skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let me qualify my initial comment.

I have conquered [and seen others close to me] FOMO by stubbornly writing things off, and I suspect others have done the same thing: it's calorically inexpensive and cognitively frictionless. No one can reasonably assess everything that comes their way.

I am not saying that that's the reason with the writer, but it's surely the reason in some people, precisely because it's easy. And easier still to click upvote on a take that reinforces that stubbornness. It's this latter group whose motives are being questioned, as per the GP who asked why these takes get upvoted. I wasn't actually questioning the motive of the writer of the article, hence why I didn't engage in the arguments in the first place.

And of course you have the corollary of true believers who will support anything positive of X-thing-they-have-adopted.

It's seems to be only these two dichotomies we see, rarely balanced takes. And that's the real problem.
Please read The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/nothing-burger.html and tell me where is he wrong because obviously (?) if he is right then any "massive" success is impossible.
There is a difference between each of those uses of electricity and PoW.

PoW is throwing away electricity for the sake of it, and resists getting more efficient. If the goal is for the bitcoin network to cost $1M to do a single double spend, then PoW has to use $1M worth of electricity every 10 minutes.

Let's say we live in a future where we suddenly have 10x as much electricity. Due to supply and demand, electricity now costs 10% of what it did before.

Dryers etc all keep using the same amount of electricity with no issue, but bitcoin has a problem: it's now really cheap to double spend unless bitcoin uses 10x as much electricity. So of course, it does.

There's a similar proper with making things more efficient. If we make a christmas light more efficient (make it use an LED instead of an incandescent bulb or whatever), christmas lights will use less electricity.

If we make ASICs or GPUs more efficient, then people will just have to run more of them, or else bitcoin will be less secure.

I think this is a real and notable difference, and I think that's enough of a justification to consider a ban.
I personally know someone with a two letter twitter handle that is a word in the english language, for awhile there they were inundated with password request attempts, but it took knowing someone 1-1 inside of twitter security in order to put additional locks on their account, beyond what any config will show unfortunately.
It seems that PoW is like recursion. You don't get it at all until you completely get it. It's a leap to understand it and somehow many very technical people don't understand a seemingly simple protocol even a decade after it became mainstream and is threatening national banks due to the very characteristics these people claim it doesn't have.
I think the argument was that you could withdraw at 201 then sign new 200b messages.
Get Rid of the IT Department
You can set up the various addons as just separate containers; this is what I do for esphome, deconz, etc.
> Proof of stake is a scam. When I say that, I mean that proof of stake is (1) claimed to be a consensus system, and (2) constitutionally incapable of actually producing a consensus.

Ok. Go break one of the many existing systems that operates using proof of stake then. If you've done this, you should be leading your article with it. If you haven't, you shouldn't be speaking.

Proof of stake is not some theoretical thing being proposed in the abstract. Many systems operate on it as we speak.
mostly this.
The "counter terrorism" is a bit of a click-bait. There's no NSA type surveillance with sophisticated machine learning algorithms going on (these are unneedded), its simple tools any police department in any modern country has and uses.
That's called Selfish mminign but the prob is to be faster than the network!
(my day job is developer on Proof-of-Stake Algorand block chain, I'm a developer, this may not be polished official PR)
Article's theory about malicious old blocks doesn't hold up. Let's say I start a new node and verify history since the beginning. Somewhere along the line I'm connected to a malicious node which hands me a fictionalized block. It would need to have been signed by not just one but about 30-45 accounts _which had stake at that time_. Proof-of-Stake attacks aren't about having 51% of the CPU that overwhelms a Proof-of-Work system, but about having 60-70% of the _value_ in the network. So, if Warren Buffet comes along and wants to spam our network, I guess he could, but that would destroy the network and destroy his value that he sunk into the network. _That_ is a guardrail for PoS systems as much as any crypto or consensus-protocol element (and the algorithms are right, original article misunderstands them).
> I'm well aware of what this is and your description of it is quite overblown.

Your comments could have some credibility if you provided any information or made any point. Unfortunately you're instead saying nothing and just adding noise to an otherwise interesting discussion.
Which would fine if they weren't also proposing that the public pay the legal bill for MPs to launch such action against the public.

If they're defending, sure, they need to be covered but if they want to go after the public they can pay for it themselves.

https://www.news.com.au/national/politics/peter-dutton-sugge...

A YouTuber lost a truth defense because things a politician said in parliament are inadmissible in court so it's not reasonable to claim they are "using the same avenues that any other member of the public can also use". That politician could given up parliamentary privilege and made it a level playing field but he did not.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-05/john-barilaro-settles...
Rust requires explicit conversions for numeric types for exactly the reasons you mention.
Whoever the 260k are (and I know some of them) if they’re all one entity, they would have had to stake eight million ETH and counting into the ETH2 deposit contract.

The 8k are randomly selected from this pool of 260k validators via RanDAO every 12 seconds.
> salaries that were almost unthinkable even five years ago are starting to become viable and a whole scale of technical roles above "senior" is starting to appear at larger companies

Could you elaborate more on the roles you've seen? I'm a developer with 12 years experience and have had "Senior" on my CV for a better part of a decade, as I don't really want to go into management.

I'm currently looking for something new and it seems that the top roles for something like a "Senior <insert tech stack> Developer/Engineer" are paying around £100k (+ comp) in London, which hasn't really changed much over the past decade after adjusting for inflation. The take home pay as a contractor is still quite a bit more though, so that's probably the route I'll go.
utility != "expected value"
"expected value" != MY expectation
utility != statistics on dollars
Yes.

I don't know about you but if you have a coin labeled 0 and 1 and flip it it would be mind-bogglingly stupid to expect a 0.5 out of this coin. Just like if you have a coin labeled A and C it would be stupid to expect a B to come out of it. You'd be better off picking either A or C and expecting that instead.
Again, it would be interesting if these academics just refused to publish in these journals. That would kill their business model very quickly.

But they won’t.
I'm on the neutral side of the playing field. But, if they actually wanted to do this, they're missing a lot of critical steps in order for them to actually successfully do this. Granted, they even hit the price to purchase a team
That’s actually the point. You theoretically shouldn’t need a court. Everything is regulated by code, and if something goes wrong you have to own it. The code is public. You can vet it as much as you want. Proposals are voted proportional to code ownership. It looks controversial but not utterly nonsense to me.
you didn't read the article to the end, did you?

about 40% in:

"Because of all the arguments above, we can safely conclude that this threat of an attacker building up a fork from arbitrarily long range is unfortunately fundamental, and in all non-degenerate implementations the issue is fatal to a proof of stake algorithm’s success in the proof of work security model. However, we can get around this fundamental barrier with a slight, but nevertheless fundamental, change in the security model." —Vitalik Buterin, saying the quiet part out loud

Security model in PoS = trust the rich. Some like having masters, whatever floats your boat.
The author takes issue with the Phone-a-friend-consensus (PFC) for establishing base consensus. I disagree with his objection for two reasons:

1. For all consensus systems, at least a vast majority will rely on PFC for base consensus since they will not personally audit the client software they download, and thus will rely on PFC to determine which software distribution channel to trust to download the client software from. In other words, there is in practice no pure PFC-free consensus protocol, to be taking such a hard stance on Proof of Stake for its reliance on it.

2. The Schelling Point PFC in Proof of Stake will always be the real order of transactions, and therefore PFC will be highly reliable. Cases like Bitcoin's block size hard limit dispute, and Ethereum's DAO hack rollback dispute, dealt with something other than order of transactions, and in both cases, the dispute was severe enough to lead to a hard fork - which jettisonning PFC can't protect against - regardless.
Ethereum is literally broken, look it up
>> 3. With the expectation of profit

> Probably? Why else would they be buying a team for?

Teams are money sinks. The reason to buy a team is political power. To the extend that the state will turn a blind eye or two (see ^2). A totally random example[1], less random examples: Juventus, AC Milan, Olympiacos[^2] and countless others.

Just pointing the obvious, I agree that this transaction should be regulated, all I'm saying is that (3) is not _necessarily real_ in this or other cases.

[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Laporta#Political_activit...

[^2]: https://newrepublic.com/article/159252/noor-one-vampire-ship...
Whenever I have to mentally rotate shapes (only on tests of mental rotation / IQ) I do it by just comparing the features of the original shape to each of the candidates and ruling out options. e.g. noticing that one option has too many vertices or not enough. It's tedious but pretty reliable.

Your comment made me Google "aphantasia mental rotation" and the summary of the first result I got makes me think I'm probably right. As I read the summary, aphantasia people were slower but more accurate. In other words, the aphantasians know they don't have visual imagery and therefore do the slow but steady thing whereas the visualizers think they have visual imagery and are fast but wrong.

Granted, I haven't read the paper, but at first glance I'm counting it as evidence for me.

https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2700106
Have you tried audiobooks? It helps me a lot to do something boring, like cleaning the kitchen or emptying/filling the dishwasher, while I consume content. Somehow when my body is doing something in automated mode I can focus well on my thoughts or audio/video content. Audiobooks and podcasts are perfect for this, videos are a bit more difficult as you’re likely to miss something, and text content is not adapted at all.
> you didn't read the article to the end, did you?

I skimmed it. It made no serious arguments. If it had a serious argument, it would have exploited one of the many existing proof of stake systems.

> Security model in PoS = trust the rich. Some like having masters, whatever floats your boat.

You mean...exactly like PoW mining?
How does that work with ISPs, healthcare, tax filing, airplane manufacture, pharmaceuticals, online retail, and a whole slew of other crucial industries (especially in the US)?

Without appropriate regulation, competition is an empty choice between the members of an oligopoly at best, or becomes entirely absent at worst if the industry was captured by a monopoly.

Transparency is of course similarly toothless without corresponding forces of real competition and legislation to punish whatever crud came to light.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29361910
I am 43 now and employed in the central IT department of a big German car manufacturer. I can completely relate to the OP in terms of roles and responsibilities, but I would like to offer a different perspective on the meaning of your job:
It does not matter whether you write code or not. As an engineer in IT, there are numerous ways to create value for a company, be it in software development, operations, IT-related purchasing, project management, agile leadership (SCRUM master) etc.
Your core asset is your technical expertise - if you combine it with any business function, you have a very coveted skill set and probably a rewarding career.
I myself changed between different roles (lead developer, maintenance manager, architect, build manager...) and different business domains (quality, customer service, manufacturing).

My core take-away is: create value and more around laterally in the company. You will gain valuable knowledge and you will be respected.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29361566
Sure, go steal all the money in curve. I'll wait.
Has anyone ever not been accused of being a scammer in this space?
I totally agree, to the point where I’m skeptical about people saying they’ve read something cover to cover.

Someone once recommended me to start at the back of each chapter and do the the problems and only read the chapter or even parts of the chapter for problems I couldn’t solve.

It comes with its own set of drawbacks but it does help with getting through text books where the author was paid by per letter.
Fact check: N95 filters are not too large to stop Covid-19 particles
LPL videos are an example in educational videos. Clear explanations, no fluff, no finger pointing (except for Master Lock and unbacked marketing claims) and real expertise.
DocuSign is obviously crap. When I first encountered it, I couldn’t believe that anyone took it seriously. The only security is that you got the document at your email address.

My brother was scammed as a result of this lax security. A crooked business partner set up a plausible email address for him, and took out a loan in his name. He only found out when he started getting notices about missed loan payments.
Matlab was what came before Python. I do not ever want to go back. Sure, the Python ecosystem has its issues and Matlab has an IDE that is refined, but at least Python does have that ecosystem, all Matlab has is a shiny proprietary cage and littlr in the way of a cose sharing culture. Python being a proper language lets you break into other things, hookup completely unrelated code (and languages). All that's a giant pain in Matlab.
> I cringe when I see methods/functions over 20 lines long

You may find this post interesting http://number-none.com/blow/john_carmack_on_inlined_code.htm...
> but that would destroy the network and destroy his value that he sunk into the network

Isn’t the whole point that by that time he would have withdrawn from the network so he would sink it without losing anything himself.
bitcoin incentivizes the search for cheaper energy, and allows for the instant monetization of once wasted energy. That's a LOT. this whole argument of energy use... i bet most of these people would have fallen for the same energy propaganda when the internet was just getting started... "what's email?? why would you waste electricity to send an electronic mail??"
Scam is the wrong word... Mispriced and intentional pumped would be two more accurate ones.

A company which produces 1% of all global cars is worth more then the companies who produce 90% combined? Sounds legit.

Next you'll be telling me a company which has only shipped 160 trucks to employees is worth 100bn... Oh wait...
I think you're confusing "visualization" and "a photographic memory".
How did it go fighting that fake loan?
"[...] ultimately pretty simple" you mean if you ignore everything making it hard?

I must admit that this kind of attitude triggers me. I have worked in the energy sector, in engineering (but not IT) heavy companies, and many have this attitude. "its easy to learn programming", "we just need to teach the engineers python" etc etc, and I have seen MOUNTAINS OF SHIT so tall you would faint. It's easy to get tricked, because being both the user and developer at the same time can be such a boost. But the moment there are more users things get hard. The moment the code base gets so large that you can't keep it all in your head, it gets hard.

Software development is easy until its not, and it surprisingly quickly gets to the "it's not" stage. And then you get excel sheets in python.

Some "subject matter experts" make good programmers, but in my experience its not because their background, but because they are smart and have talent for it.
How do you imagine the outcome would have been different in a hypothetical world with an entirely privatized justice system?
What Is Linux and Why Is It Important
With no written privacy policy or TOS, I'd be reluctant to use this.
Even if they tried, it’d take weeks, months to get all of their validators accepted by the chain because of the limit each day.
I loved my time playing EVE, spent a fair few years running a major (couple hundred players) Corp in one of the big alliances back pre-pearlabyss. We had a whole suite of web apps that integrated with EVE auth and API, and managed various aspects of the game for us. Threat Intel by putting bots into enemy chats then scraping for keywords (mentions of certain system names), tools to monitor the markets for certain prices/shortages we cared about, custom maps that let players submit scan data, etc etc.

I’ve never experienced any other game that gives you the rush of a major alliance battle in EVE.

It’s an incredible game with a lot of insanely smart people playing and some great communities around it, but regretfully I had to “win” as life is life.

o7
We could bring up a million shitcoins and scams but then we'd be here all day.

If you really want to chuck a hand grenade at the crypto-cultists ask them to rationalise Tether.
Why fork at low difficulty?
It's funny "we the people" always decide this when it's about something that would actually empower us. Meanwhile, "we" didn't only not ban cars, "we" destroyed public transport in the US and lobbied the government to massively subsidize roads and cars. Just as an example.

It's curious how much agitation there is concerning the energy consumption of PoW. I don't see nearly as many articles calling for restricting AWS & co. Coincidentally Bitcoin is the base layer of a decentralized finance world completely out of the control of traditional elites and banks.
PoS is Plutocracy on Steroids.

You've outlined only one, the most obvious and least probable, mode of failure.

The more subtle and wildly prevalent failure mode is that the consensus will be set by the few whales, who will maximize their rent extraction at the expense of numerous small players, which will include most later adopters, aka the entire population of Earth.

It's already visible on smaller scale in DAOs, every vote resembles a banana republic: "90% voted, 90% in favour". No matter what smaller stakeholders do/say, the early big investors and dev team always win. Why would they structure it otherwise? The same dynamics exist in PoS, just not as grotesque.

Perhaps that's OK for a private company governance, but for a global currency?

You want the multibillionaires to dictate the properties of the medium of exchange that serves the entire globe? Seems rather strange that so many have such a burning desire to be governed by someone much richer than them.
Ah, .DS_Store. As a Windows user forced to endure this offensive clutter I curse the fucking bastard that came up with that.

No love either for the twerp who invented desktop.ini or caused thumbs.db to seemingly keep coming back after I repeatedly turn off that feature.

If you're interested in such voodoo arts check out NTFS Alternate File Streams too (which while the bane of many at least have the decency not to spread to filesystems that don't support them).
But we the people is usually restricted to one country. How do you get multiple countries to cooperate and ban cryptocurrency mining?
There’s also an interesting precedent here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oxford_v._Rame...
Freedom of speech is exactly how you get r/politics, private propaganda syndicates, and qanonsense screaming loud enough that it drowns out everything else.

"More" of it isn't going to make any of those things go away.

"Freedom of speech" isn't a guarantee that your prefered brand of rational discourse is going to have an audience of millions. If anything, it's a guarantee that it won't, because someone with a self-serving profit motive is far more incentivized to shout over you.

Freedom of speech does not entitle you to broadcast to anyone else's audience.
The varkappa and the varpi are just calligraphy versions of the regular letters κ & π, so I would avoid them. Also, the ς is just the form σ takes when at the end of a word, so I'd avoid that too.

And I don't know why anyone would use the uppercase Ξ (Xi) when the lowercase is such a nice letter: ξ.
I think this is irrelevant. What we should know at this point is if mask mandates make any difference reducing infections in a region compared with no mask mandates.

But there seems to be very little science being done for the last two years and too much politics. Too many measures to avoid responsibility and zero measures and control groups to check if interventions do anything.
I actually really appreciate the GoF book. I don’t use their patterns every day, but it’s definitely driven home the message of carefully thinking about which parts of the system should depend on which other parts, and examples of how you can achieve that.
I also find it useful as a reference because many of the more common patterns do show up in people’s code and in libraries and understanding what a singleton/adapter/factory/builder is, does help me in my day to day.

I think the problem are the people who can’t abstract the message of the book and instead use it as their reference for absolutely everything, over-engineering the hell out of things. When I’m asked the sort of questions you describe, I also just ask if they could instead explain the problem, because being able to solve problems is all design patterns are about. If they can’t, I would respectfully ask how their knowledge of the design pattern will then help them in their job.
Kudos for the effort. Now If you have a beast processor like M1 I presume it would run ok, but still, and this makes my 5+ year old machine cooking omelet, would never use it because of this. Also mentioned here in comments, dvx/lofi is the same story, Electron and webgl shaders, just not acceptable performance for such a tiny thing. Old school demoscene coders is where we should learn how to write efficient software for such tasks.
Inertia. Lack of knowledge. This problem feeds off itself. If both parties agree to sign electronically it’s valid. In a population of luddites adoption remains low because they’re worried other luddites or cautious people don’t accept electronic documents. One silver lining to Covid is that businesses have been forced to adapt by moving up their digital workflow deployments or go out of business.
I have done a little bit of lock picking as a hobby, and LPL is somewhat of a lock-picking Mozart. Locks I struggle with, he picks in less than 30 seconds.

He has inspired me to become better at lock picking, which helped me at least once when I locked myself out of my locker at work. My Assa-Abloy lock which would have taken me 20 minutes before was open in under 2 minutes.
Show HN: Console Daylight Hours Clock