skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel like Microsoft is spending a lot of time shooting themselves in the foot right now, though.

In the days when "DOS/Win31 versus OS/2 with compatyibility" question was asked, OS/2 was the expensive choice, both to license and in terms of hardware requirements.

With the high Win11 hardware requirements, Linux is actually more accessible as a supported platform, both on the low-end (i. e. you could strip it down a lot further for a device with small storage) and for a large number of older enthusiast PCs (6th and 7th generation Core or first-gen Ryzen)

You also have an incredibly weak buzz for WIndows 11 right now. Some people are up in arms about stuff like "requires a Microsoft account on the affordable version" or "we've moved the UI in weird and confusing ways" but nobody is saying "it provides cool features A, B, and C to justify the hassle."

A well packaged Linux launch could provide a compelling message just from the perspective of "here's an OS where all your games work, but it's not also a ticking support timebomb."

TBH, I feel like the old early-2000s Linux style of "let's choose custom window managers and theme the crap out of everything" would also appeal to the gamer crowd, but I feel like that's sort of disappeared in modern desktop Linux.
NFTs have been a revolution for digital artists. I can’t tire of saying this here. Look at Hic Et Nunc or even better FXhash on Tezos (a low carbon chain).

FXhash has created a generative art market like it’s never existed before, it’s created an amazing art scene without precedent I’ve ever seen. It also allows for generative art to interact with the blockchain to make every art piece unique.

IE if you mint on FXhash, each generative art piece is slightly different due to a randomising function in the art pieces. This means each and every NFT is unique since they all went through a slightly different values for some of their features. I highly recommend anyone criticising NFTs to think about this since it’s an absolutely groundbreaking achievement in digital art that just wasn’t possible before. The artists scene around FXhash is just incredible.
To me NFTs are like selling “rights” to stars in galaxies far away.

It’s nice that you can say you “own” your very own star as stipulated by the star rights granting corporation, but in reality it means nothing other than you can say so… but I can claim a million other stars without needing a corporation and no one can take them away from me but also anyone else can make a claim on the same stars.
> Tor never claimed that it can hide if somebody is using tor.

Not true. Pluggable transports are explicitly intended to prevent someone from seeing that you are connecting to Tor. This is because someone seeing you connect to Tor means that they can block your access to Tor, or monitor when you are using Tor.

See: https://blog.torproject.org/tor-heart-bridges-and-pluggable-...
The Tor Project wrote: "But what do you do when Tor itself is blocked? When it happens, you can use bridges and pluggable transports to get around the censors."

The problem is, EVERY pluggable transport is trivially detectable. And of all of the pluggable transports, snowflake is by far the easiest to detect. The current suite of pluggable transports are nothing more than a security facade. I wouldn't even call them "better than nothing." If you are in an environment that requires bridges or pluggable transports to connect to Tor, then using them becomes easily detectable.
"Remember dapps?" There are plenty of useful dapps that exist today.
Hand up, luckily I scanned the comments before posting a request to have it fixed. Great story!
Don't know who this guy is but just looked him up online. As someone in their mid 40s, scares me if some people think this is what a 60 year old looks like...
When Gmail came along, like a decade after the web started getting popular, there were countless people, very much like you now, telling everybody how much better their desktop email app was.

Nfts may or may not be the blockchain's killer app (I think they are), but the average person's track record identifying a technology's killer app is a tad less than perfect
What matters is who issued it. If you buy an NFT of a Tyler Hobbs painting it's valuable because it was minted by Tyler Hobbs. That one is on one ledger only and even if he himself starts putting it on multiple ledgers it would devalue itself naturally.

It's all a social construct.
Wow Pirsch looks incredible, will definitely use them for my blog and projects.
I've never bought an NFT - but do people actually look at block addresses to validate things like this?

I just read https://networked.substack.com/p/web3-i-have-my-daots and there's a cute analogy about buying the Mona Lisa, but only getting a record written in some obscure room saying that you own it, i.e. you never actually take possession of the Mona Lisa. You can tell people you own it, but they have to go the obscure room and verify your ownership. Who would do that, for literally anything, especially a jpg?

I forget the name of assets that designed merely to show wealth (e.g. a Hummer), but those work because everybody sees you with that asset, constantly. For NFTs to work in the long term, you would have to expect people to validate authenticity of these things.

edit: Veblen is what I was looking for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
From a systems point of view, the "boiling over" of agitated Grindrs data is no surprise as the source of obvious data abuse, similar to the way that the data on compulsive gamblers is used and abused, I suspect. Yet this is only a tip of an iceburg.

In My Own Opoinion - this "surveillance capitalism" is a huge, stinking cancer on free society and is only getting started.. history will show this is absolutely true. "I have nothing to hide" people can get a free Grindr subscription for all I care.. this is a rotten situation.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_theory_of_value :

> An intrinsic theory of value (also called theory of objective value) is any theory of value in economics which holds that the value of an object, good or service, is intrinsic, meaning that it can be estimated using objective measures.

If you use "what someone last paid for it" as a measure of intrinsic value, then they have intrinsic value.
In what sense would I "own" the art? Do I have more rights over it than anyone else - and if so, how are these legally enforced? What prevents the artist from minting a different type of NFT (or whatever comes next) on that same artwork?
Jeans and tshirt?
some of the cc0 licensed NFTs encourage replicas :)

nouns.wtf
> So to the extent that NFTs can enable that, I'm tentatively onboard.

And what extent is that? There are plenty of ways to send money to an artist, both with crypto and without. What value do NFTs add, as far as patronizing artists?
> The problem may arise in a very long time due to water molecules progressively entering and exiting the enclosure during thousands of years.

Or you know, after a couple of decades because the storage containers really don't like salt water and start to corrode. And as recovery of the waste was not foreseen initially, it gets really difficult and expensive now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
I think if we can convince HN that NFTs are essentially the art market, then that would be a huge upgrade in the discourse here; no one needs to be impressed.
So long as we're talking about the value of NFTs, I have some Beanie Babies and Pogs for sale for cheap! No? No one? Well darn, it's like these artificial scarcity have no real value at all!
You’ve nailed it.

People don’t understand what artists used to have to do to make a living. They complain about carbon usage yet I know many talented artists who had to work for BP, Shell and ICE car companies so they could pay their rent. On Tezos the chain is low carbon usage anyway.
The emperor has no clothes when it comes to NFTs. Mass illusions of rareity of what is just simply a string of ones and zeros.
Is "programmer" a coherent group?

How much does a Senior Engineer doing something like writing kernel code have in common with a fresh high school grad writing on something like a single threaded ASP/PHP codebase for an internal tool that has fewer than 100 daily users?

I've done both of those jobs, and they both involve the same set of general tasks (requirements, brainstorming, coding). But in actuality they have almost nothing in common. The fact that both involve writing code is mostly a red herring.

More to the point: is a convenience sample taken by a university research group representative of the profession?

I'm generally suspicious of Emperical SE research that doesn't either:

1. focus on specific sub-populations of the programming profession, or else

2. make an extremely strong case that their research questions are highly likely to generalize across all research labor.

(edit: changed wording because many folks made the worst-possible interpretations of my original comment.)
IMO this feels like a somewhat random brainstorm about how to keep an older vision of the web. For example, why focus on behind-the-scenes dev process? What % of indie sites die due to dev build process? Very hard to know and Jeff doesn't provide any edge on insight over this problem. Without knowing that, focusing on things like whether to use git (???) and whether you compress your site... seems confusing.

> And how should your version control that file? Should you use git? Shove them in an 'old/' folder? Well I like the simple approach of naming old files with the date they are retired, like index.20191213.html.

Anyways, this appears to be a pitch for a project:

https://irchiver.com
Are honeybee populations declining or not?
Over the past, say, 5 years I’ve seen so many headlines about honeybee populations in decline around the world, along with gloomy forecasts of what that means for ecosystems etc. Then I read an article in the most recent Economist that mentions, in passing, that that’s a myth. Which of these is true? And maybe more importantly, if honeybee populations are not in decline, what accounts for the persistence of the myth?
This is the principle reason we need decentralized versions of apps like YouTube as you cannot safely build companies or big projects on top of them as your entire organization's existence can be turned off arbitrarily through no fault of your own. Businesses are hard enough to run at the best of times without the threat of your foundation shifting under you.
The problem is nobody who is getting upset about this had any reasonable expectations to begin with. They're just now realizing they might need to protect their data against attackers inside AWS, and now they're caught with their pants down, so cue the hand-wringing.
If you're anything like me I learn best by doing.

I really learned how to program when I had problems to solve, at the time I wanted to automate unrelated programs on Windows that needed the same data entered into them; I used autohotkey, but probably wouldn't recommend this unless you want to automate other software.

I moved onto python after that. Python seems to have everything needed to easily learn what you need to know, with libraries for everything. This is beneficial when you start out, at least for me.
I'm firmly of the same opinion, but the one thing I could see value for them would be in crowdfunding prizes, for example, as patreon rewards for the development of a video game. In that scenario, they have "real value" to the recipients, and money is exchanging hands for a very targeted purpose. Plus the NFTs are relatively low effort/cost. That seems like a win for everyone, but it is a very niche scenario.
That’s an extraordinarily weak and broad argument. Of course a lack of personal appeal doesn’t imply non-existence. Don’t rely on that for affirmative investment strategy!

Airbnb is a useful example, though; consider its context of hotels, VRBO, couchsurfing. These are proven human needs with associated economics that starkly contrast with the precedent for NFTs - Tumblr likes and retweets.
Python does have real threading. The `threading` module provides os-level threads and synchronization primitives. The only difference between this and multithreading in C or Java is that CPython's GIL prevents more than one thread executing bytecode at a time. This prevents parallelism, but not concurrency.

Note this does not mean that python code is thread-safe by default. At most, you can theoretically rely on bytecode operations to be atomic, which means you'll need to synchronize multi-threaded code with mutexes, semaphores and higher-level synchronization constructs.
And by "owning" what's meant is a signed hash of some URL that fits in a few kilobytes at most.
I do this. I also have a small plugin that causes F6 to pull up scratchpad.md
Philosophically, I think there is something there. How do you create scarcity in a digital infinitely copyable world, without an authority figure. With baseball cards and pokemon cards, you can create artificial scarcity by only printing so many in a run. NFT scarcity is really no sillier than baseball card scarcity. The original creator says "this collection has x amount." What makes that matter is that they said so, and the community believed them that their decision was important. Pokemon could print a "rare" card for every person on the planet, but that ruins game mechanics. In digital games, you can control scarcity with a central authority. EA or Ubisoft or Blizzard or Microsoft can only issue so much of an item, and they distribute them, and you cant copy it because the authority keeps track.

In a decentralized world, a digital yet scarce item can be created, distributed, and reused. A game can go under, and a new game can pop up and respect the accumulated wealth of the community. A game can fork, where half of the community plays one teams version, and half plays a different one, with nobody losing their assets. A rogue developer can entice people to play by inviting people to reuse tools they acquired from a rivals game. A counterfeiting blacksmith can forge their own weapons, and a dark side community can vote to allow them in game, while a light side community can vote to only allow official weapons. What it will all come down to is consensus, the developers (and players voicing through where they spend their attention) of the game deciding which items should be allowed to be imported and which shouldnt. IMHO, there is something cool about the player stats of an RPG being isolated and separated from the game itself, and always owned by the player not the game company.

From an investment perspective, I can see why it looks as dumb as anything in the physical speculative art world. But as a game mechanic, it does seem to offer a useful utility that previously depended on some server staying up forever or trust in a closed system. This is a brink or cusp, where theres a good idea out there somewhere, and maybe someone has or hasnt executed on it yet, but if it has been made into something truly useful, it still isnt popular enough to be well know by us plebs yet.

They also, more simply, act as a membership card or vip pass. You can spend money to join a club, and then you get the corresponding experience that comes with it. Take for example the Matrix NFT. I fully expect there to be some somewhat cool experiences that real people get to really experience by consenting and paying to join that social experiment. Sure it could work roughly as well as a database entry at a central authority, but decentralization is one way to allow easy transfer of your membership to someone new when youre done, without the game developer having to care or keep track of who is who. It turns into Willy Wonka, whoever holds a golden ticket is allowed in, copying tickets isnt possible.
for me, cannabis is only useful for sleep and sometimes blank canvas thinking.
I'm saying is that it's unrealistic to expect to hold a persistent TCP connection for an extended period of time across networking environments you do not control.

Making things not uncomfortably expensive is a good idea.

Relying on websockets to solve this for you is a mistake. It's convenient, but not robust. How would you solve it without websockets using traditional HTTP? The same solution should be used with websockets, but unlocks tremendous opportunities for optimization.
Then put your hobby where your mouth is. Pull all of your photos from the past 4 years from unsplash and mint NFTs for them.
It is deterministic, though I am not sure if it gives one unique solution. In the example shown, there are many squares with white dots on one diagonal and black dots on the other; in these cases, it always seems to separate the white dots. (These are the cases liversage points out are ambiguous.) I guess that if you reversed the coloring, or used the alternatives for cases 5 and 10, the resulting partitioning would join the previously-white dots together.

Now I am wondering if you could use the alternative for case 5 or 10, but not both.
I love me an In 'N' Out burger and those limp (but delicious!) fries, but yeah, I'm good with swapping that In 'N' Out at Lassen & Balboa that's always blocking traffic with a Waffle House. Roscoe's has traditional waffles (and my favorite, buckwheat!), but apart from them all you can seem to find are those Belgian waffles. (Sorry, the magic has worn off.)
True but what if in buying those stars you were supporting space research?

That’s all NFTs are right now - a novel way to invest in artists. And that’s remarkable, and good enough for me.
Scarcity on it's own does not equal value

This is an important point that a lot of the crypto bros don't seem to grasp.

Antiques and thrift stores are crammed with millions of things that are scarce. One-of-a-kind, even. But still nobody wants them. Eventually the cost of storing them becomes more than they're worth, and they go into the trash.
I don't claim it has intrinsic value (what has?) but it's still scarce. There's one entry on the blockchain and it's unique, even if it's just a number and a trace to the original wallet.

I also don't disagree with your second paragraph.
Same story in every expensive hobby; people saved during the pandemic and are now spending on those hobbies.
Doesn't matter if he's right, we just need to run the headlines and continue overfunding the military!
There are a finite number of particles in the observable universe and each particle can store a finite amount of information. Therefore anything that requires information or anything that requires matter or energy will have a finite amount of availability. The point store as you put it is the observable universe.
> Furthermore, this cannabis usage is primarily motivated by a perceived enhancement to certain software development skills (such as brainstorming or getting into a programming zone) rather than medicinal reasons

How can anyone who has tried it remotely believe this nonsense?
The FBI Deployed Surveillance Teams Inside Portland Protests
Looks interesting. However, no more subscriptions. I only use FOSS software or software I can buy for money.
I'd argue the exponential growth curves for Gmail, Maps, and Facebook (with no financial reward for the user) suggests there was a good appreciation of the utility. When will get an equivalent Web3 app that isn't predominantly driven by price speculation? What will this look like?
If it's data about your sexual orientation, HIV status, and who you've been talking to it may be extremely important.
I think a lot of the overengineering is driven by amphetamines and self medication instead. I'd expect a system designed under Cannabis to be very simple and flexible.
This is maybe pendantic but there are different types of productivity. If I really need to get one thing done, it does no favors to be stoned. But if you just want to learn, experiment, explore, I find it extremely useful in keeping myself patient and receptive.

I learn languages in very much sober place, but learning linux I can be stoned, and maybe it helps?

Also if your in this space at all, you just need to modify Hemingway's advice: commit stoned, but rebase sober!
I don't think it's a limitation with electron on Linux. One time I joined a meeting with an external org, and probably due to some bug in teams I suddenly got more features like e.g. background blur. The next meeting a couple of hours later the features were gone again.
The apps also work as a backup to some extent (and still let you export even if the server is down)
you can read quora answers anonymously by adding `share=1` as query param
same, thought it was a clever play on words

oh well at least i learned something
That has not been my experience. The issues are with licenses other than BSD but that's the same in Linux; Linux can also use BSD code, a lot of Linux code is actually dual licensed as BSD already.
Why would I pay to remove ads when the key reason I don't want ads is because I don't want to be tracked? When they will just use other methods to track me.

I will use YouTube as little as possible, but that is nearly impossible because google used their power to make YouTube the only available option to view some content.

Google did this to themselves.
Somewhat related, but a recent Senate hearing cited the lack of a national standard regarding cannabis impaired driving. They voted to investigate further. Results may be counter-intuitive ;)

Interesting there is so little research into the actual *effects* on humans. You get better data from Leafly reviews!
It shouldn't be difficult to set up a VM for Windows + Photoshop CS2.
Show HN: Homechart--free household management app
> Currently, the only ways to flash software are from the factory Android installation (UART shell, adb, or fastboot) or by using rkdeveloptool

https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineNote_Development
No, you don't have more rights than anyone else, and nothing prevents the artist from minting more NFTs of the same artwork. But this is no different than buying say a print of a fine art photograph (that print would be physical, yet only artificially limited and easily mass-produced; you may or may not care about this quality).
You get it. Everyone who says this is "dumb" said the internet, Facebook, Instagram, or Tik-tok was dumb too. Yet here they are.

Kinks need to be worked out, sure, but in ten to fifteen years artists will not be beholden to corporations. That is something to work towards and be very proud of.
Doesn't seem misleading to me, your summary ("It's about municipalities hiring private companies to staff the libraries and manage day to day operations.") aligns with my understanding of what "privatize libraries" means.
It's comments like this, which reaffirm my fears of staying in this industry for too long.

I'm only in my mid-30s but I'm deathly afraid to stick around to see what the mid-40s or 50s will be like.
It’s sort of the same, but what I don’t get is how things like that rainbow cat and other famous internet pictures are NFTs. I mean, if the picture was around for twenty years before it became a NFT, then how is the NFT the “original”.

Going that line of thought, what happens if two people make the same picture into a NFT?
I had the same question, but don’t think you’ll get an answer. Recently I reached out to HN admins to get more info on why something was flagged but never heard back.

@dang, is there a process for determining why something is flagged even if it’s just as simple as “users flagged it for unknown reasons”?