skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish I could say I stopped buying things off Amazon for ethical reasons, but the truth is, I stopped buying because if you look closely at the reviews, you realize that almost everything for sale there is now a scam or a knock-off. This was a slow creep for awhile, but now the problem has grown exponentially. Amazon is what Canal Street was in the 90s - somewhere to buy fakes, stolen goods, and electronics that might catch fire.

Amazon has no interest in fixing this problem, because they know that well over half their "inventory" is now from knockoffs, IP theft and/or bait-and-switch scams. it's almost impossible to find items there anymore that are not fake, whether it's re-packaged hard drives or "pyrex" bowls that explode in the microwave.

One way to look at this, and the way I think Amazon must look at it, is that it's not any worse than a third world night market. The attitude of vendors in, e.g. Phnom Penh or Mexico City markets is that the very fact that stupid Americans think they're going to get "real" goods just proves how much they deserve to be scammed. Amazon is actually helping baffled Americans to finally understand what the third world has always known - unboxing is going to be disappointing. Everything you think is affordable is probably fake, and you can't trust the packaging. Only the rich get actual brand products. As America degrades, people will start to get more savvy and more cynical about this, but right now it's still a newish phenomenon and people are shocked, shocked! to find out the kids toys they bought are full of toxic chemicals that we ourselves shipped overseas for burial or "recycling".
Thanks for the guidance.
But no one else can use your app with the same guarantees you give to yourself, while also being able to share state with you.
I've been a software engineer for 32 years (I'm in management now, but I still write non-critical-path code). During my career, I've used Express, Koa, Rails, Django, Laravel, Pyramid, Sinatra, Flask, Pedestal, Luminus, Phoenix, and several other backend frameworks. If I were starting out as a "noob" today, I'd learn Elixir and Phoenix.
Usenet is *semi-centralized. It's much more like a series of co-operative BBS with shared inboxes (read only, auto-expire based on storage).
> Dapps running on the blockchain are immutable

I can think of very few systems I'd want to use where nothing can be deleted.

I don't understand why this is seemingly considered a feature for all use cases.
Love the idea of Schema, but not a fan of that syntax, doesn't seem Pythonic to me, seems more like something you'd see out of Javascript word.

Like looking at that very first example, I have no clue what "len" means in that context. Is it implicitly checking that it's not an empty string? Then on the next line, how come `int` has `Use()` around it, but on the previous line `str` didn't? I guess that int is being used as a converter, line on the next line with str.lower, but the str was being used as a type check?

Not a fan of that API.
According to NFTs: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/rho91b/whats_...
Polars is not using Rust bindings for Arrow, it uses a Rust implementation called arrow2: https://github.com/pola-rs/polars/blob/master/polars/polars-...

Arrow2: https://lib.rs/crates/arrow2
Tor has actual websites and functionality. Web3 has venture capital and some randomized apes.
Besides pass-tomb, there's also pass-coffin which doesn't need to rely on a 3k+ line ZSH script. I'll add support for using age and signify in pass-coffin soon.

https://github.com/ayushnix/pass-coffin
13 year olds used PayPal in 2005 just like everyone else.
i think the word VACCINE is missing from the title ;)
So does Elixir with typespecs and Dialyzer, but I'm talking about quick, at a glance analysis of a function definition. Which is really the only benefit from a brittle type system like C or Java's, in contrast to a proper type system like Rust's or Haskell's, which have their place and cannot be adequately replaced merely with pattern matching.
This is how I feel whenever I read a 'blockchain is scam.. is broken.. is a fraud' article. Everyone wants to put their 2 cents in and jump on the criticism train to seem like le technical experts. Over reading the same fallacious and tired arguments. I haven't seen anyone make an original point for some time now.
They didn't address the points - they tried to say nobody gets to compare other things unless they do <the two facets that dapps offer>. Which is wrong.
the answer to all your questions are simply to attach it on the satellite prior to launch.
Archived: https://archive.ph/YZpjj
This is a "just so" story.
If blockchain is more expensive than cloud for you, the person that launched the product, then you architected your project wrong

Blockchain products are write once, read free, persist forever for free.

Your users pay to interact. Every SaaS funnel person knows that of you get users to pay at all then you have filtered the funnel to larger payments already. Blockchakn projects are that funnel in warp speed.
You’re making good points, but from this comment[1] and stuff like

>Why the irrational hate?

you’re coming off as too mean and I think you’d do well to avoid that tone.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29587901
Is that true though? If two people run self hosted apps that can communicate, all you have to verify is the data passing between. What assurances are you missing?
well then you are trusting the signer, that is the ultimate promise of decentralization. especially coupled with deterministic builds by gcc you could have a end-to-end verified firmware running on a device.
The entire point is to remove the trusted entity. To build a way of doing things that isn’t dependent on trusted entities to work. That’s it.
What would be so dirty asking for speed?

I did strong stimulants, and while I 100% agree there are even regular people who can get addicted, and people who should not be taking stimulants period (schizophrenia), and that I may be an exception, and all that, but as long as the stimulant is taken orally and at therapeutic dosage, there's nothing wrong with stimulants.

If you don't have ADHD and take stimulants exactly as instructed by a psychiatrist mostly nothing bad will happej (you will get speedy a few times, start a few mega projects, clean your house, and after a while realize you shouldn't believe your stimulant self's has only good ideas).

You could also keep a job that's not for you because stimulants make even boring jobs seem interesting.

But you won't turn into a crackhead just because you take stimulants exactly as instructed by a doctor.
The internet was better before Social Media, but I guess that was a kind of different decentralization.
The alternative to "butts in seats" is some kind of hard KPI. Uber doesn't need to pay for "butts in seats" because it can manage workers through discrete and easily monitored performance indicators.

For any job where performance is hard to measure, either a company needs to basically manage contracts (why not just go to Fiverr), or manage by a bad KPI (lines of code? feature points?) or pay for "butts on seats".

"Butts on seats" means "employees who are present, and hopefully intrinsically motivated (rather than driven by a bad KPI) to add value to the company in a way that's not fully specified by their manager."

They very existence of employment as a phenomena (rather than contracting, as it originally happened (IIRC a "factor" was a subcontractor who made goods at home, before it became better to employ them in a "factory" where they didn't need to be micromanaged by KPIs) is because employees are better (in a lot of ways) than management by "things that bring results".
I thought defragging SSD/Flash-based devices is a big no no? Since that would reduce the lifecycle in a considerable way. Is that what TRIM is for?
Something that I think a lot of Web3 (and metaverse, et al) proponent types don't understand is that you can't plan out a revolutionary technology. By definition, any wide-reaching society-wide overturning of the current order will behave in ways you can't anticipate. For example, HTTP code 402 "Payment Required" was standardized in 1999 when the W3C anticipated that people would be paying for things over the web, but didn't realize that such an error message wouldn't ever really be used because of how such payments were eventually implemented.
Yes, these are the failure scenarios I had in mind when I wrote "the ability to shutdown these apps would rely on somehow breaking the blockchain itself".

It's possible that bugs in the blockchain software can cause blocks to no longer be produced, essentially halting the network until the problem is resolved. So-called 51% attacks are also a failure possibility.
Besides ENS, there is also https://www.hdns.io/
Seems like a tautology- the things built will inherently be centralized
I’m referring to shopify apps that merchants try to integrate.
They'll reply as soon as some seed provides the final few words of the sentence they are constructing.
“The Inverted World” by Christopher Priest involves a world that appears to be based on hyperbolic geometry I believe.
> Dapps running on the blockchain are immutable and highly resistant to being shutdown

I have tried my best to read up on how all this is supposed to work but have come up blank. Is there a simple explanation - using zero buzzwords - of how I can run a site in the way you describe in the Web3 world?
This repeated comparison with Tor is apt - barely anyone (relatively) uses it, even though it has useful features.

This is imo the best case scenario with web3. Which would mean that most of the current "value" is a bubble.
At this point React is old news. You need to learn something like Solid.js or Svelte.
Please don't break the site guidelines like this. I realize it's frustrating when you feel surrounded by a lot of people who you feel are wrong, but there's a guideline for that too:

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Well, I do agree they should represent their members' interests. I will aver that fighting alongside your fellow workers builds class consciousness and progressive values, but that's up to you and your colleagues.
APIs have versions. Facebook guarantees that the API for version X will perform the documented behavior.

If it fails to, then it is probably a bug that they will have to fix. If the API were immutable, then the bug would not be possible to fix.

The immutability is the exact opposite of a feature.
That is indeed the "intended" behaviour. I don't own an iOS device, and based on initial testing by someone else, it seemed like it wasn't working. But from what I hear now, it does work on iOS too.
> * I am not advocating for the use of drugs.

I am! :P
I'm not saying there aren't rational reasons to dislike trusted entities. At a minimum they are single points of failure. But all this does come at a high cost.

The real questions to ask with blockchain stuff:

- at what cost does this lack of trusted entitids come at? I don't just mean in terms of money but also engineering complexity

- what are the hidden trust relationships? Plenty of blockchain stuff still involved trusted entities, its just hidden through layers of indirection. The only thing worse than a trusted entity you dont trust is a trusted entity you don't even know exists.
Hopefully, the number of people you are talking about is fairly small, or maybe I'm just out of touch with the rise of crime and corruption on the dark web - but I wouldn't lose any sleep if they got shut down. I'm fairly libertarian about drug use, but there's a lot of other terrible stuff that is enabled along with drugs in this system.
I don't follow. Writing a parser doesn't require generics. I've written hundreds of parsers. You can even use a generator like protoc to provide you read/write code that returns/uses concrete, static types.

What on earth does dealing with untrusted inputs have to do with anything?
> this monitoring stuff makes sense for hourly paid jobs where the employee has to deliver a certain amount of completed items per hour.

Couldn't you just monitor that deliverable directly? Why would you have to monitor anything else?
The shopify apps on their app marketplace is what I’m referring to. These are sold to merchants hoping to do something easier.

All defi products help people already in the defi ecosystem do something easier.
That's all well and good for the handful of niche services that rely heavily on immutability but not performance, but the vast majority of applications need performance as well.
BT, as a community, is actually being challenged by cheap streaming services, like Netflix, Spotify, Youtube, Steam, etc. They are so cheap and convenient that even simple torrenting feels very slow and cumbersome.
Please don't cross into personal attack. I don't want to have to penalize your account again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
While I agree with you that the Internet was better before Social Media, these service are highly centralized. Although, for most normal users decentral or central doesn't really matter.
On the glass half full side:

As the police have found, being monitored can actually help in the event of false accusations of misconduct.

Furthermore, if you are monitored and nobody has a problem with your performance, now you have evidence (even if you don't have it, it's discoverable) should they try to change the rules or the enforcement of them.

I really can't count the number of times my manager thinks something is wrong and I have to patiently dig up emails to prove it's not. Furthermore, as long as people don't really hate you for some reason, every time you successfully defend yourself against a false accusation should be some banked goodwill.

I've heard stories about how in olden days subordinates would have to take notes longhand to protect themselves from the bosses rewriting history. Sounds like a lot of work.
How many are not anti-vax in general, but anti-spike? Isn't the safety of a vaccine supposed to be assumed controversial for a few years, under normal circumstances?
I disagree. The cost of just deploying my contract might pay for years of self hosting at current transaction rates. It might eventually amortize out to cheaper over many, many years, but that assumes no changes are ever needed. How likely is that?
The commenter you replied to did provide a fair correction as far as the right layer to be comparing. They didn't specifically suggest that Nest.js (started in 2017) is as mature as Rails (created in 2004) or Laravel (created in 2011).
Thanks for your work! Just uncovered a gem.
Depends on what files you're distributing. There are some legal uses that they're a good fit for, but there's no better way to pirate content.
FTFA: "Now, so far, Bitcoin has not performed well as money. Quick recap: money issued by central banks, fiat money, acts as a ‘store of value’ – it preserves the spending power of income and wealth, so that you can be confident that a pound, say, will buy about as much in a year’s time as it would today."

Heh. The above assumes that world governments will not collude to inflate their currency.

Full disclosure: I have no cryptocurrency assets whatsoever, and never have.
I see the blend of both on iOS Safari as well, and it loads differently each time I refresh. It’s a race condition as described, so presumably whichever concurrent sub-render finishes first wins. That’s more than enough computing noise to produce that output.
Isn’t this just legalese for “let us use your drawings as training data”?
I think Web3 is a stupid idea unworthy of the name, but this is not a strong objection.

> I don’t understand what problem web3 can solve that a trusted entity cannot.

The lack of trustworthy entities.

> And let’s keep in mind your reply to this comment will be using a trusted entity.

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/259/257/342...

> In fact in the history of the internet I cannot find a single example of any technology working better in a decentralized fashion compared to centralized.

Strong objections to most Web3 concepts can actually be derived from the idea that “there is no algorithm for truth.”

We can imagine an NFT that claims to be a deed for a house. We can also imagine:

* Someone with a fleet of tanks forcing me to leave the house, and then keeping me and my heirs from moving back in. Regardless of what the NFT says, by no means do I own the house.

* I might guess someone’s password and give their NFT to myself, and if it was government binding, convince the rest of society to go along with this. Maybe this counts as owning the house, but it definitely shouldn’t.

Political tools can live or die by being realistic, or by being just and fair. Etherium has managed the astonishing feat of being popular without achieving either.

So, how do we actually ensure that the database reflects the underlying social reality? That’s the part where all these supposedly “decentralized” applications punt, either by explicitly relying on a centralized entity, hoping the government goes along with it, or not having the database really reflect anything outside itself (a very small niche).
I mostly agree with you; but what if knowing being “available for work” means being available for a specific 8 hours of the day is crucial to my mental health?

On call is brutal. What if I want to go camping, hiking, on a road trip? I’m only on call once a month and it still drives me crazy that I lose my freedom for that week.
> My self hosted apps run on immutable infrastructure and are replicated and load balanced

What? Assuming you live in the US, the government can swoop in at any time (provided they have a legal reason to do so) and demand that AWS or whoever's hosting your servers shuts them down. If you're hosting them yourself, they can raid the physical locations where you host them. If you're not in the US, I'm sure your country has equivalent security forces that would be more than capable of doing the same should the government find a reason to.

Good luck raiding every single Ethereum node in the world to take down a smart contract.

Also, you didn't address code immutability guarantees. You can change your server code at any time and your users would be none the wiser. The darknet markets, once compromised by federal agents, did exactly this, and stopped actually encrypting user messages with PGP while continuing to pretend to do so. A smart contract, unless it has upgradeability built in, offers just this sort of guarantee to its users.

Oh, and if your app deals with finance, and the US government (or your own) wants you to stop letting John Doe use your app because they just placed new sanctions on Mr. Doe? You'd better code that compliance feature up real quick or see yourself getting heavily fined or even imprisoned. Tough luck doing that sort of censorship on the blockchain -- as long as a single miner is willing to include that user's transaction, they're basically in.
Flu vaccines don't match the main circulating flu virus strain, researchers find
10^9 time worse isn’t “can’t run 1080p livestream”. It is closer to “takes 30 years to load a webpage”.
Yes. Because the files are actually there.

Twitter won't allow you to say what the CDC says on viral transmission. They won't allow you to say that men aren't women. They hide posts as "sensitive content" that show crime in the cities that people of the same mindset run. Their CEO doesn't believe in freedom of speech.

Blockchain is currently a set of underwhelming technologies, but in a world of 0 or 1 existentials, it's a driving force to allow the open expression 90s tech people said they wanted but lied about.
I feel the same as you do about cryptocurrencies and NFTs.
I'd like to notice the framing of the same issue in two cases:

1. covid19 can potentially cause irreversible damage to brain with blood clots (the reader is encouraged to focus on grave consequencies and ignore the low likehood of those issues)

2. the J&J vaccince has an extremely low possibility to cause blood knots, so CDC recommends to play it safe (the reader is encouraged to focus on the low likehood of adverse effects and ignore the severity of those effects)

Edit: I'd add that in both cases the news outlet wants to bypass the reader's rationality and reach directly the emotional part of the brain, so the reader would make the decision based on feelings.
People make this mistake because they think there is a "function" part to NFTs. It's a ledger, and you want to remember what media an entry refers to. You can do that by just keeping it in your community's collective memory, or you can use a hash of the file, or both.

People can then choose to value that ledger entry, or not.

Everything else, such as the ability of n app to figure out an image URL for the NFT, is just sugar on top.

NFT people will value a Bored Ape token whether the URL is valid or not - and they are entirely right to do so. The Cryptopunks don't even have a URL!
600k seems like a lot of cash but it's not enough to quit working. Tough it out a bit more, save more money and switch to a career you like when you have enough money saved up to make up the difference in income between the two.
To me, the demonization of one group by another group or person for a political agenda, is the worst form of gaslighting possible.
Interesting - I've also written a ton of code in those languages (not as much in Haskell), and Go would be my last choice by a large margin (and Rust my favorite by a wide margin). I went through a love/hate relationship for a while (it lets me create static executable, compiles pretty fast, it is easy to remember, etc. but if I have to type "if err == nil" one more time!!!).

While I applaud the focus on simplicity, I found it simply transfers that burden to the programmer (I have to loop over a map to clear it...really?). Every single "lack of" feature in Go (has nil, no sum type errors, no pattern matching, etc.) is in Rust which gives me endless freedom to express safe, correct programs. I suppose language choice is highly individual, but it still perplexes me as to what people see in Go over Rust.
We have 50 devs (including inexperienced juniors) and 1-3 releases per day from different teams, pushing untested changes to master would be problematic because one team (maybe with a less important feature) could break/delay everything for the others, and go figure who broke what (it used to happen with trunk-based development, hence the switch to Git flow). Sometimes there is a problem and we need to make a hotfix and redeploy, but how do you do it when 5 teams just pushed random untested crap to main? Our feature branches don't diverge much, each team/release has its ows staging environment (around 15 right now IIRC), and it's a rule to refresh them with new changes from master every day. Yes sometimes there's conflicts when two features are to be released on the same day (it wasn't caught during one of the "refreshings"), but it doesn't happen often because during PI planning we discuss possible interdependencies between teams/releases in advance to resolve problems long before merge, so those conflicts tend to be trivial. All features are required to be split into smaller subreleases which shouldn't take more than a week or two to make, so there isn't enough time for branch diverge anyway. And what happens when business requirements change and the feature is cancelled, do you unmerge all that? Sometimes priorities change and a very important client needs a feature to be released sooner, so we change the release plan accordingly, and how do you do it when everyone already pushed their untested, possibly broken stuff to master? It probably also depends on business needs, in our case we deal with statistics which drives our clients' decisions (who to fire or promote), lack of testing/review/unsupervised merges to master would be a disaster for our business.