skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> can not guarantee it will be make available always

True! However I trust the wikimedia foundation, and the fact that because it is a valuable dataset there are many copies of it. If they really did restrict access, anyone could spin up their mirror.

Most of the decentralisation arguments seem to rely on some fetishistically absolute version of the world where you cannot trust any single person or entity, and crypto/web3 is the only reasonable solution if that is true. I, however, have more faith in other people, and am fine placing trust—to varying degrees—in others.
Show HN: I made it easy to create personalized pages
Hey HN,

I'm working on an easy way to create personalized content, such as personalized thank you messages, surveys, signup confirmation, etc.
People sometimes claim that there's a generational divide in crypto adoption — younger people "get it" while older people (those who came of age with the early web) are stuck in their ways.

But there’s a large group of older people who cling to crypto because they think it'll make their ideas sound relevant again. While appearing "disruptive", the crypto space actually privileges those (generally older) folks who already have money to burn (like the Winklevoss twins, whose payout from FB provided more money than they could ever spend on themselves in one lifetime).
This is more of a step-by-step deep-dive into the ways to profile, diagnose and work through the timing and performance problems. Anyone who doesn't know about many of these tools will probably find them useful (or at least useful to know that they exist) in the future.

Besides, for iteration people are probably in debug, not release mode, which the article mentions is initially 19s vs 2m+. As far as I can see the main conclusion seems to be that there was a compiler regression causing the issues, which is fixed in nightly.

I don't think many users would need to go through these steps to diagnose the problem beyond "wait for a newer compiler release".

In general I don't think being slightly slower in a systems language in cases where you've explicitly asked for full optimisations is that much of a problem when there are simple ways to mitigate the feedback loop (e.g. debug compilations). Would I like these things to be faster? Sure. But with the size of the rust projects I use, it's not noticeable slower than the large established C++ projects I have to deal with (that aren't tuned for compilation speed).
That no offence was comitted here should be apparent to 10 year old of average intelligence. The governor is either very stupid, very ignorant or very cynical. Or some combination of the 3.
2022 will be more or less the same as 2021.
I'm not at all convinced that "web3" is positive.

But when people say things like

> otherwise that money could have been spent helping real causes

It bleeds their personal opinion and hampers the debate. Apperently you think "digital art", or cryptocurrencies are not a "real cause". Which begs the question: who defines what "a real cause" is? The International World Causes Committee?

Isn't anything that people want to spend money (resources) on by definition a real and worthy cause to at least those people?
The much bigger 2020 (decade) predictions thread was here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278
I believe they do; you can download archives at [0].
It mentions that the edit history can be downloaded by looking for dumps with page-meta-history in their name at [1]

The same is probably true for OpenStreetMap et al.

[0] https://dumps.wikimedia.org/
[1] https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/
> communist members of other parties

Who? DIE LINKE is constantly (rightfully) critizied for their extremist parts and members, also for their SED roots. I agree with your assessment about murderous communism but disagree that nobody cares. I was born in the GDR and hate communism with a fiery passion. Plattenbauten are traumatic for me. Anyway...

The AfD is a fundamentally anti-democratic party at least since Petry took over. It became 10x worse with Gauland and Weidel. The debate is pretty clear in Germany and you are legally (!) allowed to call some of its members fascists because that is exactly what they are and exactly how they act. Proven Neo-Nazis like Björn Höcke and Andreas Kalbitz are only dealt with to save face in front off media and later re-introduced to powerful party positions anyway.

Their only goal is disruption, they have zero constructive solutions to anything and their ideas are based on lies and fake news. On top of it all, they are directly supported by Russian money, a country whose main foreign policy has been disruption since the 1980s.

Also, I didn't talk about how the NSDAP finally seized power, that reads like a distraction. I am talking about how NSDAP was democratically elected for multiple periods although their street thugs already roamed Germany for nearly a decade before Hitler became chancellor. As in - angry people are happy to democratically vote anti-democrats. AfD is just proving it a second time.
While not the reason for "Pfand" in Germany (originally it's to encourage reuse of bottles, now it's expanded to include recycling), this is a pretty good analogy. Including the points beyond which it fails: You get emptied trash cans because people tried to get at the Pfand... Which brings you back to the original point: People are far better at gaming a system than the system is at setting its rules
They're just rows in a MySQL database. Traditional RDBMS for OLTP are built around the assumption that all data is mutable. An unscrupulous Wikipedia DBA could unilaterally delete new history rows before anyone downloads a hard-copy and then no-one would be the wiser.

On the topic of OLTP RDBMS: things are changing though: ISO SQL (and at least MS SQL Server) have added support for "LEDGER" tables that extend the Temporal Table system (...that we know and love...er...hate) with immutability secured with cryptographic keys. Basically, you get to have your own centralized blockchain-like table.... so long as you trust your DBMS (and DBA) with the keys.

There's two types: append-only and updatable (which is still append-only under-the-hood, as destructive DML operations are still just appended to current history, just like with git).

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/le...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/le...

It's pretty cool, I'll admit - I've been wanting support for true "read-only" tables for ages - the only thing I'm dreading is having to put-up with poor tooling support for a decade or two (e.g. Entity Framework Core still doesn't support temporal-tables, and SQL Server still only supports SYSTEM versioning and not the (far more useful) APPLICATION versioning system, argh).

That said, I don't think Wikipedia would really want crypto-signed page edit histories: it would obligate them to host truly objectionable content (otherwise the hash references would break), and there's far too many sociopathic griefers online for that to not happen...
> Rust 1.58

Do you mean 1.57?

As soon as I saw the final binary taking an ungodly amount of time I knew what it was going to be, because I hit it myself, in 1.57, using warp.

Though there are also a few separate older regressions (at least one in 1.56, though I gather somewhat less critical / troublesome).

> the knowledge required to bypass it is to just switch to the preview of the next release

Switching to the previous tends to be more reliable and a better idea, really.
I'm generally a web3 skeptic, turned off by all the hype and ideology, but the interesting thing about "web3" is you a potentially critical mass of zealots working together and building on ideas. I'm sure something interesting will emerge out of that. Will it require crypto? Maybe, but probably not. In fact, I think what will likely happen is interesting ideas will come out of web3 but then they'll just end up implemented without crypto/decentralization.
I rememeber someone on Twitter describing the invention of public blockchains by way of an analogy of computers being invented as part of an effort by someone to invent pong.

A permissionless database was invented as part of an effort to create p2p electronic cash.
A Neuroscientist Prepares for Death
Ain’t gonna happen for whom? Features were added for decades before and will be added after us. I don’t get it, someone always says it’s not gonna happen because of size of something but then you open the tech news site after a week and the amount of happenings is overwhelming.
Tokio maintainer here. I've actually been spending a bunch of time recently looking in to how we can reduce Tokio's compile-times. I haven't really been able to find any big wins yet, but one thing has been pretty clear from the benchmarks: The number of dependencies of Tokio is not the problem. They all compile pretty fast and can all compile in parallel. Tokio itself takes a lot longer than the dependencies.

(Except for tokio-macros which takes a long time because it depends on syn and quote. Consider disabling it if you don't need it.)
I went the opposite direction, 1 vm per service. It's much easier to secure, backup, restore thanks to full isolation.
Great post with lots of details. I'm sure I'll try some of tools mentioned.

We do something similar, multiple django sites and static sites on a single digital ocean droplet. We use docker for everything though, and have a single nginx listening on 80/443 that routes traffic to the sites by domain. Each site has a separate pg db and everything is glued together / configured / deployed via ansible.
European perspective:

- car manufacturers will start to phase out ice production

- all time low birth rates

- brexit and covid will still be major problems for politics

- worker shortage we saw in GB, will hit rest of West Europe

- major collapse of German pig farming after tonnies moving away

- rise of living costs will kill almost all of which was left of brick and mortar shops
Fselect – a CLI tool to find files with “not quite SQL” query language
Well, he tried to use this for tax evasion and got caught in the comments.

He deleted his tweet by now
Yeah, "nice" is a wishy-washy word. I think most of my fellow humans are decent, by which I mean that I think they want to do the right thing, provided it's not too costly.

My faith in my fellow humans has been shaken lately, I'm afraid, by the number of people in my local grocers not wearing masks, despite a big sign on the door saying that mask-wearing is mandatory (it is - that's the law at the moment, around here).
Whereas now power is with the people with the most... GPUs? Those don't grow on trees either.
Nice, there's an experimental release compatible with the HP 200LX. I miss that machine, so I should carve out some time to test it.
I'm talking about ownership, more specifically - market control. I don't care about "Web3" if a handful of people/companies are the one's controlling its growth.

It's so stupid it actually hurts my brain just to type it.
How do you think proof of work operates now? Do you think big mining operations don’t take massive capital? They do, and also waste ungodly amounts of power at the same time.
Care to elaborate? I would expect most solids are filtered in the primary treatment, so what would be the issue with trying to filter micro-plastics in or after the secondary filtering?
I've seen specific Jordan Peterson YouTube videos URLs blocked on messenger as well. Sometimes they're completely non-controversial as well.
The incentives are identical, less jail time. The fact that one is guaranteed deal while one is a standard sentencing practice is a distinction without a difference. The effect will be the same, innocent people "admitting" guilt. In Japan, plea bargains were illegal until recently. Yet standard police behavior when arresting someone was to notify them how much more lenient the system wold be on them if they admited guilt. And they were just stating facts about how the system works, not guaranteeing you anything... and racking up a 99.9% conviction rate. A lawyer in any country would tell you the same thing if your chances didn't look good.
Am I to understand that a state governer has the power to instruct some lacky-lawyer to charge someone with a crime, and to prosecute them for that crime? In the land of the free, this is not an independent process?
You make a good point, and you deserve appreciation for your ability not to confuse all of Web3 with the vocal majority behind Web3 right now - who I agree are empty salesman.

> If you can separate the distributed database technology from the financial speculation then I will be a lot more enthusiastic about it.

Tough pill to swallow for you: the consensus mechanism fundamental to Bitcoin and blockchains in general (assuming they are fully decentralized) is economic. It relies on block producers spending or staking their money for no profit if they lie or cheat. The tokens or coins associated with the network are the digital collateralizations of that money, and are therefore subject to shift in valuations relative to anything else you might trade it for.

Crypto is inherently financial as long as its consensus mechanism is economic - that is not a bad thing, but it should inform how communities interact with the topic. Despite believing in crypto, this is why I believe some spaces should not consider it polite to talk about specific crypto-currencies versus others, as it quickly deteriorates into shilling of one's own holdings. This is the same reason novice's can't reliably make money in the market - since everyone advertises coins/tokens they hold as the next coming of Jesus, the only productive way to make decisions about which are good or bad is to not only have a deep understanding of them but also their context in the market as it is currently. Even then you might fall victim to the 'clown market' when hype trumps fundamentals.

Long story short crypto-currencies are inherently economic and therefore financial and subject to price fluctuations which attract speculators. This does not make "crypto" a scam, but it does mean that novices have little recourse for understanding the space sans becoming more independently competent or having a trusted advisor.
And some sort of new tax on everyone who uses FOSS, of course. Budgets don't appear out of nowhere.
May i ask for a tildes invite ?

Thanks
You gain more power by having more money in both PoW and PoS. In PoW it means you can buy more hashing power, in PoS it means you can buy more of the network's currency to stake. Even under PoS, the network's upgrades still rely on social consensus, as in node operators (!= validators) agreeing to forks, and the network's finality requires 2/3 of the network's almost 300'000 validators to come to consensus.
Me I d define web3 by referencing the websocket arrival that evolved from Ajax polling to have better data subscription and the rise of full js frameworks which transformed the amount of work clients do on web resources that sometimes couldnt be done by the backend (drawing a financial graph full of beautiful indicator and refreshing live for instance).

I can understand web4 could be self financing unstoppable web resources with no central authority able to close them but I dont see yet a proper use case beyond criminal endeavour. Plus, we're far from it, we'd need an organic transmission network that goes out of the traditional ISP system, like a global bluetooth peer to peer mobile network every phone contributes to in exchange for payment... that would be fast enough...
To add to the list of complaints.

> No single entity or small group of entities controls it

In practice they will. The moment +50% of miners agrees on any transaction, regardless of it happening - it will happen. So having +50% of Bitcoin miners means you control the Bitcoin market. And we're back to square one.

Edit: Fine they only control current transactions, but forking as a solution to this implies the current network won't be able to just join and takeover a new bitcoin fork. Which is highly suspect.
Because Proof of Work requires computational power, which is expensive and thus requires a lot of capital, and Proof of Stake requires controlling a significant amount of the currency, which also requires a lot of capital. Basically the consensus is built around ways to demonstrate you already have a lot of money, either through conspicuous consumption (PoW) or flaunting your balance (PoS).

As to why VCs would invest in it: it's currently dodging most regulations that apply to financial transactions (money laundering, pyramid schemes, pump & dump schemes, etc) much like loot boxes dodge most gambling regulations (and it turns out selling gambling to kids is extremely profitable). This makes the market uniquely profitable to invest in right now with promises of extreme ROI as long as it remains unregulated.

"Humanitarian" campaigns to normalize tracking public records and qualifications on the blockchain in technologically underdeveloped countries also produce a high amount of technological lock-in while increasing the capabilities of automated decision making on the blockchain without having to bother with externalities. For example, if one's ability to use an NFT on social media hinges on demonstrating ownership of that NFT, copyright law becomes a tangential consideration much like systems like ContentID make it harder to claim fair use rights because the ContentID claim is not based in copyright law but in the terms of service.

Additionally a lot of the more vocal tech VCs are libertarians bordering on anarcho-capitalism (i.e. free market maximalists who think humanity's survival and progress hinges on a few Great Men rather than the unsophisticated masses). The greater Web3 ecosystem is trying to solve cooperation with people you actively distrust and represents every interaction as a financial transaction. This is extremely appealing to them. Their problem with capitalism isn't that it inevitably leads to a massive wealth disparity (because after all, some people are "just better") but that the government gets in the way. This makes the promise of decentralization (even if it defers to consensus between the already wealthy) ideologically appealing to them.

Based on my conversations with web3 believers, they would generally agree with most of what I said but object to the language I'm using because it doesn't sound very flattering.
"- One EU country will default (not Italy), the EU will bail it out"

Who?
What is "real"? Do you count infrared? Ultraviolet? What if you are color blind?
For me photo is how I see it, not some "representation of reality" whatever that reality may be.
- The cryptocurrency market cap will continue to rise, reaching $4 trillion by mid-year then crash 60-70% about $1.5 trillion by end of 2022 (currently around $2.2 trillion as of December 31st 2021).

- More large companies will invest in Bitcoin, including Tesla who will purchase another $500 million worth. Tesla will also start accepting Dogecoin as payment.

- NFTs will continue to be hyped up along with Web 3.0 but there will be no actual progress. Once the crypto market crashes by 60-70% the companies which remain will start to truly build the future web technologies we will be using in 5-10 years time.
> Why would you lunp Greta Thunberg in there? By age alone, she’s not to blame for climate change. And what she does explicitly advocate for is in her own words: “Listen to the scientists”

You're right, she isn't to blame for climate change, but she is one of the most prominent characters in the world and when she says "personally, I am against nuclear power"[0], people listen. It causes real damage.

She does indeed say "listen to the scientists", but the scientists say we need nuclear power[1]. Which she is against. Confusingly.

> Blaming the hippies for climate change is absurd.

I really don't think it is. I think it is climate alarmists (purely with good intentions, as I mentioned earlier) like Thunberg going back several decades that have pressured governments into abandoning investment in nuclear power.

[0]: https://m.facebook.com/gretathunbergsweden/photos/a.73363095...

[1]: https://environmentalprogress.org/complete-case-for-nuclear
I personally don’t think it’s acceptable and the disregard for files sizes generally extends to disregard for RAM usage which is even more unacceptable. Sadly I don’t really have a choice regarding using most of these apps.
Well, where are the killer apps?

Where are the mass usage use cases beyond "get rich quick" schemes?

We have had the technology for years and all we got are NFC schemes, speculation and hot air.
It would be cool if there was a program that built a database out of your raw audio files, and that database was read by media servers like mpd. I want the user contributed data, but I don't necessarily want it to replace the original files.
There was a review thread for 2021 a few days back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29678113
web3 will start to become mainstream as corporations adopt NFTs
- another facebook whistle blower will emerge after the US midterm elections

- people will lose interest in NFTs, the bubble will deflate

- google chrome will decrease it’s market share
Sad fact: you can be a 1000x developer, and people will not remember your name in 100 years.
How necessary is it to wait for the US government's reply on the matter?

Can't you write a letter to a US official saying "As of 31st Dec, I renounce my citizenship". If the USA can't organise an interview before that, that's their problem...
Do you have a link where these concepts are explained in more detail?
Because murder is a crime, intent is not.
> some fetishistically absolute version of the world where you cannot trust any single person or entity

And even then, there’s still trust necessary to the extent that web3 things interact with the real world. You can have provable on-chain voting in a DAO, but if the DAO owns any non-crypto assets, you’re trusting a human to execute the consensus decision.
Pandemic situation will turn into something alike Brexit - indecisive pulp without a view for resolution or and end. Further corrosion of EU agreements like the current suspension of Schengen Area (certificates are required now). Real estate market to rent and to buy will turn even more unaffordable and hopeless for salaried - especially millenials and younger.
I'm sure you know, but that comes down to cost. Repair quotes from Tesla area astronomical, so it's easy to write a perfectly repairable car off just because the finance doesn't make sense to the insurance company.
> Let me frame it this way: “Guns don’t kill people. People do.”

I think it's actually worse than your framing suggests, even though it's generally recognized that widespread gun ownership is very poor for public health. Guns kill people by providing the means for people with the intent and opportunity to kill. Cars provide both the means and the opportunity, while making the intent irrelevant.

Operating heavy machinery at high speeds in public spaces is an inherently risky thing. It is no surprise then, that deaths from automobiles are consistently in the top ten deaths-by-cause for every developed nation. Expecting people to maintain the degree of focus and discipline necessary to operate heavy machinery in streets shared with children, elderly and cyclists, without safety barriers, at high speeds, is obviously a bad idea, unless you're willing to accept a lot of children, elderly, and cyclists dying.