skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Schaap is the administrator of Stichting DataTruc Zeewolde, a Facebook group of residents opposed to the data center in their village.

>“To give 166 hectares of fertile land to metal boxes is beyond our imagination.”
“It’s not like it’s a data center where they store all this data for maybe payments, hospital applications, or, you know, medical things,” Schaap said. “They have all this information stored from people, which they sell to advertisers.”

I honestly think it's kind of admirable that someone who sees the scarcity and how precious land is makes that very same connection about how we use our data. And of course some people will mock that he voices the criticism on Facebook itself, but to me it just goes to show how far that company (and others) have more or less automatically invaded every aspect of infrastructure.
The average user (the same user that doesn't want to be bothered with running a server at home) doesn't care about this, I don't think. Most people would prefer to rely on a trusted authority or expert for this sort of thing.

When talking about democratization, the average user is probably the only user that matters.
It's worse than a joke
> Like the parent post, it's shocking to me the 180 that HN has done in this regard.

Is it all of HN that's changed, or just this thread? There are probably a lot of ppl commenting on this article that don't bother to comment (or maybe even read) many other web3 related articles.
After successive black streaks about the only thing you can say is maybe the wheel is biased toward black. Assuming no green, and a perfectly unbiased wheel, black if a fifty fifty chance. Which means the next infinity sounds half will be black. If there were three blacks in a row, it doesn't mean red is more likely, as the rest of the spins half will be black.
That's exactly why it took me ages to finally get into other programming languages besides QBASIC and Visual Basic, and primitive ES3 era JavaScript. I'd try to learn C, but it was immediately obvious that there would be a long road to doing anything interesting. If I could easily do I/O with QBASIC, it was hard to justify spending hours reading a bunch of boring books to do the same thing with C/C++.

Looking back, I think QBASIC/QuickBasic had it right in contrast to other learning languages. You don't need a DSL, turtle graphics, drag-and-drop code blocks, or any of that stuff to teach programming. Just make the hurdle to getting useful input and output minimal, and the prospective programmer can take it from there.

On the other hand, I do wish I had been able to pick up things like C much earlier in life. Only recently did I actually learn C++ in my 30s, even though part of me wanted to learn it when I was 9. I think that things like QBASIC can also be a sort of trap because if the I/O is so easy then it can be difficult to leave it for something that actually is better but not in an obvious way to a novice.
I've used old school HF portable radios when I was a ranger and in a valley with no line of sight to our VHF repeaters in the park.

The fun part was finding a clearing big enough to string the antenna out. Usually involved ascending to the bushline or descending onto the river flats.

Being able to listen to Scottish life guard boats from the other side of the world, at dusk as the ionosphere layers changed, was cool. Zimbabwean cricket broadcasts could be listened to up until about 9:30am in the morning.
I love so much of what moxie is saying here. I also feel differently on some important points.

I believe all the issues discussed here are real. Some are even mildly terrifying to the point of being hysterical.

Interestingly, I think all these issues are solvable and it’s made me immensely more interested in doing some research.

I find it oddly inspiration so thanks for that as well! Really great read, just the kind of content I want to see!
> is tying web3 to several centralized front ends (Metamask/OpenSea).

You can't really lump both of those into the same bucket of "front-end". Metamask is a front-end, a user interface. OpenSea is more like middlewear that connects various front-end clients like Metamask to the backend database, and provides some additional functionality that's in any of the database's stored procedures or views. OpenSea also has its own front-end UI to its own service, but its core service is its API to the Ethereum database.
Asking hners to enable JavaScript is dangerous. Many here are anti JavaScript.
The value of a deed is that it's recognized by a legal system, which is backed by a police force, who you can call if some guy shows up claiming that your house actually belongs to him.

With an NFT, you don't get that. It's equivalent to your county clerk's deed registry, including the $100 filing fee, and excluding the legal machinery which gives the deed registry its value.
When I worked with radio engineers, and they told me it's impossible to fully model a Yagi antenna, I was dubious.

But sure enough, developing a new Yagi really depends on trial and error at the end of the day.
In this tutorial, we will build a rule based chatbot in python using a flask and deploy it on the flask.
Perhaps it's more useful then to consider what the value adds would be on top of your product. One obvious addition to build systems is security-related features like source code scanning. People are rightly a bit paranoid about that right now.

Based on the use patterns you can decide whether it's better to run as a SaaS or as installed software.

BTW if you are looking for VC funding for an open source product, the first question they will have is what is your adoption? The pattern VCs are looking for is to find something widely used and monetize the audience. If you can get a lot of people using it and telling their friends you are golden. The other common option is to figure out a service model and bootstrap the business.

Feel free to contact me directly if you want to talk. My email is in my profile. Either way, good luck!
Head up to Canada, and find the Columbia Icefield. It's about half way between Jasper National Park and Yoho National Park.

Depending on where you click on the ice field, you can go out to the Arctic Ocean, Hudson Bay (North Atlantic Ocean), and the Pacific Ocean (via the Columbia River).

It is one of a very hydrological apexes where water can go three different ways rather than two on a regular divide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_divide
All true in 2009. In 2022, I'm less sure. We seem to be back to bloated software with deep and complex dependencies that allow down release cycles and innovation. try doing the 67 releases that the author cited when you have to wrestle with where your framework is going to subtly break.

I assert two laws of softwarw.

1. every piece of software has a point where the power of the software vs its complexity is maximized. beyond this point, gains in complexity generate only small gains in power, and conversely large gains in power add hugely to its complexity.

2. The peak point is only recognisable in retrospect.

webapps in particular are behemoths. as a class of application, are they that much better now?
"After receiving media attention for the penny stunt last year, a page called “Pennies” appeared on OK Walker Autoworks' website."

The "pennies" page was taken down earlier today but don't worry (http://web.archive.org/web/20210822161735/https://aokwalker....)
That captures it well.
ESPN used to talk about the regression to the mean a lot. And it always bugged me, as you are talking about skilled players. Perhaps a player's skill improved
my bad, it's a Gatsby site. Need JS :/
I shouldn't need JavaScript to read text
That’s not really the same thing. It’s intended to search a manually-specified site or collection of sites, not the whole web. It’s basically a Google Site Search API, not a Google Search API.
Intertemporal Consumption
Good-cat: This cat hates pipes
That is indeed a better criticism, but it happens to follow the same template as another common startup criticism: "It hasn't been tried before, so we don't know whether it will work."

Yes. That's true. It might not work. And you're probably even correct. But that's always true, and the most valuable cases are those that work when most people don't expect them to. http://paulgraham.com/swan.html

You say that every other VC does this. But if other VCs are training ML models, they don't seem to be publishing their results, so I'm inclined to say that this is new.

Is it going to work? Well, we'll have to see. But as with most startups, the answer is "probably not, but the chance may be significantly better than random."
I read this pdf years and years ago.. I wish that I could say I followed it. It's rather brilliant in its simplicity, and honesty.
The math can't be argued with. Eat X, expend < x and M++.
It's the Mechanical Turk approach to pentesting. Find people who will work for small amounts of money, but find lots of them.
Usborne 1980s Computer Books Available as Free PDFs
Ask HN: Is there a good paid remote desktop workstation as a service solution?
I'm temporarily in New York City for 3 months looking for work (if anyone wants a good technical manager see my profile) and I travel really light. My laptop (a surface tablet) is great except for some heavy desktop usage. I definitely don't want to buy a desktop or full laptop here due to traveling soon but I was wondering if there is a good paid powerful remote virtual machine I can rent for desktop type of usage, like a remote desktop as a service? My budget is ideally $50-$100/month but could go a little higher.

What is your recommendation?
Right, I have never heard "mean" being used in the context of casino games.

I get what they are trying to say though, at some point the variance should start evening out to reflect the odds of the game. But we should be practical and remember we're in a casino. A red/black bet on roulette is one of the few games where you're going to get that low of variance. With slots, you have to play a ton of games before you can get an idea of what the variance is just from your game play. In poker, the rule of thumb is 10,000 hands before the player can be confident of having an idea of how effective a change of strategy is.

Overall, whoever wrote this article is out of their element. Like this bit...

> So we think we can use our amazing powers of pattern recognition to determine that black is “due” and use that power to win big. Casinos love this delusion, because they know that math wins out in the end.

This is contradictory. They're saying the player is wrong, because of math. By that line of thinking, the casino would also be wrong to love it, because of math. In a typical casino game, gambler's fallacy won't make your choice more or less correct, unless the choice is to keep playing or to walk away. The author doesn't specify why the casinos would love this though. As an aside, gambler's fallacy could affect more decision making in poker, but poker is a game of skill and the casino doesn't have a house edge on poker (they take a rake.)
On the other hand a good type system doesn't:

# let ch_arr = [
"uno";
"dos"
"tres";
];;
Error: This expression has type string
This is not a function; it cannot be applied.
He got $3k and a $1k bonus the first time around, and another $3k for each of two failures to resolve the issue. At the end of the day, that's over $10k.
The editing task you set is admirably met with VSCodium, indeed, but the task itself seems irrelevant to real coding. In what circumstance do you see that three disparate changes of that nature all need to be made? In reality, you would think about and act upon each in turn. In Vim, I would use db and . and . after navigating to the necessary places, perhaps using search. At all times, I would a perfectly content vim user.

(But yes, I’m sure there are plenty of situations where mouse and multi-cursor make a great approach.)

I look forward to seeing international text editing competitions appear on YouTube!
Wow. I was thinking about making a game and saving player state in a similar way to what caused the gas prices to spike for everyone. I'm floored by the ramifications. My stomach feels very queasy with OP's article, and now yours.
Wish you well on your new venture. The domain name worked well for me for 25 years. Here’s to your future decades. Kee Nethery
It is possible that the meaning of the sizes changed, but that would probably go in the direction of making the shift larger. [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanity_sizing
You did nothing wrong. No need to apologize.
Would mypy have caught any of the issues highlighted in the article?
LOL, you found another one, way to go! Keep going!

But be aware that those Boogaloo Bois aren't quite the white supremacist provocateurs you think they are. They are genuinely anti-government, and they hate cops. This guy wasn't there to make BLM look bad. He was there to help them fuck with the police.

> nobody in this thread claimed "all" since the extent is unknowable

Thing is, I strongly suspect that you actually believe that. I could be wrong-- just a feeling. You seem unable to acknowledge even the possibility that the BLM protesters were themselves responsible for a significant part of the violence and destruction, and appear to be desperately clawing for stories to prop up your narrative.

I on the other hand will freely admit that you might be right. Maybe the violence and destruction was significantly or even mostly the work of white supremacists, provocateures, state agents, whatever. But so far nobody including you has produced anything close to convincing. I'll keep looking though.

Have fun inside your head man, I'm out.
Moxie is missing a very important point:

0. People want control.

People run servers because they don't want their operations to be affected by the arbitrary whims of some third party. When issues inevitably occur, they want to have as much control over the situation as possible so that they can remedy the issue as optimally as possible.

This issue was wonderfully illustrated to you by OpenSea when they unilaterally removed your poop NFT and offered the generic "You violated our ToS, we wont tell you how, and no there is no appeal". This is the fundamental reason why cryptocurrencies took off. No more arbitrary rules from whimsical payment processors.

I agree that Web3, as currently implemented, is a regression. Hopefully they manage to fix their flaws before the whole thing falls apart.
An incredibly sad story I heard a few years back, when a dog could not get out of the water and seemed to have started drowning, so a boy jumped in to help the dog but then also started drowning, and so his father went in trying to rescue him. Both drowned; the dog somehow managed to get out of the water on its own…
I suspect the Steam Deck will help chip away at Windows dominance over the long run. Not at first. It’ll be a slow transition. But it’ll definitely be the beginning.
Show HN: Email encoder – protect your public emails from bots and crawlers
One of the best comments I’ve read on the internet in a while
The server here is actually not a centralize server in a traditional world. It's a node that connect to the network and replica state.

When running transaction, you send it to that node, that node then broadcast it to network. This node here is like a replica in a traditional database.

You can run that node, and talk to it through http, websocket.

The point about trusting server signature the author bring up is bad IMHO. Even with a database, if you install some malicious Postgres package that return fake data for example, it doesn't help you at all if you enable TLS or not.

The point about verification is that read-only data isn't important because write always get verified. If you connect to a malicious node, that change the data it returns to you on purpose, then it's fine. But when you write data to the system, it always get verify so it isn't a problem at all.

The point here is that you are the one that run that node, and you are responsible for it. Entire point of Ethereum is that anyone can run node that connect to the network to replicate its state.

If you take out all the hype(OpenSea is a massive scam here no argue), I found web3 is really amazing.

1. It's a public dataset that anyone can read data and listen to event

anyone know something like that in current web1/2? Example, when I bough a domain name on namecheap or google domain. Can anyone know that? When I change my DNS, do anyone know that?

With Ethereum when you run a WRITE method on a smart contract, when you transfer event. Everything can be emitted. And you can listen to it.

The code is almost always open source.

2. Build-in Authentication System

Many website use wallet to sign in but didn't verified a signature. In fact, that signing is very cool in deed. That signature verifcation ensure that only you can sign that data, send it to server and server can verified it with your public key, which is part of your address

3. No one can stop you

If you search hacker news, you will found many people got blocked/suspended randomly by Stripe, Paypal then what do you do?

4. Openness

This is a system that anyone can read. Think about that for a second. Anyone can read its data. Without the need of any API. Everything follow a standard, which is smart contract.

Anyone can write, if you're willing to pay.

You're pretty much can see the code of any legitimate company. Pretty much all of them published their contract on ethscan, to make it convenience for you to run directly.

If you don't like some webui, you can just write to its directly.

Literally just a `curl`, without you to even register for an account.

I know that many people like to dismiss web3, the term is broad and bad IMHO, but think about the thing that it gives us. I can think of some example how web3 is great.

1. ACL: any changes is published, if a malicious activity happen, pretty much anyone can monitor it
2. Charity Fund: we can see what happen with the fund, transfer to where, when, who made it
My mum had started using a desktop at work (Windows) for the first time in the mid 2000s (she was ~50 at the time) which was used for basic work like creating / editing documents / spreadsheets and emails/browsing. She used to find it challenging to use and usually got her work done by subordinates.

Around 2008 I got myself a new personal laptop and gave her my old one (2003 compaq, setup with Ubuntu) and taught her basic usage during a short trip to home. She picked it up quite well and managed to do all her work on her own, and even used it for general browsing. She continued to use it till around 2015 when she retired and decided to live with us. It functioned just fine even then without slowing down like a typical windows machine, even though the battery had basically become useless and it needed to be plugged on to be used.

Recently we emptied our old home (set to be sold) and she got that laptop back. It still functions the same way, though she has no use for it now as she's used to smartphones/tablets so its set to be donated.
> but a competitor to Twitter cannot access the entire set of user data that Twitter has access to.

True, but they could make it very easy for users to transfer all their data, which makes it possible if they could convince everyone to do it mass. So the real problem is that it's not realistic to convince everyone to move; the network effect is too strong.

AFAICT, OpenSea et al have the same first mover/network advantage. The record on the chain of a url "belonging" to someone has approximately zero utility without the edifice they've built on top
Yeah ultimately the caveat is that it’s not a book that provides a working formula but one presents the idea that generally most folks can find a working formula if they practice and push themselves. There are unfortunately a some harmful ideas that come from i think the authors desire to make a entertaining read as well as sell to the target audience that come with this book that are worth watching out for.
Okay, so you're asking for examples of improvements to the middle class, because you don't see them...and that's coming from a place of legitimately not knowing what it's like to be middle class. Fair enough then.

The income cap to be able to contribute to a Roth IRA is indeed absurd, but has also been around for a long time; that's not a Biden thing. Biden's plan isn't to eliminate capital gains (what even...), but to tax it as income for those making over a million; while certainly debatable, that doesn't equate to "bad for everybody and investment and growth" without, you know, some sort of argument as to why (trickle down economics maybe? :P)

There is a war on wealth - really? An increase of 2.6% on dollars earned above $539,900 (higher if filing jointly). Yes, that's clearly a war on wealth; clearly, that's going to make everyone destitute.
1) The addressing side of IPFS could probably actually be standardized to be as ubiquitous as URLs or email addresses. DNS style stuff is honestly a reasonably good blockchain fit. The storage and server side of it still has a ton of gaps, where lessons learned from torrents are being somewhat inefficiently rediscovered.

4) It sounds like the data available already from those two isn't that simple and is likely to only become more complex over time.

Heck, web2 is still using a ton of web1 components. What are the forces to push some dapp to be fully decentralized e2e?
What is "lean muscle" regardless of fat?
Easy dependencies are also a huge boon for fun, I remember having a lot of frustration with python in that regard.
> I don't see why the IP owners would play ball and accept the loss of control).

The main reason would be if they could make more money on their digital goods by floating them in a large, open, heterogeneous market rather than in their smaller walled-garden. That's what traditional capital markets are good for, and the name of the game here is figuring out how to recreate those benefits in decentralized digital markets.
It’ll always be an option to install Windows, but Valve has been trying to get away from Windows dominance for years now.

SteamDeck is a Trojan horse in disguise, designed to get their gaming platform off the dominance of Windows.
Code this tightly coupled makes me itchy.
New materials? There is no shortage of trees for dimensional lumber.
Ancient FORTRAN, as opposed to complicated modern Fortran/C++/Rust, has a huge advantage if you ever crash your spaceship on a resource rich alien world and have to build a programmable computer from scratch from first principles using only knowledge that a single human could memorize. Modern languages require nontrivial compiler theory to parse a sequence of language symbols into an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), etc. But Ancient FORTRAN is essentially designed to be read in and translated just a few 80 column punch card lines at a time, much like assembly languages. Compilers were written that could fit inside computers with only a few thousand words of 16 or 18 bit memory. Magnetic Core memory from that era was often made by hand, by little old ladies weaving it in factories I've been told, and was used for the Apollo moon spacecraft and was extremely reliable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory

Ancient LISP and BASIC variants also stand out in this regard of not requiring you to undergo years of training and theory to implement and fully understand.

Fabrice Bellard's minimalist but complete quickjs.c Javascript interpreter is presently about 54,000 lines of C:

https://github.com/bellard/quickjs/blob/master/quickjs.c

Javascript is an enormous, complicated, designed-by-committee language, as are essentially all other languages we are forced to use. I do hope there is a renaissance of simpler technology, technology not driven by competitive egos but by a desire for the joy of simplicity and understanding. But such simpler technology won't be useful for building backend infra for Big AdTech ad-bidding exchanges so that we can be bombarded with ads for One Weird Trick to burn belly fat or whatever.