skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are three undisputed independent developments of writing: Sumerian, Mayan, and Chinese. Egyptian may or may not have been influenced by Sumerian; Indus Valley Script may or may not be writing; and Andean quipus (essentially knotted strings) raises interesting questions about what writing even is. All other (known) writing systems developed out of knowledge of these priors.

The development of writing systems seems to be pretty clear, especially because we can use Sequoyah's documented development of Cherokee script as a check. Writing seems to start as logographic: each character starts out as representing a word, often as a stylized representation of that word (for example, draw an eye to represent the word 'eye'). To represent words that don't have easy representation, a rebus system develops: you use homophonic puns (so an eye might also stand for 'I'). This lends itself to a simplification to a syllabic representation, one word for each possible syllable. And usually, it stops there (although note that 'syllable' usually comes out in writing as a consonant-vowel pair, rather than a full syllable).

It's with the Semitic languages that things took an interesting turn. Semitic languages have an interesting feature in that you can get most of the sense of a word even if you drop the vowels. And the writing ended up switching from consonant-vowel pairs to just consonants (what we now call an 'abjad'). Greek opted to adapt this by adding letters for vowels and formed the first 'true alphabet'. Sanskrit opted instead to use reliable markings on consonants to make an 'abugida'.

Chinese never developed their logographic system into a syllabary, although this was probably partially driven by the fact that Chinese itself had most of its words become monosyllabic at the same time. Japanese did continue Chinese script into two full syllabaries.

Korean is the other independent invention of an alphabet: Hangul. Although Hangul is arranged as a succession of blocks representing full syllables, so it can also be viewed as a systemic construction of a syllabary rather than an alphabet.

I mentioned Sequoyah's development of Cherokee script: he knew of writing from the Americans at the time, and even had access to a Bible (although he couldn't read it at all). And his own documentation of his development does expressly indicate that he started trying to build a logography, realized that there were too many symbols that had to be created, and instead simplified it into a syllabary, which was much more conservative in its character count. (And the influence of several character shapes came from that Bible, which is why Cherokee script looks like someone started with Latin script but had no idea had it worked--here is its character set: ᎠᎡᎢᎣᎤᎥᎦᎧᎨᎩᎪᎫᎬᎭᎮᎯᎰᎱᎲᎳᎴᎵᎶᎷᎸᎹᎺᎻᎼᎽᎾᎿᏀᏁᏂᏃᏄᏅᏆᏇᏈᏉᏊᏋᏌᏍᏎᏏᏐᏑᏒᏓᏔᏕᏖᏗᏘᏙᏚᏛᏜᏝᏞᏟᏠᏡᏢᏣᏤᏥᏦᏧᏨᏩᏪᏫᏬᏭᏮᏯᏰᏱᏲᏳᏴᏵᏸᏹᏺᏻᏼᏽ)
Yeah we just changed the meaning of 'or', no biggie.

That said I would normally read 'User.where({id: id}).or({condition1},{condition2})' as 'User where id=id or condition1 or condition2' and not 'User where id=id and (condition1 or condition2)'. Though I could probably get used to either, after all you've also got languages like Lisp where 'or' isn't an infix operator either.

And doing something with any one of the results when you only expect one result to exist is just bad practice.
> do a little light word processing

For the vast majority of people, “a little light word processing” involves Microsoft Word, which instantly rules out Linux for the near computer illiterate.
I found that Manjaro just works, which is super confounding: Arch is supposed to be one of the nerdier distros. I've thrown Manjaro (and now pure Arch) at my Linux-hostile laptop, and everything works. Provided you have access to good internet Arch is almost like off-cloud-SaaS on your machine, and that model makes tons of sense for desktop usage.

Printers, the bloody cursed things, are far more reliable than Windows.

In terms of hardware support, Ubuntu comes really close. The Linux desktop has come very far in the past few years.
I don't see how this could help. The main danger here seems to be that the custom proxy is adding an authentication token for internal resources which is leaked if an external resource is accidentally requested, but at the same time, the auth token being included is actually required for the functionality they're trying to implement.
> In the US, it’s a bit fat zero.

It seems you get what you pay for.
Windows/MacOS are great for developing native software for the respective platform. For virtually every other development scenario i can think of, Linux is imho the weapon of choice, not just web development.
I really hope they standardize the fallback to HTTP2 (and HTTP1 too). Almost any real world internet facing application will need one and it'd be a shame if they all had to reinvent the wheel when it could be done at a lower level once for everyone.
> In reference to WikiLeaks making her private emails available.

Oct 28 was the day FBI Director James Comey made his announcement that the FBI had reopened its probe into the Clinton campaign based on a laptop it received. It quickly determined all of the e-mails were duplicates of ones they had already seen, and reversed course, but the damage was done. I think she's really saying that was the proximal cause, and I agree with that assessment.

DNC hacked e-mails were released on Oct 7, the same day that the Washington Post published the Trump Access Hollywood tape.

She blames both, but I think everyone pretty much realizes that the FBI director tanked her chances hard with that move.
> I mean is file size really a concern?

Yes.

> I would rather have a 300 GB game

I, on the other hand, would not.
The "a website for buying and selling JPEGS with your debit card" part simultaneously made me realise how ridiculous NFTs are and, nevertheless, how popular they are, and how that popularity fuels the value of bitcoin. Essentially paper money gets its value because you need it to pay taxes; that is, there is a demand. Bitcoin gets it value because you can do interesting and popular things with it; that is, there is a demand. As long as there are interesting and popular things to do with bitcoin, that attracts outside money, bitcoin will keep gaining in value. Obvious, I guess, but that helped it hit home.
I don't want a web app to play my local music collection. What I want is:

1. here's the directory with my music files in it

2. shuffle play it.

That's it. This is not rocket science. I appear to be a unique snowflake, or somebody on the WMP team is just like me. Because that just causes every other music player to commit seppuku.
Wealth is why we enjoy the quality of life that we do.

The spread of private property and contracting rights, and the consequent rise in wealth, is credited for the largest reduction in poverty in human history:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-pol...

https://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-gl...

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2013/06/01/towards-the-end...

Extreme poverty is a much greater evil than inequality.
I think the ad hoc stuff you're talking about is mostly the kind of systems design detail you're going to get plugging any CSPRNG into a kernel. In particular: there's no way to get to a point where you can just reconcile a commit against a standard to know whether it's good or not; you're going to have to do the work of following and grokking the changelog no matter what, because no "standard" for a kernel CSPRNG is going to capture all the details of safely providing randomness to a Linux (or FreeBSD) kernel.
I've been burned by this. It was a result of nVidia deprecating support for my video card in new drivers, and Ubuntu only shipping up-to-date and compatible proprietary drivers in their latest releases. According to Canonical, this was because the nouveau driver has some support for the deprecated hardware and the old drivers were no longer compatible with up-to-date distros.

If that was your issue, there's scripts that patch support for newer distros into the old drivers.
All these arguments apply to email as well - there are plenty of small providers and you can run your own email server. But, in practice, almost everybody uses gmail or outlook so we still say it's heavily centralized.

What good is running your own full Ethereum node if OpenSea blocks the NFT you're trying to sell and most of the customers who would want to buy it are going through OpenSea's node?
Employee reported them for wage theft. Company retaliated and further defamed said employee. Apparently the wage theft was bad enough for the government to get involved.

Hopefully the fine will be enough close the business. This guy gives bosses a bad name.
> I don't equate law with morality (or fairness). To me often to be a criminal is to be the good guy.

I think we've reached the end of this conversation with a clear understanding of the type of person you are. This is a garden-variety description of egotistical selfishness -- a person who is totally unwilling to follow rules that seem subjectively unfair to him, regardless of objective fairness, and despite the fact that the vast majority of others are willing to follow these rules, even if they disagree with the details.

We create law to reflect what our shared morality and conceptions of fairness are, even though we admittedly don't have perfect laws yet. If you don't understand that, you don't understand the essence of democracy; you are fundamentally an anarchist. Worse, you are a hypocrite: You gladly take full advantage of the protections the law affords you, while expressing disdain for the protections and fairness-guiding that the law affords others.

I'm done with this thread.
As an experienced vim user, I find vim to be superior to nano in pretty much every important way, and am glad it is set as the default editor. In my opinion, setting nano to the default editor would seem like a prank.

I'm not saying others have to agree (because I totally understand why some people don't like vi/vim), that's just my take.
The web3 frontends appear to be in the same place that Chrome is: yes, technically you can always switch to another browser, but if Chrome decides to boycott a new feature, it will never exist as a practical matter. If Chrome blocks a website, it will be as though it doesn't exist for most people. That in theory it still does doesn't change anything. What makes OpenSea different than Chrome in this respect?
Nuts, you beat me to it; I was going to provide that exact same link, together with an excerpt from a comment: "The LWED database reconstructions just aren't good enough to form the basis of a successful effort along those lines."

Here's another relevant post at Language Log: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4634. (Before anyone gets too excited, notice the "filed under" terms.)
> With a Big Crunch, the universe is destroyed. With a Big Freeze space-time is ripped apart.

And then what happens?
I think the main issue with TypeScript’s type system is that most of the time, there’s no runtime types. You know something matches an interface, but if you have some untyped object (like say a thrown error from some lib that you caught), and you need to check if it’s a X, often it’s pretty awkward and hacky to do so. Obviously this issue is inherited from JS, but it’s still an issue.

Great type system and language otherwise, though.
So, the thing is that, in proprietary software development, a lot of stuff is licensed and copied around, because the engineers need to get their jobs done on time. Legal makes sure that everyone actually is working with properly-licensed code (usually), but the definition of "properly-licensed" is going to be in the very narrow definition of "what do we need to license in order to ship the product".

Most of us here think of copyright in the way Disney or Nintendo thinks of copyright: we own the thing, and you don't get to touch the thing. However, to actually get 100% ownership over a copyrighted work, you actually have to make 100% of the work. If you're just buying what you need to make the thing work, then your ownership over the resulting software is going to be thin. After all, the people who sold you the software are going to want to be able to sell it to other people, and in order for that to work, those other people need to not have the software. Which means that all those licenses are going to have provisions on further redistribution so that they still have their copyright monopoly.

If you want to release source, then you have to go back to everyone you bought software from and renegotiate licenses on a far more expensive basis. Because you're asking them to take all the money they will ever make on that software all in one go. For similar reasons, things like licensed music tracks in games are far cheaper if the license is for a limited time, because then the record label can ask for more money later on. The irony of proprietary software development is that it can actually be just as collaborative as Free; but only if every participant regularly pays back into the system.

In contrast, the Free Software world tends to have some of the strictest copyright hygiene in any software industry. You have to, because the whole point is to more or less waive copyright interest in the code - and to do that, you need to have Disney-level ownership over everything. We can thus look at copyright as a sort of deliberate cultural poisoning that puts software developers and artists into the position of having to demand troll tolls everywhere.
For the near computer illiterate, the tiny subset of Word they use can be easily replaced by Libre Office or Google Spreadsheets.
New Zealand has abandoned zero Covid and has new cases reported every day.
I switched from Debian to Arch and I've been very impressed with the stability of Arch as well. I wonder how much that is due to Arch packaging versus perhaps the simple benefits of running more current Linux kernel directly and software directly from upstream.
Stripe offers a billing product that serves as a source of truth for the entire subscription lifecycle. Companies are legally required to maintain financial accounts and nowadays accountants can even do your reporting using the data directly from stripe.

What’s happening here is that there’s a user who has a card on file and a cancelled subscription, and an erroneous new subscription is being created under that user.

Whether or not it makes sense to remove the card from the user account depends on whether or not that user could meaningfully have multiple subscriptions or expect to renew in the medium-term future.
The reviewer shows a setting for it. By default, each track loops on its own. You can toggle a setting to link tracks and make them play together (I forget how it’s called).
I didn't know there's a gay TLD.
I think he touched on that in the article. The masses are trusting the centralized API, not the blockchain. His NFT exists in the chain, but not the API, so it effectively doesn't exist in the eyes of the market.
They are hard to make, so currently the "expensive" part simply corresponds to the amount of effort and material needed to make them, see https://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/2021/10/04/monoclonal-an...

> Both of those things (medicine and hospitals) are limited by money and physical infrastructure right now.

We are spending stupid amounts of money on healthcare right now. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of our inflation problems build up from the amount of resources we are redirecting into healthcare.

> It's like we just said "get vaxxed and the pandemic ends" over and over and enough people actually believed that and in the meantime we did nothing to solve production issues or build more hospital beds.

We underestimated how many people would not want to get vaxxed, and how many don't want to wear face masks, how many idiot governors don't want to take responsibility for their states. But ya, if this gets endemic, we will live on, but we will also pay the price for that.
> Fertilizer is not a neutral product.

I'm not sure what neutral means here, but if it means adding or removing something from the system then sure. Growing and harvest is not neutral either, which is why you need other not-neutral processes to replenish what was depleted. This is not negotiable whether it's compost or nitrogen fixing bacteria or whatever.

> Adding fertilizer destroys the biodiversity of the soil leading to sicker plants and the need for even more additives in the form of pesticides and fungicides to stave off problems caused by unhealthy soils.

Modern farming techniques absolutely cause a holocaust of life, wiping out as much animal, plant, fungus, and other life as possible while leaving the crop. It's also the most cost effective way to mass produce food crops.

> So ideally you would replace chemical intensive farming with regenerative organic. Regenerative organic does require more hand labor. What I am saying is that robots could reduce the labor requirement, making it easier to scale regenerative organic. There are a whole host of benefits to this process, cost is not the only concern. In fact people are willing to pay more for their products.

Regenerative organic does not avoid the need for the nutrient inputs. That's the thing. It replaces fertilizers with compost and nitrogen fixing, but that's not free and if you scale it up to meet global food production it would probably be much more expensive. Nitrogen for example takes a lot longer to fix than you can apply fertilizer so you would need more land to achieve the same rate of nitrogen use by crops. Compost itself has nowhere near the nutrient density of fertilizers and would become scarce. Before the days of intensive agriculture and before most pesticide and herbicide chemicals and machinery, back when people had to use compost and legumes and things to get nitrogen into soil, guano become one of the biggest industries in the world because of how much more productive it was than those prior techniques. It resulted in such big efficiency gains, that the huge costs of running guano mining operations on remote islands and sending fleets of wooden sailing ships across vast oceans to ship the product were more than covered by the cost advantages at the farm.
If they are panicking, how about us? The stories from r/nursing are frightening. Lots of people are going to quit nursing in the coming months over working conditions and burnout, and since immunity against coronavirus is not persistent, there's going to be a re-run next winter, but with less healthcare personnel.

Same with teaching. Working conditions are shit, salary is poor, and spending time in a classroom with current incidences is an invitation to catch the plague. Many won't be back, come next August. Some will be underground.
You realize this will not get us to zero Covid?

You’re basically trying to stamp out the common cold (same virus, Covid-19 being more severe) which has been with us..forever?
Good statistics depends on good data. Theirs isn't. See the posts higher up for links to comments at Language Log.
LibreOffice[1] handles light word processing pretty well. For more complex use cases involving Microsoft Office's "Office Open XML" formats, the proprietary but free-of-charge WPS Office for Linux[2] has great compatibility with Microsoft Office documents. It's available as a Flatpak[3] (which lets you turn off network access for the application if you don't trust it).[4]

[1] https://www.libreoffice.org

[2] https://www.wps.com/office/linux/

[3] https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.wps.Office

[4] https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.tchx84.Flatseal
They're not being sued fir the pennies thing. They're being sued for other issues.
Because distributing software on the App Store is a raw deal.
Is this the same Marak who got in trouble for setting his house on fire when his homemade explosives project went wrong? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25038438)
"Successful" is an ambiguous descriptor. What do you have in mind when you say that? From where I sit, ENS and IPFS are unambiguous failures. Do you disagree?
"but the receiver has no gain, the energy it traps depends only on its area"

Really no directionality, no resonance? Just make bigger area antenna out of whatever and it collects more energy regardless of geometry?

Please go on this is new information to me.
Perhaps picking up on narcissistic personality disorder or something similar?
I took a long time to get to sleep, slept poorly and intermittently, and had a hard time waking up until I was diagnosed with sleep apnea and got a CPAP machine. Now I just pull the mask on at night and I'm out within a couple of minutes. I also wake up suddenly in the morning, get up, and start my day. Much different from the endless tossing and turning to get to sleep and long drowsy sleep-ins in the mornings.

Sometimes I'll come wide awake in the middle of the night. No problem, get up, read, or surf the web for a while, then go back to bed. Sometimes you need more sleep than usual, but sometimes you don't need as much.
In Australia it's free to transfer money between individuals via your bank instantly, and most banks don't charge monthly account fees.
This post really resonates with me, I've been building https://raremints.club as a way for indie, non technical artists to create NFT's, and have really had to wrestle with all things "web3" that would've been trivial in "web2".

I tried to document some of the challenges here:

https://chriszhu12.medium.com/the-challenges-of-building-on-...

But basically: I built an app that relied on mostly stable gas fees. A single app on polygon spiked the fees over 10x in the past few days, and so large swaths of it have to be rebuilt.

The promise of web3 was software that was not controlled by any centralized company. But it seems like any new project sharing a chain can effectively DDoS what you've built.

This is effectively an anti-network effect. Inevitably, you'd have to start centralizing part of your application to avoid gas fees altogether to hedge this risk.
> Fourth, what kind of person meets her, googles her, thinks "it's all bullshit", then proceeds to get in a relationship with her AND have a kid with her.

Someone who gets rather handsomely paid for it?
Tally is a community-owned, open-source fork of MetaMask. From first impressions it looks like it will also solve some of the issues brought up in Moxie's (excellent) blog post, i.e decentralizing the node-> NFT->wallet Metadata routes.

Regarding the immutability of NFT image pointers:

Some emerging solutions to this issue are:

Use ERC2477 (DRAFT). This allows you to have some control over the metadata to ensure the name is as you want it. Note that this will require you to implement a zero-knowledge proof or a JSON parser on-chain which validates the new metadata.

Use 0xcert Framework. The 0xcert framework is specifically designed to provide metadata integrity for ERC-721 tokens, it uses a different hashing technique (Merkle tree). But it requires you to use the same schema across metadata versions.
Ceramic Network is doing some interesting work on schema coordination amongst other things.

https://ceramic.network/

https://tally.cash/community-edition/
Penn Station Sucks
They are inefficient solutions to problems that nobody actually has (shrug)
Except of course people send .doc/.docx around and expect .doc/.docx to be sent around. Ask the average person to do some word processing and send the result to you, the chance of receiving something else is close to zero.

Speaking from experience dealing with near computer illiterates, including my mom.

Of course you can argue that it’s easy to learn to export to .doc/.docx.
As someone who dislikes probably almost every single thing said o Parler, I'm glad it exists. Preventing people from talking is not the way to fix our problems