan is that laws requiring non-consenting participants to have their faces blurred out do not apply in Japan"
Probably to make noprocrast work.
It's the world's first globally accessible, decentralized, transparent, immutable ledger. Lots of value and future value that is being unlocked.
Playing games with your employer probably isn't the best idea if you're looking for a long term relationship with them.
It's a neat idea, but take the second photo in the article for example: The guy gawking (well who knows, but it could be construed that way) at the women doesn't even have his face visible. Yet just from the clothing and context, his friends and colleagues would probably be able to identify him.

That said, if it works, your suggestion would probably cover >90% of cases.
Excellent straw-manning 10/10
The Dichotomy of Verisimilitude Between Books and Movies
I thought that it was Dr. Seuss Enterprises themselves choosing to cease publication of some of his books rather than school libraries removing them from their shelves.

Politico seems to agree. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/mar/10/viral-imag...
I always use the links terminal browser test. If the site is usable in my terminal with the `links https://usabilitypost.com/2012/11/05/stop-fixing-font-smooth...` command then it is well done. Chances are, if you are using any type of special font rendering to fix a UI issue you are also doing other things on that page that will cause it to not display properly in links. Also, shout out to the author for having their article actually render well in links!
Always enjoy the blog/video posts you do, Jeff. Thanks for creating this awesome, in-depth content!
I guess it makes sense as a development board: if you are building a product around a Pi Compute Module you can use this board for quick prototyping before building your own product-specific board. But any hobbyist looking at this should seriously consider the various Pi alternatives around the $200 mark first. Or just buy a used PC.
It provides "distributed trust", in the sense that you know no single person or group is in control and you trust the distributed consensus, in terms of ledger state and algorithm accuracy.
I think you would love Neovim
You sound privileged enough to have access to a reliable and trustworthy bank. Many, many people aren't as lucky.
I think on the whole you make a very good point, but don’t underestimate the impact of time zones & differences in language & culture.

Communication may not be geographically limited anymore, but there are still barriers to overcome.
Then you would expect people in the EU to not be interested in crypto, yet it's the opposite. You can pull up search volume for "Bitcoin" across the world (using Google Trends), many European nations are at the top.

As a matter of fact, their search volume is higher than US.
I always found this issue to be confusing. There are literally hundreds of cameras tracking me every day: in the parking lot, in front of the ATM, when I buy my groceries… I have no ability to know when I’m being recorded or what happens to those recordings.

Yet some people are upset if they get photographed by a human photographer in a public space.

Is the only difference that the photo was taken with intent?
You can also get it via NuGet, for your build scripts.
The best space colony export being considered now is a sunshade installed at Earth-Sun L1 made from asteroid materials, probably some combination of plastic and metal films made from a carbonaceous chondrite. They would be something like this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKAROS

Sunshade modules would function as solar sails so they could navigate on their own power from the point of manufacture to the point of delivery and not waste volatile fuels.
This is about the war with china.

Europe: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/tech-is-make-or-break-i...

Germany: https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/about-infineon/press/press-r...

Korea: https://fortune.com/2021/05/13/south-korea-chip-semiconducto...

Japan: https://www.aroged.com/2021/11/23/japan-has-allocated-5-2-bi...

Non-OP USA: https://9to5mac.com/2021/06/09/us-chip-production-52b/

Key players are expecting an all out war with China:

France: https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/03/31/the-french-armed...

Taiwan: https://thediplomat.com/2021/10/taiwan-says-it-is-preparing-...

Australia: https://au.news.yahoo.com/chilling-warning-of-australias-rol...

AUKUS: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/16/what-is-the...

Japan: https://hamlinemidwayhistory.org/japanese-aircraft-carriers-...

China is fully aware of the cold war: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/chinas-leader-xi-w...

Let me blow your mind far more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_UFO_videos

These aren't hillbillies. This is US government technology recording and confirming UFOs.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pentagon-ufo-report-released-ma...

And nobody is talking about it? This is completely related to the war with china.

It's all an attempt to prevent war with China. Though that does mean a peasant revolt in china is coming.
I wouldn’t be so confident as to think Facebook won’t catch me lying for years.
You know those "strip of LEDs on a gooseneck" plant lights? Even these, low-end as they are, have similar issues. They have buttons instead of physical switches. If the power goes out, I have to remember what sequence of button-presses gets me a twelve-hour timer. And you can't even set it to "always on" and control with a mechanical timer. Maddening.
The Burj does have a sewage system, though. this was during construction. the main point of thevideo is the dwellings of some workers, which has actually improved drastically (soonapur for example, and al quoz indistrial area)
The Windows Resource Kit binaries come to mind. They were distributed together in the same ZIP, but:

1. They used differing return values for success and failures. Sometimes, a 0 was a success, sometimes 1 was a success, and sometimes only 4 was a failure, but everything else was a success.

2. They used different command-line switch formats. Some utilities used a hyphen, others used a forward slash.
The difference is that librarians already provide a "SafeSearch" by curating material at libraries. This is more similar to if Texas tried to mandate that Google SafeSearch at libraries should now include a ban on any LGBTQ images.

Contrary to what you might imagine, checking out and shelving books is not the only things librarians do – they also curate and trim material, a bit like cultivating a garden. Libraries are a fine-tuned system that maximizes freedom of expression and ideas in a reasonably curated manner. It existed long before the Internet, and legislators tampering with that is always alarming.
Wish I started out with Emacs, but after 10 years of curating my vimrc, I don't have time to replace all my custom plugins/bindings by figuring out elisp.

I liked Doom as a vanilla editor, but I went back to vim.

For what it's worth `vim-iced` is pretty cool for Clojure. I didn't like Fireplace at all.
and in this instance the slides on the website are also not the full informational load, the docs are.
> I don’t want to have to configure IntelliJ Ultimate when I want to use Kotlin or want to use Python. Maybe it has a nice way of handling that?

Hmm, that's actually the point of the Ultimate version, I believe: it supports multiple languages quite nicely, from what I can tell. Finally convinced my work to pay for Ultimate so I no longer have to switch between PHPStorm and PyCharm.

To add support for a new language, you just download the first-party plugin pack (like Python plugin by Jetbrains for Python). Then point it to the interpreter/compiler, which can be set as a per-machine default and then overridden on a per-project basis as needed (like if you needed to use NumPy for a specific project, or a different NPM version). Most of the time it's just auto-detected and works out of the box... it only gets tricky if you have, say, macOS Python 2.7, homebrewed 3.x, and some strays in a Docker container. It'll detect all the ones it can and ask you to choose.

But other than that, projects can use multiple languages simultaneously with no additional configuration. You can even (in the IDE) combine multiple repos into one project, each with a separate git but presented together in the editor. Or use SQL/GraphQL inline in a JS file, for example. It all works pretty seamlessly if you DO have the right license (Ultimate).

In fact I believe the language-specific products are, for the most part*, stripped-down versions of Ultimate. It's all built on a relatively modular plugin system, with each language or module (like the database browser) as a plugin -- but they can't all be activated on every product, like you can't add the DB plugin to PyCharm Community Edition. Ultimate just allows you to enable every plugin.

*That's not 100% the case, maybe only like 90-95%. I have noticed some minor GUI differences between the products, such as being able to collapse buttons... but they are very minor compared to the benefit of being able to use all the languages in one IDE.

I think VSCode works like that too, but you'll need to install a lot more plugins to reach near-feature-parity with IntelliJ.
As to your first point, I'm not familiar with Merkle Tree's, so I'll learn about that before I respond. Thank you for the insight.

To the second point--I would imagine you would vote in the same way we do today for MVP, in-person / mailing, etc. So the main function would be to verify that your vote was properly recorded and counted.
> they were struggling to find engineers that the CTO thought were smart enough.

If you have to find the smartest people to keep the wheels on, you’ve already lost.

Disdain for the bell curve is the fastest way to get overengineering. Very few things have to be rocket science to create a good company. Everything else should be dead simple so that anyone can work on it. That also means you have to compartmentalize the hard bits so they don’t leak across the entire codebase.

But some people get bored with mundane code and will make things interesting by replacing a boring task with an exciting one. It’s part of the Curse of Knowledge. You can’t run a company like an action movie. Everyone gets burnt out.
Exactly -- "except crime".

Practically speaking these can just be anything from conflicting jurisdictions (buying weed in a state where it's legal but the Federal government is skeptical), to "crimes" like circumventing KYC or AML -- things that look like structuring (like sending > $10k) even if they are not in furtherance of criminal activity.
Are you simply talking about the shading style? Because otherwise there's nothing similar in style between Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and any Pixar film of that generation.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was very much pushing animation style dramatically at the time and brought a lot of Fleischer, UPA and Looney Tunes animation into 3D for the first time.

Regarding your point of Marvel agreeing to it: Sony still owns the rights to Spider-Man for a lot of domains. That was purely a Sony film with little to no Marvel input. Source: I worked on it.
But that ledger isn't accurate. It's just distributed and difficult to change.

I technically am the owner of (quite a few) bitcoin that were being processed by MtGox when they imploded.

The wallet they were in at the time was emptied and no longer exists.

I still receive the relevant court documents as the case continues still.

As far as the ledger is concerned - they are no longer mine.

---

So question to you: How do you reconcile the theft of my property with the ledger at this point?

It turns out I have no ability to do so at all. The ledger is distributed and impossible to meaningfully change.

So while I trust that the ledger can't be changed easily - I don't trust the ledger to accurately reflect ownership (it can only represent possession, not true ownership).

So now what?

Now it turns out I have to turn around and trust a central authority anyways! That authority being the government that is handling the prosecution of MtGox for fraud and theft.
This is interesting and something I hadn't thought of. Thank you.
I wish they would just release a light version, without all the database, spring integration, and other crap. I just want a light language server.
I’m willing to be swayed on this issue but to me the word “consent” implies permission, and the word permission implies some type of authority. In the case of photography in public there is no authority so no consent is needed. I personally believe that, for the most part, ethics and legality align here. I don’t think it is unethical to photograph and publish a picture of someone in public. However, I think there may be an ethical dilemma if the picture is unintentionally sexually suggestive. I still don’t believe it should be legislated. The societal and personal benefits guaranteed by the right which allows us to photograph in public is worth more than the protection that would come through legislation.

Additionally the picture in question is not sexual to me at all. I don’t even understand how anyone could construe it as sexual. To me it’s a raw, emotional photograph that perfectly describes what it’s like to mother children in a large city. It’s an amazing moment
As a kid in the 70's growing up on the beach in Santa Cruz I once watched a real book burning. It was weird. Some local christian group came down a dug a huge pit. Started a bonfire and a large group of people were tossing in books and records. When I was much older I realized with all the melted records that must have really polluted that section of the beach...
When asking "why" people vote certain ways, they aren't asking for reasons so that they can address concerns. They're asking for correlations, so that they know what to downplay or avoid allowing space in discussion, so that the people will vote "the correct" way going forward.