skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Do you know any other way to bootstrap a peer to peer network without centralised authorities?

In IPv4 a client might have a chance at auto-discovering peers.

It's also not necessary to rely on a single centralized authority. There are many things (DNS, Encyclopedias, Linux kernel mirrors, etc.) where the majority of existing centralized authorities agree with each other.
Generally agree, but should be supplemented with influence of hand-written math.

> Xi -- seems like a good one!

This one is fine to typeset, but is slow to write by hand because it has three disconnected strokes. (You have to pick up your pen twice.) People don't want to use it to do actual hand calculations, and so rarely use it in papers (both because they aren't used to it and, perhaps, because they know their readers won't want to write it by hand).

> Pi -- good one, I have seen this used for sets. In context there is rarely any confusion with product notation.

I think the rarity is indeed because of risk of confusion with product notation. Note that capital sigma is also very rarely used (15th), and my guess is that many of its appearances come from people mistakenly using it for a summation rather than \sum, e.g., \Sigma_{n=1}^N.

When typeset, the size of the summation symbol is pretty obviously bigger than the variable Sigma, but in handwriting it's not as clear. It's true that subscript/superscript notation for the variable being summed over (and that variable's limits) tends to disambiguate, but very often in handwritten math people just write a quick squiggle for the summation sign without bothering to write down the summed variable because it's obvious from context.

So overall, I think the rarely used Greek letters are rarely used for pretty good reasons! I'd say Upsilon is the most unfairly ignored. It's rendered like a Y in some fonts, but not the one that TeX uses for math, and it's easy to draw quite distinctly by hand.
For people who arent familiar with Oz politics I'II fill in the blanks a bit to compensate for the selective partisan filter here.

France was pissed of with Australia because they took a perfectly legal exit on a contract for submarines. This kind of staged contract is normal for large military tenders as once committed you are locked into an effective monopoly. So with each stage there is typically an exit path to keep pressure on the vendor who would otherwise have no incentive to perform.

After many delays and cost overruns, Australia took a completely legal exit on the French contract and took up another commitment for UK/US nuclear submarine tech. This was a vastly superior option and pretty much everyone agreed it was the right decision.
This is particularly the case, as the strategic situation in the Pacific is radically different to when the French sub contract was taken. As you would expect Australia played its cards close to its chest before informing the French they wanted an exit.
This is perfectly normal approach as anyone would do in a similar situation whether they were buying a car or a Boeing 747, let alone something with massive geo-political consequences like a defence contract.

Scott Morrison was accused of being a liar by the French who pretended they weren't aware the sub contract was at risk.
A text message was leaked that showed, in fact, the French were aware and Macron had lied.
A lot of people have been suggesting Macron was simply playing up to nationalist sentiment in an election year (same for the current French/UK fishing disputes etc).

Scott Morrison was also called a liar by the previous unsuccessful Australian Prime minister, Malcom Turnbull, who he replaced. Malcolm is well-known as someone with an axe to grind and a massive chip on his shoulder.
Malcolm himself has been called out for lying in his recent autobiography.
He was also recently called a liar by Ben Fordham, a journalist, details are here:-

https://www.2gb.com/hes-lying-ben-fordham-reveals-untold-sto...

So make of that what you will, but as always, the situation is a bit more complex than the partisan one-liners you read in the comments section.
> If we're going to start legislating how we're all allowed to use energy that civilization has made available, who gets to decide what's allowed?

We already legislate different pricing for different applications. Household electricity has a different price than industrial usage. A 1000x price of electricity for certain applications is just a small extension of what we currently have.
You seem to believe that evil requires a priori knowledge or intent. I think there is enough wiggle room in that word to allow otherwise.

Merriam Webster offers causing harm or injury to someone which would fit the article.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/evil
'Tick, Tock goes the Clock'

Quartz clock : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_clock

Crystal Oscillator : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_oscillator

Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-locked_loop

Ceramic Resonator : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramic_resonator

Atomic Clock : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_clock

Rubidium Standard : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubidium_standard
Wow, there's a lot of incorrect info in that comment! Which free to air TV channels are left leaning? Wasn't it the federal government that introduced the recent draconian surveillance laws? Wasn't it Peter Dutton who famously inflamed racial tension in Melbourne by blaming "African gang violence"? I think you may have consumed a little too much of that Murdoch press!
imagine an internet without trolls, nobody would use it lol
Not everyone who works for a social media company is a six-figure dev. There's a lot of underpaid helpdesk staff and even-more-underpaid "independent" contractors for whom it might be worth the risk, and they're the ones who actually have access to the account recovery tools.
Huh, me too. Not ideal.

I’m not defending them, but I at least was able to make it go away by opening it and then clicking “decline”.
That Git is just a massive list of statements. It points to a couple external links for more information.

Unless my browser is just broken, there’s just a few paragraphs on the first link. There’s no worthwhile discussion on the myriad statements.

More egregiously, the page hijacked the back button in Safari, refusing to let me go back. 0/10 would not recommend.
What advice would you give today for someone who is sitting on some cash but looks to begin investing it?
I am working in very small company, but the funny part is - most of the points from the playbook applicable and fit well here.
OpenGL worked on Linux last time i checked (a few minutes ago).

Linux isn't some special case that makes this impossible, the only reason for this to not work is libraries themselves not making it possible. But the blame lies with the libraries not with Linux.
I remember hearing about a study on mental rotation. The time it takes most people to determine whether two shapes are identical (but rotated) is roughly proportional to the angle of rotation between those two shapes. That seems to be close to what you're asking for.
First of all, it's simplistic to say socialists reject markets see

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism

>Early models of market socialism trace their roots to the work of Adam Smith and the theories of classical economics, which consisted of proposals for co-operative enterprises operating in a free-market economy.

Second, just because you reject something still means you are allowed to present arguments against it. Otherwise only those who hold crypto would be allowed to think or criticize it. You aren't giving arguments against the critiques presented right now, you are just going "ah, you are a socialist, that's why". If you disagree with the critique I'd love to hear your reasoning, but what does labelling and rejecting add?

Third, yes, I do in fact. Marketing, exploitation and hostile business practices are my main problems with the current system, I don't have a moral problem with property, capital etc. If we can configure a capitalist system to be non-exploitative I'm down. One way (not realisable, semi-joking) could be to impose a hard cap on individual wealth (say 100 million, or a multiple of the median to make it timeless) with the excess poured into a UBI (land would need its own treatment but I'm just being funny right now). This would even out power dynamics, avoid dynasties and allow market forces to take hold. We can add a form of new-game-plus for those that need extra motivation, if you build up more wealth and hit 500mil, 1bn , etc you get a progressively more impressive Roman-style triumph as recognition - you still don't get to keep it though.

Fourth, you are making a nonsequitur going to utility now without taking the time to define terms. I don't think of myself as a virtue ethicist nor a utilitarian, but I do think there are some things people want that a utilitarian would still say has negative utility. Is selling crack, fixing up people to opiods or drawing them into cults providing positive utility for you? How about adding extra sugar, salt, MSG and fat to food to make it more palatable with cheaper ingredients, and possibly more unhealthy and addictive? Is it positive utility to use marketing to create a perceived problem and then selling the solution?
> If a node can present a lottery ticket of rarity one-in-a-million, the network can conclude the node did about a million lottery tickets’ worth of work, on average.

This is not true. You will have scratched far fewer tickets on average than one million.

If you have one million tickets, one of them guaranteed to be a winner, you will on average scratch exactly half of them (500 000) before finding the winning ticket. If you have an infinite supply of tickets, each with a 0.000,001 chance of winning, the number becomes higher, but the number of tickets scratched on average is still lower than one million.

Finding an error regarding something I know makes me skeptical about the rest of the article.
Also - and I am not a car mechanic - I can spot at least 5 violations of street-worthiness laws just by watching this rather flashy video. This contraption would never pass inspection.
"who gets to decide"

it's called "we the people" or democracy if you will. We as a society decide that cryptocurrency aren't worth destroying the world over, and that's about it.
I honestly think it’s alright. After spending 40-50 waking hours with tech in a week the last thing I want is extend the tech, or professional aspect, of my life more.

I love reading literature though. Hours, engrossed.

This might just be me. Tech is just a means to pay the bills for me - there’s no passion, hatred, love involved here.
As usual, crypto is not a technical solution but rather a regulatory arbitrage solution. The technology is old and boring. Scoffing at the law, though, well that's fun and new.
Bernie Sanders Documentary (Career and Biography)
The big jump occurred when Ballmer paid $2 billion for the Los Angeles Clippers in 2014. Despite being a historically terrible franchise that is the third team in the city behind a) the Lakers and b) whatever team that you were already a fan of before moving to southern California, the price was four (!) times as much as what any previous NBA team sold for.
> EU got to the brink of collapse with 1 million Syrian refugees

That's overblown. Support for the EU is the highest for a decade and close to all time highs. Brexit seems to be proving something of a cautionary lesson.

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/11/17/majorities-in-...

https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/2532
> When you withdraw you are no longer allowed to sign anything.

Allowed to by whom?

Who's to punish me if I disobey them?
I do dream. I just don't think people have access to the visual imagery system used in dreams while they're awake.

I do read books, and, if visualizers were real, I'd expect that my enjoyment of books would be naturally greater. The narrative format of a book is similar to how I think and perceive of reality - as words. Books are more like a native format for thoughts and experiences than I'd expect them to be for visual minds.

I don't think I ever said I can't imagine what it would be like to have visuals in my mental experience. I'm familiar with images and vision and expect it would be like being able to "see" things without seeing them or calling images up on a screen. That people who claim to be able to visualize don't seem to have that ability makes me doubt their claims. (see: bicycle example)

I do have an imagination too and agree it is a real and powerful ability. I just doubt that other people actually have visual imagery in their imaginations.
Yet you still use Facebook's censored spyware, even with this terrible UX?
Consumer boycotts of products have never worked. The only thing they effect is reputation[1], and social media companies clear don't care very much about theirs as long as they keep making money.

Collective action needs to be legislative or legal in order to actually change things.

[1] https://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/news/2017/king-corporate-bo...
Ok, but that doesn't mean it'll be good.
Maybe I didn't word it right, but I wasn't calling bitcoin's method reliant on centralised authorities, just asking if there were more methods out there that weren't as well.

Bitcoin is an open source permissionless protocol, so you have multiple clients to chose from, each with their own list of bootstrapping nodes, many open source where you can submit a PR to add your node too. You can even build your own client and point to whatever you want. You can also just ignore them and just point directly to nodes in a list from a public forum, a private chat, whatever.

Also, you're not just connected to those bootstrapping nodes: you use them to find the rest of the peers in the network.
There is no guessing in the "completing the square" method either.
I hate to argue from authority but here is @vbuterin saying the same thing about centralization:

https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentrali...

“Blockchains are politically decentralized (no one controls them) and architecturally decentralized (no infrastructural central point of failure) but they are logically centralized (there is one commonly agreed state and the system behaves like a single computeR”

I think you’re mistaken that I don’t know how Bitcoin works. Not only do I know, but I have spoken to many teams doing work in the last 10 years in various alternative systems, and I have even designed alternatives myself.

I used the word server in my analogies. The transactions are, however, all going through one COMPUTER which receives them, puts them in a envelope, and finds the right PoW input to “seal” the envelope, and sends it out to everyone. Whoever does that first, gets the rewards on that chain. If the transactions do not make it into the block, they don’t count on-chain.

Therefore, every 10 minutes, ALL TRANSACTIONS IN THE WORLD must be gathered by one computer, the one that will happen to mint the next block. This is a bottleneck, and it is the cause of the skyrocketing fees whenever the system sees any on-chain adoption.

But it’s actually worse than centralized — because we don’t know who will mint the next block so we have to send everything to on everyone. Imagine if all BitTorrent nodes seeded every file in the world. Bitcoin failed as a peer to peer cash system because of this topology and people on the group were telling Satoshi this back in the day.
We had one prof who wrote these as ς with one, two, or even three squiggles below. I never figured out what letters they were supposed to be (zeta, sigma, xi?), but read them as something translating to "zig-zag".
If there’s a million tickets and you know one of them is a winner, then yes.

If you have an effectively infinite stream of tickets and each have a 1 in X probability of winning, you will indeed go through X on average.
Am I a Bitcoin maximalist?
I agree but wet ink signatures can be forged too. Signatures alone do not make a transaction non-repudiable. High value deals are also secured by public notaries, agents, government clerks, and even attorneys.
If it’s scam, the article could have presented a stronger case for it. The objection seems theoretical. If PoS is broken, I would expect to see a plausible attack spelled out.
As far as I am aware, these long-range forks can be hindered by using verifiable delay functions (VDFs) [1, p. 6]. Essentially, VDFs take a certain amount of steps to compute and cannot be parallelized. However, the correctness of their output can be verified efficiently.

Now if a proof of stake includes a VDF that needs to be computed for every block, then a long-range attack needs to recompute the VDF outputs as well. This is infeasible as it will take a long time given the correct choice of VDF parameters.

Notably, the Chia blockchain mentioned in the article would succumb to long-range attacks as well were it not for their usage of VDFs [2, p. 17].

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/601.pdf
[2] https://www.chia.net/assets/ChiaGreenPaper.pdf
And that’s only looking at US Christmas lights, not world-wide
I've heard this, and I did take a class in drawing once. I improved, and could see a path towards becoming good, but it was not "the same".

The artist I was referring to didn't draw "iteratively", like most people. He didn't start with a pencil sketch outline that he refined progressively until it looked like the subject. Instead, he'd pick up a pen, put it on the paper, and then he just traced a single continuous outline, moving the pen inwards to fill in details. All in one movement, without picking up the pen.

I saw him draw a "dwarf with a hammer" character like this, complete with clothes down to the buttons. A detailed beard and expressive face. Boots with the tops turned down. Wrinkles in the pants. A belt with a buckle. Detail upon detail. But he just... traced it. From the outside in. You couldn't even tell what he was going to draw until a couple of minutes.

PS: I've also met a guy who could do the same kind of thing with programming. Most people build up code iteratively, "sketching" the structure using interfaces or function definitions, building them up and refining them one piece at a time. Not this guy. He'd just stare off into space, and then start typing. Left-to-right, top-to-bottom, non-stop. I saw him open seven consecutive brackets and the close the last one a page and a half later.

He did this for a couple of hours at a fast typing rate, then hit compile. There were 3 typos due to a sticky shift key. He fixed those, and then the code compiled, ran, and successfully completed the (very complex!) problem.

These were some of the freakiest thing I've ever witnessed in my life. Some people's brains just work differently to mine, and I won't ever be able to "think like them".
I'm okay accepting the premise that 'China' is ambiguous sometimes.
Clean code... To this day I cringe when I see methods/functions over 20 lines long.. Or when I see commented code blocks in one function..

Other have mentioned The Mythical Man Month, and I'd say it's a great book. Sadly, more often than not, it's something I wish I could staple to managements foreheads. "read this now before our next planning session"

The Rspec book was a great book, that helped me fully embrace TDD, and this has led to more sleep filled nights than I had a right to before its consumption.

1984... This one terrified me so much, that I have to include it. I write code much more securely because of it.

Strange in a Strange Land. If only because I learned what GROK means.
There are but you really shouldn't. It's such a wasteland you'll get savaged before you can turn a profit. It's not grounded in fundamentals and it's exposed to industrial scale price manipulation. The only win is not to play.
>Is it me

I think it's you, because I see criticism levied against TikTok here all the time.
This absolutely needs to become part of grant requirements. The NIH is doing well (and good!) on this, and the new German government has announced that software funded by the public needs to be free and research should be open.
Theres also all `._.name` files MacOS spews all over network shares >:(

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/14980/why-are-dot-...
Client side: https://osxdaily.com/2010/02/03/how-to-prevent-ds_store-file...

There’s always been a hidden setting to stop Finder from generating these on a server, but the downside is that it won’t remember things like your girlfriend’s view preferences on the server (window position, sort options, text size, view type e.g. list or icon view).

That setting is also per user account, so if you have a user account for yourself on the same computer you would have to set it for yourself as well.
Not pending anymore, but the best one so far for me has been that the jews should come flying back to their homeland "on eagles" or something.

That must have looked pretty insane for anyone reading it the first 3000(?) or so years of that prophecy.
From your examples, it seems that you make a distinction between B2B (with possibly internal clients) and B2C.

The general advice that would still apply to both would be: understand who your client is and what they need in the context in which they evolve, be they consumers in a country you're not familiar with or mechanical engineers you barely know the job of.
Great things about publishing known facts: reviewers (often short on history) less likely to question, seldom proven wrong.
When explaining tech to non-tech people, communicate it with visuals (or memes)
To get to the truth of the matter, we will need to agree on what's actually happening. The phrase "concentration camp" provokes imagery of Nazi Germany, with overtones of the most egregious human rights violations.

What happened, in actuality, is that the Howard Springs mining camp was repurposed for quarantine. People have opted to go there instead of hotel quarantine. They are there for a total of 14 days, at which point they enter society at large. The army was providing transport to the location. People could have opted to stay at a hotel instead.

That's it.

At my core, I'm a civil libertarian. I am skeptical of government, and an anti-authoritarian. I am very, very much not a government apologist. But I am a strong believer in the importance of using facts as the basis of an honest, good faith discussion. My comments might just be a futile attempt to reduce the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect of this particular story.
Your surprised it took a while to resolve a problem with big tech? Really?
Are those 8k/260k individuals, or could they all be Syble?
Edit: I meant to say it's the first I have finished (which will happen soon). I'm not saying there aren't other worthy technical books out there I'm sure there's plenty.
My mental experience is something like a voice that rapidly narrates my every thought at all times (and is indeed reading along with me as or slightly before I type this). Saying "narrates my every thought" is kind of a weird construction because those essentially are my thoughts not just narration. I also have what I think of as a separate thread that is barely at the edge of awareness and has thoughts that aren't quite words but more like feelings. There are no images of any kind that accompany any of this nor a black void on which images might be rendered.

In another comment I likened it to reading a book. When I read a book that voice is just enunciating the stream of text instead of my thoughts (except when I get distracted and the internal voice starts narrating my thoughts again).