skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The question that you asked was:

> when the leader is elected every 10 minutes, do they get a choice of what block they append to the chain?

and the answer is yes, the miner that gets elected chooses which transactions to append to the chain. Do they pick the transactions after getting elected? No, they pick them before getting elected. In fact, it doesn't matter whether they pick the transactions before or after getting elected, because their chances of getting elected are unaffected by which transactions they picked. Therefore, it makes absolutely no difference. The fact that you think it makes a difference tells me you're very confused about the role miners have in the bitcoin network.
I don't know why but I've always loved reading technical content cover to cover. It started with cereal boxes when I was a kid and I would read ALL of the text. In my teens it was MaximumPC and 4Wheeler magazine that I would read cover to cover. Now I buy random tech books for things I want to know about like Hadoop, KVM virtualization, Code Complete, etc.
New Zealand has cases, so what exactly is your point? The initial argument is that locking borders could prevent the spread of a highly contagious virus into a country. It cannot.
Looks like many people think that is the goal now.

I come from a place that has a lot of vaccinated people, ICUs have been at 4% since may and still there is an increase in restrictions because of a recent uptake in cases which don't result in hospitalisation since a lot of people, as I said, took the vaccine.
I've found if a book or idea doesn't come to them through their own network, then it's easily just dismissed. Especially if the book is nearing a half century old. About the saying that adding people to a late project makes it later, the simple retort was: "But we have agile scrum." End of discussion.
I played EVE for about 4 years around the late 2000s and early 2010s. It's the only game I've ever played where (a) physical units were respected in calculations (e.g. tracking speeds in radians per second; distances in Pc -> Ly -> AU -> km -> m) and (b) other players contained a nonzero number of linux kernel developers...
Why online courses can’t make you an expert. And what to do instead
This medium articles discusses effectiveness of online trainings and demonstrates an alternative way to learn at your own pace.
I thought there was enough historical data to draw the conclusion that command economy doesn't work. I also would appreciate if you could back up your claims on how Bitcoin is used.
I don’t see how this is a rational response to the question that the commenter posited. It’s all assumptions on top of assumptions about his/her personhood.

What do you mean by “preservation” here—is it just attending to our most basic physiological needs? Is doing that really even an active choice? What about the things that we do for our loved ones—is that on the same scale as trying to preserve our species from mass extinction? What if the commenter contributes to charity or puts out excellent work which improves people’s lives—does that not count as caring for the lives of one’s fellow man?
This doesn't makes any sense. The amount of energy any PoW coin uses has nothing to do with the number of transactions that are made.
Totally agree here. I got closer to my now closest friends from the time we spent in computer club in middle school.

And even though we all learned the same thing (karel the robot, quick basic), for each of us it was a gateway drug to something different.

Two of my friends took that knowledge and started playing with making animations and animated text in quickbasic.

I used it to write music with the play command. I eventually learned HTML and my first website was about stealth aircraft. (SR-71, F-117A)

We all ended up doing different things. Our passions still dictated what we did with our programming knowledge.

It’s the exposure and creating the spark that’s key.
All passengers on any flight leaving South Africa must show a negative PCR test, including those who have been vaccinated.

Source: https://www.gov.za/covid-19/individuals-and-households/trave...
To propose we go to Mars to protect the species is backward. People with the means want to go to Mars to show off or other personal reasons. Then they drum up some humanitarian-sounding reason for government and popular support.

If we could prove beyond shadow of a doubt that no dangerous asteroids would hit Earth for a million years and that pursuing Mars accelerated our environmental problems here, I don't doubt that the same people would come up with new justifications and keep going, even if counterproductive.
You assume a garage exists or that said person keeps tools there and not in the basement.
Electricity will not be a problem for the world in the next 30 years...
1. We will all move to renewal or nuclear

2. Bitcoin will decentralize more as the miners will move where electricity is cheaper and thus will cover geography of whole world hydro,thermal,solar,wind etc..
3. Bitcoin can be the main chain and all side chains can rollup and commits.
4. The btc uses will be huge and there will be no dearth of transaction fees..
The reason anti-vaxxers are being mocked is because their entire MO is pointing out the sawdust in the eyes of others while ignoring the plank in their own. Calm and reasonable debate only interests them when their own so-called "valid concerns" are being put into question, but this is thrown out the window when they themselves find something new to misunderstand and publish to mislead millions for likes and five minutes of fame.
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Sounds like the difference between a low-budget game that gets plenty of iteration and playtesting before its wide release, and a AAA game that gets shoved out the door for Christmas because the fiscal quarter depends on it.
Interesting!

It reminds me of the hash maps that are said to be amortized O(1) but can be O(n) for some sequences of operations in various languages like Python and JS: https://blog.toit.io/hash-maps-that-dont-hate-you-1a96150b49...
Most jobs I've had there was an implicit expectation that if your shit breaks, you fix it. This resulted in systems which didn't break because, well, that keeps work to working hours.

A few years back I took a job with no mention of on call and then was told there would be a fortnightly 24 hour slot, which later turned into ~weekly as team members left.

I left too.

I have no idea why they felt it reasonable to not mention this before I joined, they effectively just wasted a few months pay on me on a gamble that I had no life outside of work.

They seemed to find the idea that I don't take my laptop to the pub, or up a mountain, or on holiday, some sort of bizarre way of living. Sick system effect? Who knows.
One argument is that you are being paid for it; it’s just not broken out into two lines, but the dollars are there.

If you’re making $200K/yr, maybe $150K of that is for your job and $50K is for being on-call. That seems like a more than fair price (or at least one that’s in the ballpark) for periodic on-call service.
> If I have to dictate phone numbers

The problem also exists in English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVPZAXMCasI&t=154s
“Why are numbers “backwards”?? What a naive question! So ignorant! What’s backwards to you is forwards to somebody else! Anyway, when Germans studied numerals they decided to write them backwards in keeping with their written text”
Tbh, as a German I never really noticed this.

Thinking it trough, it also makes me wonder why it ain't consistent and breaks down after more than two digits? 21 is einundzwangig, but 121 is einhunderteinundzwanzig, 1121 is eintausendeinhunderteinundzwanzig, and so on. So there it's not really backwards anymore.
While I agree that in general they shouldn’t feel bad about asking to be being Paid More (tm) you are making unwarranted assumptions about how happy they are with their current employment situation. You don’t know them, don’t know how much they’re paid, and don’t know how well or badly they deal with being on call.

There is nothing immoral about deciding you’re happy.
Perfect is the enemy of good.

There's a chance the data center where I host my offline backups could be destroyed at the same time as my house. Does this mean I should stop wasting my time and effort on off-site backups?
And humans are quickly and systematically extinguishing nearly all life on this planet, including themselves before too much longer at the rate we are going.

As the legend George Carlin once said, “the planet is fine, the people are fucked”. Although most animals and a bunch of plants are fucked too.

Now that being said, I don’t think that means we should start colonizing Mars or that things would be any better out there.
Most people don't know what their home is worth, and if you get two appraisers or realtors to give you an estimate they'll likely be quite different.

Similarly, if you think a house is worth $500k but you list it for $600k, you don't know if someone will decide they love that house and they're willing to pay that amount or not.

That's one reason Opendoor tends to list houses at a fair premium to what they paid, as sometimes someone decides it is worth it and they make 20%+ on homes like that.
The average citizen doesn't need to craft casual theories, they need to be able to look at them critically. Yes, an introductory statistics course doesn't cover everything, but it's absolutely the 20% effort that gets 80% of the results. Most of the worst misinformation I've seen lately surrounding covid, vaccines, etc, would be solved if everyone had a basic understanding of introductory stats as currently taught.

If we can get there, then we can talk about what we can do to improve things from there.
I've worked at Google as a UX Engineer and really enjoyed the role. It's closer to coding than design but if you have strong design skills that may be something you can choose to do differently.

My job was best described as a prototyper specifically. Embedded in a UX team, I worked on prototypes of new features, prototypes for new research and internal tools to assist the UX team (for example, better visual design and motion specification for engineers).

My take was also that non-FAANG companies don't often have enough prototyping work for a full time prototyper so this is a role that's most often seen in large organizations.

Other than that, you won't see a lot of the role. If you're a designer and developer, you've spent time learning both disciplines. Many who have focused just on one discipline may have a greater skillset purely due to time spent learning and executing.

At the end of the day it all comes to down to the individual and the specific team. As a PM now, I greatly value engineers with an eye for UX and designers with an understanding of code which would make me more likely to hire you but the role would still be just for an engineer or a designer.
>There's rarely such a thing as 'wasted energy' outside crypto.

There is a lot of resources getting wasted in the real life. For example I'm from East Europe and we do not have good water pipes' infrastructure and lots of water gets leaked every month.

Speaking of wasting and leaking electricity I did a quick Google search and this is what I found:

"Are your appliances leaking electricity? Some of you might not be familiar with what this means. Not only do we have more small- and medium-sized appliances than ever before, but many of these never really stop using electricity. For example, if the television has a remote, then part of the TV is always on, waiting for a signal from the remote. If there is a clock on the microwave then the microwave is always using some electricity. Experts call this usage "standby consumption" or "leaking electricity" because people are often not aware that the appliance is using electricity.

A single appliance usually leaks only a small amount of electricity each hour (see Leaking Watts Chart below). Since these appliances leak electricity whenevery they are not turned on, and since people have a lot of these appliances, the amount of leaking electricity is significant. The average household spends about $40 a year on leaking electricity. The federal government works with appliance manufacturers to reduce the amount of electricity that leaks out of new appliances[1]."

Also here is another good resource on electricity leak which is related to the first web document I linked[2].

And then how much food is getting wasted every month globally? Probably billions of dollars of food is getting thrown away every month.

[1] https://www.uwsp.edu/cnr-ap/KEEP/nres633/Pages/Unit3/Section...

[2] https://www.teachengineering.org/content/cla_/activities/cla...
not hypothetically speaking, it takes a couple of minutes

but what the original post said it's not that you shouldn't buy a new screwdriver, but that it you know something will break, you learn how to fix it.

if your brand new screwdriver ends up stripping that screw anyway and you don't know what to do next because you thought that it would never happen using a working screwdriver, well. you're screwed :)

sometimes there are no good solutions, only bad solutions

that's what keep things working.

if everyone believed that spit and bailing wire was a no go, because they are bad solutions and there's a better one - there always is - (i.e. fixing the root cause, after having identified it) there would be no internet as we know it today.
> This example is not Simpson’s paradox, it is simply the misuse of statistics.

If you read to the end of the post, you'll see that the author was using this correlation to prove that the mistake is identical to another claim related to COVID [1]. This COVID-related correlation doesn't seem as spurious as the Ghostbusters one, but that's because it's much harder to spot errors like this when variables aren't so "random".

[1]: "Vaccinated English adults under 60 are dying at twice the rate of unvaccinated people the same age"
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-english-data-on-vacc...
"With an annual budget of about $8.3 billion (fiscal year 2020), the NSF funds approximately 25% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities.[4] In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics, and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing." - Wikipedia

Let's say that the NSF, during a typical fiscal year, received requests for research funding which totaled far more dollars than the NSF actually had available to grant. And that the NSF had a long-established system of paperwork, procedures, and preferences - to decide which researchers would receive how much from the NSF's limited funds.

Now, if the NSF's preferences were inclined against supporting closed-access publication of research results, and if some universities were not so flush with research funding from other sources that they could happily maintain a "principled stance" and ignore the NSF's crass, self-serving bias...
Not that many people on HN seem to be interested in spurious correlations.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
Imagine the cosmos without a single solitary observer. Populated with automata which simply act out their genetic instructions, never seeing beyond the next meal or the next opportunity to couple. Imagine the cosmos without one single sentient being that could look up at the sky and think, "Wow!".

It would be a shame for all of this to go on, just existing, unappreciated. The cosmos deserves to be loved.
It didn't invent the term. John Allspaw and Paul Hammond maybe did, in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdOe18KhtT4 (from the comments, I guess this talk is actually referenced in the book?)

Other places credit Patrick Debois who ran the first devopsday in the same year: https://newrelic.com/devops/what-is-devops
What you're saying is tautological in a sense that for for it to be true, you need to postulate that every human activity is also based on economy and game theory (otherwise, why would people behave as you say they would behave) . So your argument essentially is that governments banning bitcoin is also based on economy and game theory. Which is fine by me.
Hermes-Lite 2 external 10 MHz reference
I'm interpreting your comment as:

x = x

As if that's insightful. But in the spirit of HN, can you say more? My understanding is that renewables are the cheapest and will likely continue to trend in that direction, causation or not. So are you suggesting maybe there's a chance of a super inexpensive non-renewable overtaking this trend?
Literally a spoon or the product Spoon?
Downvoted for insulting someone you don’t know anything about.
The Dutch East India Company would beg to differ.
Using the real data is the nice part of many xkcd posts, for example https://xkcd.com/893/
>Interesting. This is the first time I've seen Robert Martin to be referred to as a fraud.

I'm not sure if fraud is quite the right word but he gets a lot of flak on HN for being something of a religious fanatic. E.g. the top comment in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26153823
I’m not opposed to making points.

I’m commenting on the relative merit of the craft and thoughtfulness and humor that went into the attempt.
I used to not mind oncall as much, before managerialism and corporate attitudes took over tech. It was fun (I’d also stressful) to feel in the trenches so to speak, while being treated as someone mildly crazy for taking on the responsibility but also not held to the same silly and stupid bureaucratic attitudes that afflicted the rest of the company.

Now I’m supposed to talk to businessspeak talk and walk the promo game walk while also supposed to answer the phone at one am and stay up all night saving the business from melting down.

Yes I know I’m ranting. The industry has turned into a miserable corporate grind like finance or something, only with the added obligation of someone has to mop up to slop in the middle of the night and that someone is me.
I like ξ! Have been using it in my paper. When presenting it, people have different ideas about how to pronounce it. Some say it like x-i, some say khi, and some try hard to say xi. I like the x-i version as it is similar to its latex notation \xi.
I think this is why I usually see `[A-Za-z]` for ascii. My previous employer decidedly ignored "non-english" text.

`[A-z]` -> https://regex101.com/r/IlhPiD/1
`[A-Za-z]` -> https://regex101.com/r/iWjwf2/1

After looking it up, `\p{L}` looks like it matches letters https://regex101.com/r/1UiG9S/1.
Conversely, the unpredictable nature of our first big mistake as we transition Terraforming out of science fiction and into text books argues for having a backup planet in place before we try it here.
I have a question. Is this for all environments (dev, qa, staging or whatever the equivalent is at google/fb) or just production?
Ran into this issue when was updating package. But then, I did not find anywhere mentioned this url documented anywhere. I.e currently broken link to archives https://github.com/USER/REPO/archive/TAG/REPO-TAG.tar.gz vs currently working and documented URL https://github.com/USER/REPO/archive/refs/tags/TAG.tar.gz

Is there a list of pre-defined URLs supported by GitHub?
This is my go-to technique for lockouts (I'm a firefighter, we'll get called for more "urgent" lockouts... a young child still inside, something on the stove, etc).

There are plenty of custom made tools on the market that do a great job (with built-in pads to protect the door frame, etc).

The only issue they commonly run into is a deadbolt with a throw long enough that you have to destroy the jamb and surrounding frame before it comes free.
Perhaps it would be useful to have a sort of different shade of green/yellow/red (perhaps striped?) indicating it's a value determined by automatic processes, not yet confirmed by a human.

At least that way, as a user of the service, you can make the assumption that it could be broken, and act accordingly, or at least take certain precautions while you wait for the human-confirmed status value.
Yes. Bitcoin is a mechanism for arbitraging the conversion of energy production directly into black-market money. As such, there is no other possible use for energy so well adapted to exploiting the most horrible, polluting, illegally-in-operation energy production facilities as they get phased out.

What you do is buy up the dirtiest plants, run them until they break, bribe or evade any authorities (if they even exist) who would stop you, and if the plant is being shut down because it's failing to comply with pollution regulation (again, if such even exists) that just puts it in a weaker negotiating position. As such they HAVE to deal with you at whatever price you're willing to pay because they can't go anywhere else because they have to run illegally. But they're powering bitcoin, so it stops mattering if they're running illegally, because bitcoin is the currency in which it doesn't matter if you're being paid for crimes, only that the coin exists.

I consider that powerful motivation to arbitrage the energy system and exploit cases where energy suppliers are running out of options because they are too dirty. And this can be happening anywhere. Climate's global. If all the dirtiest coal burners are huddled together on a secret island for warmth and to eke out the last pennies (of real money) they can earn, they'll do that for bitcoin if they can't operate any other way.

And it'll still matter. It'll just be happening in secret, because bitcoin don't care.
Tom Scott made a great video on this: https://youtu.be/n-Ej2EtE744
Besides the modified Kwikset, he was also unable to pick the Bowley lock.
I'm not sure you know what "Windows support with WSL2" means. It means no Windows support, only Linux support, except Microsoft figured out how to put Linux software on Windows so "nothing working on Windows" is no longer a possible baseline.
If you spend more tokens than the tokens that were spent mining the last two blocks you can erase the transactions in those blocks, but isn't that also the case with PoW?
> "We pay you well" is a non-sequitur.

Not at all. The choice might be between $60k salary plus around $20k for overtime in one career, vs another career with $200k+ salary plus crazy benefits (gym memberships, a variety of mental health services, $20k in fertility treatments (no joke), 3+ months paternity leave, over 10 more things I can't even name they make no sense...)

I don't even use any of the benefits, just the money (and the parental leave) but calling a few on-call nights per month "abuse" or "exploitation" is just ... without perspective. Nobody that does real work has it this cushy - not doctors, not teachers, not construction workers. Maybe aristocratic political appointees or something, but jeez, no field that is accessible to anyone with an old laptop and sufficient motivation. This is as cushy as it gets, for a real job. Enjoy it while it lasts.
> As individuals, we all expire at some point. Is there a reason to think that humanity should be any different?

It's not a question of living forever. It's a question of living as long as possible. Individuals certainly try to do that.

I think your post is playing a game. You think your life has value. Claiming otherwise is meaningless verbiage unless you, um, follow through. It's difficult (maybe impossible) to rationally ground that belief but that doesn't stop us from holding it.
>since you tend to write the first digit you hear, but that's actually the last of the pair you gotta write so numbers get easily mixed up

Somewhat reminds me of typical hexdump representation, where even if data has little-endian bytes, nibbles inside each byte are still ordered big-endian.
I also find it baffling that people still think about things the way you do.

It's not necessarily some kind of inferiority complex or anything else, it's about the free market.