skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the crypto space I'm most excited about the ability to have open projects where anyone who contributes can have a stake in the financial rewards of the project, and there are no barriers to becoming a contributor. A lot of the time the financial benefits of open-source contributors are fully captured by a "host" corporation, and open collaboration platforms for non-software projects like textbooks and IRL shared spaces are almost nonexistent.

Proof-of-personhood a la BrightID is something that governments could theoretically provide, but most don't, and even if they did, there are serious privacy and interoperability concerns. SaaS companies trying to provide a free trial can prevent abuse by verifying unique personhood using web3 tech without needing to ask for any more information about the user. I'm sure you can think of other applications for that tech. Even if every government in the world provided this service, everyone who wants to use it either has to implement 195 different APIs or fork over money to a cottage industry whose sole job it is to unify those APIs.

Finance and commerce on blockchains has a lot of real-world benefits that traditional finance can't or refuses to provide. You can't easily set up a 3-of-5 multisig for your photography club in traditional finance. A lot of normal people have their payments blocked or funds frozen in TradFi for arbitrary reasons. Sex workers get kicked off of platforms all the time, and a friend recently had their PayPal frozen while raising funds for a school reunion party.

I'm not super into NFTs personally, but I can see them having a use case as a more consumer-friendly business model for gacha games and games with similar mechanics. There are probably other promising applications that I just don't know about because I don't follow that space very closely.
On one hand all these PhD thingies are very very important, and on the other hand words like "assets" and "commodities" are used for these same PhD people.
> beginners who need to start working on non trivial production code.

If you're a beginner dropped into a non-trivial production codebase your best bet is to follow existing conventions until you gain enough experience to be able to evaluate such advice and consider it against your projects' and business' requirements.
This seems like a totally unrealistic and impractical way of organizing a codebase. Living, useful codebases under active development need to be searchable and well tagged rather than laid out in "chapters" in my experience. In most scenarios it is also not a great use of time to try and read through a codebase line by line from A-Z.
This is some real hacker spirit tinkering weird lifestyle innovation, I love it. May Hacker News fill up with much more of this genre!

Oh, you may be interested in my Telegroam: https://github.com/mbrock/telegroam
> dramatically higher probability of leading a long life

Yes, but not that much. Mythology on HN makes them live basically as long as we do live. Completely ignoring adult accidents rates, ability to fix them or sicknesses and deaths while giving births. Ignoring sicknesses from stuff missing in food.

And of course using nebulous "past" as if forrest communities in 240 had same lifespan as 1950 city middle class. You imply deep past and all people. Then you argue by recent past excluding most common causes of death.

If you look at estimated length of life after adulthood, it is still lower then what was written here. If we were in the past, some of us would fall from roof, died of minor wound infection, tetanus, whatever we get vaccines for now, got tuberculosis or other now treatable sickness. Some of us would die while giving birth.
Come on, people should get paid for the work they do right :-/
Slightly OT, but - aside from a couple of outlier commenters - THANK YOU to both the OP for bringing the conversation around "web3" (not a fan of the term myself) back to a level where actual information is exchanged and proper discourse, for and against, seems to happen.

This is really refreshing.
This is actually one of the few uses I know of that I have a lot of hope for. I worked on a digital voting system in college a decade ago, we were researching accessibility concerns mainly related to visually impaired voters. The voting industry in the US is just as much of a tire fire now as it was then but it could easily be improved.

A blockchain based voting system with each state acting as a PoW validator could actually work. The main challenge is how to centralize key distribution in a way that is accessible to everyone without compromising anonymity. If anyone knows your public key they know exactly who you voted for in every election.
Kinda, but not completely. The problem is really with the hardware, switching OS can only alleviate but not resolving it.
But really, we don't have choices unless we want to stay with fairly old platforms.
Ask HN: Can you relax without a screen?
Can you relax without a screen?

Today I did something I haven’t done for years:

I lay on the couch, put on my headphones, and listened to music.

Nothing else, just listened to music. Sure enough, I stopped after 2 songs. Got bored. Needed a little more stimulus.

They say it’s about dopamine baseline. Scrolling instagram is 10x stronger dose than listening to a good song. If you scroll Instagram every 2 hours, then just music is not really much of pleasure.

I think this just might be behind this burnout generation. I have many times find myself absolutely unwilling to clean my house or take out the trash. It wasn’t always like this. Years ago, I would’ve found pleasure in doing those things.

Now I simply don’t.

Is it really too much screen time? Is my dopamine baseline all out of whack? Or am I burnt out? Do I need to take 6 month sabbatical?

I wonder if anyone else is going through this sort of thing.
Thanks for outlining these positions!

> 1. The grant system overly rewards proposals that grant givers can understand to have a high chance of success. This creates an echo chamber of what kind of research gets funded.

This is indeed something I am experiencing across the board. There are few 'blue-skies research programmes.' The Swiss National Science Foundation had one a few years back and I was over the moon to get a grant there...because I could not really guarantee success.

I am still somewhat struggling when writing a proposal: on the one hand, I want to show that I considered all the angles that can be considered; on the other hand, it's research, so I probably did not foresee all the problems that might arise. Getting this balance 'just right' is a knack, it seems.

> 2. The acceptance of mafias based on mutual back-scratching. The dynamics of funding into these mafias.

I never experienced this so far, but I can definitely see that 'networks help.' When you are in the in-group, everything is a little bit easier.

> 3. The cut of research funding claimed by universities as operational costs. (How much of your grant money goes to your university as overhead?)

OK, that one hit close too home! I just had exactly this discussion with someone from our own admin team. They are doing an excellent job, but they are getting quite miffed by the overheads claimed from the grant admin people (a different division). The numbers are even bigger outside Europe, or so I am told...

I am definitely with you in that the system needs improving. At this point, I am still somewhat optimistic that I can at least try to enact some changes by playing the game according to my own rules, but I am not sure whether reality is going to catch up with me at some point, overriding my 'idealistic naïveté generation field.'
Out of curiosity, why is your CV screwed up? Feel free to reach out (email in my profile) if you need advice and/or are looking for remote Django-focused work.
It’s still copied, but a process can quickly become a bottleneck in parallel code (every request to a process is sequential).

An ETS table can be concurrently read (and tweaked even further for that use case if desired).
Also, people doesn’t seem to know about the separation of power. The US is definitely not the best example from the point of view of a totally democratic state, but a financial system does need some kind of “admin account” to actually dispute/enforce the agreed upon law. This is not solved by cryptos at all.
That's more or less it. Also

- it might be that two shots 6 months apart are more effective. i.e. skipping the 2nd shot in the 3 shot series would be fine.

- it might be that a nasal vaccine would be more effective than an injected one. We just don't have one of those yet.
The intended url is presumably https://mikerourke.dev/blog/robust-software-if-statements/
Much more thoughtful than yesterday's blog post addressing Moxie's concerns.

I wonder if the quality of conversations around this subject were improved if similarly to conflicts of interest declared by scientific paper authors, each public critic or supporter of web3 would disclose whether they are currently financially invested in 'crypto'. For outsiders it's harder to tell apart hacker/geek types from speculators and lurkers (not that there couldn't be an overlap). The fact that this article mentions there exist much fewer Ethereum nodes than "Ethereum nerds" may suggest that the non-technical group controls the public discourse and expectations.
i have worked on both TLS and blockchain tech for years.

my point is that the purpose of the security architecture proposed in the article is to authenticate data from the chain. this is a protocol-level detail: like TLS secures transport between a client and a server, light clients authenticate data between a validator set and a user. whether a particular person or group decides to use such a protocol, or if they decide to censor data, is a separate concern.
I wish Django had an equivalent to Rails' "unobtrusive Javascript": https://guides.rubyonrails.org/working_with_javascript_in_ra...
Being condescending is not nice, but some people have it hardwired as part of their personalities. For example, people who suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
> I personally can't wait for a way to easily and quickly give money to someone which doesn't involve Visa or MasterCard

Is that really the only way for many people? Where do you live? In most European countries you can connect your bank account to Paypal. And many countries have sms/phone number based transfer systems.
This pandemic is very strange mental-wise, all my doctors note that. The US, as far as I understand, has huge lockdowns and that may be the factor, but in my country it's called "an advisory self-isolation" and everyone basically lives their life like before, except wearing masks in public places and mandatory vaccination to visit a mall or a restaurant (also "manageable").

I'm not a social person (age almost 40), and I ought not to feel any consequences of that, cause even a strict lockdown wouldn't change my life too much. And I have a friend who isn't particularly stress-prone (a former warzone guy, 4 kids, a strong mindset).

And guess what, we both experienced numerous acute panic attacks in 2020, without realizing what it was. We both have called an ambulance and thought this is the end of me, only to learn later what panic attack is. And we both never got covid. Doctors say that it is a very common phenomenon to observe. Idk about him, but my mental state I find pretty questionable now, because something induces anxiety in it non-stop from the spring 2020. I don't watch TV, neither read on pandemic situation consciously. Visited therapist for a whole last year.

I can imagine what all that does to regular people, and probably can't imagine what teens may feel about it.

Can anyone share similar observations, or am I just a coincidence?
Jabiertzo (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUGfBZ3WiiqCc_UfcF_RrRA) is that you?

:)
I guess it’s downvoted because same as with data collection, average user doesn’t understand what costs are associated with the mining.
What's the benefit of having the URL permanently stored on the blockchain in that case? If I have to download the original file as soon as the transaction completes to make sure they don't change the photo on me, why bother?

And then what am I spelling later? A transaction immortalized in a block chain with nothing more than a broken URL and, at best, a hash of the original file?

Edit: I realize I sound a bit dickish in how I'm replying. Don't take it that way, I'm really confused at how NFTs solve anything but really appreciate the conversations here and am glad to hear differing opinions!
This is a disproportionate comparison

Flying your modern aircraft doesn't depend on a lousy app that requires your "username and password" and probably doesn't even know what a pwd salt is. And if it goes down you can still fly (or keep flying).

You won't get cut out of replacement parts unless you're in a sanctioned country (and they do have ways of sourcing the parts).

Yes the agribusiness are ok with this, they know how to handle it (but you'll bet they'll have a lot of angry calls and lawsuits in some cases). Small farms on the other hand...
One advantage of REST is that it's easier to use from a programmatic client perspective; this might become useful if you want to offer an API to third-parties.
You can be anonymous but you can't do much without creating accounts all over the place because companies want to know about you and get paid.

But if you pay with crypto-currency you are in effect authenticated everywhere where crypto is accepted.

Identity is history. You could have multiple separate "anonymous" identities on the web, but that is not the same thing as no identity because associated with each account there is history. Think about credit history. You want good credit history. You don't want anonymity. But banks etc. don't really care who is paying the bills as long as they are being paid on time your credit history gets better.
Sure, but if you have a semester to talk statistics and climate modelling, you will be able to caveat the information with plenty of 'this has been simplified' warnings.
It works for me, it’s the only way I like to write programs, so I don’t know how to respond to the notion that it’s totally impossible. It’s not perfect, it has its own difficulties just like any way of doing things.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

There, I just sent another 50 souls to rationalist hell.
Even when doing things by hand, making a duplicate alongside the original is not much more time. That happens to me every time I do something by hand.
I'm pretty sure that you can pop down to the search bar and type "TLS too inefficient" and see that, in fact, they did. there was a large period of time where TLS was not widely deployed and where it was viewed as not likely to be deployed, due to marginal performance reasons
You know what's extremely puzzling to me? That you think I disagree with you. I don't. I completely agree in fact.
Your initial argument sits pretty squarely in a camp or class of person that dismisses medication for mental illness. If you meant mental health medications have been overprescribed I think I even take issue with that. Anyone who’s been in that world and has been on any kind of mental health medication knows it’s not usually the first pitch thrown by mental health professionals.
> But back to the point, rules on legal costs, punitive fees and so on, all fall down when "the boot is on the other foot." There is no way for the small guy to take a big guy to court if legal costs are always paid by the loser, never mind punitive damages.

It's a good point, but I think you can solve that by just giving the judge discretion to scale the punishment appropriately.

> Equally while it's popular to default to evil-corp (with good reason) it's also important for big-Corp to have, and be able to defend, their intellectual property.

This is true as well, and I think if its a good faith disagreement on the law, the other side should pay the legal fees of the winner, but no more than that. But this case seems like bad faith, and I think we should be more aggressive about punishing that.
For interested, scroll down to the second from last paragraph, where the actual reference can be found.

I never noticed this, but if true, it makes sense. The whole Mrs, Ms and Miss is a relic of and old era.

Marital status of a woman should not be part of public pronoun.
The real question is why are so many people still getting married? Marriage offers little upside to outweigh the vast number of cons, especially if you're in an economically superior position compared to your spouse.
Good for you if your products do well. But making logos and such is your job as PI if you want it to happen. It's certainly not your students' job. They're here to learn academic skills and advance the field, not to make products that do well. Any material advantage they get from that should be incidental, and not a goal in itself.
Bulgaria Freelance Taxes: Detailed Breakdown
Also in Italy we use a lot the sms. Since they’re free for almost everyone with all the mobile phone plans.
I don't know what a self-hosted service that lets every user have power over the instance would look like, but the original argument was that IRC gives you ownership over your own server.

Hell, the "no say over the owner" argument isn't even restricted to self-hosted services, there have been numerous cases of a discord admin nuking the server over some petty drama.
I remember Clifford Stoll in The Cuckoo's Egg had an observation that went something like this:

The astronomer's thought I wasn't that great an astronomer but a great programmer, and the programmers thought I wasn't a great programmer but a great astronomer.

So maybe Stoll appeared as a T-shaped person to others but a line to himself?
Flipping that script is bad ass! Sounds like stuff for a separate post.
Apparently, the author wrote this tool because jid was struggling with a 7MB JSON file.

See https://github.com/simeji/jid/issues/66#issuecomment-4436718...
I used to subscribe it. Ended up cancelling a couple of years ago because even though it does give some coverage on what's going in the world, most of the articles aren't anywhere as deep as I'd like them to be. There are also lots of very shallow, write and forget type of articles. I'm having more luck with the Financial Times but they too gone off the rails a bit.
To confirm their own assumptions as to how the media operates.
Heh. Can you imagine the world-wide debate over whether or not we should reach out to the alien intelligence?

Apparently, SETI's policy is to NOT respond. Which makes sense to me.
All of the above are already utilized, to varying degrees of success, and lack thereof. I believe in this stuff but let's be real, we're exploding fossil fuel to propel a camera into space. Baby steps for global consciousness.
IRC is a protocol, not a service. The alternative discussed is slack/discord, where you sign up to use their service. You can pretend that TheLounge is IRC and then it's just the same as slack/discord from a user's perspective. I don't see why that's horrible UX.

I keep an irssi session running inside a screen session on my server and SSH into it to use IRC. Since IRC is a protocol, not a service tied to a specific client, I have that option. I can't do that (easily) with slack/discord. I consider slack/discord to have shit ux because I'm forced to use their bloated clients that waste tons of screen real estate.
It will be near impossible to get tenure if one develops T-shaped qualities. You simply cannot amass the number of grants and papers necessary when dancing on several academic parties, or even doing devops. I've seen too many PhD students doing that and then hitting an academic dead end in their first postdoc or directly after graduating.

It's great for the PI if they have T-shaped students on their team, but they must make it clear to those highly talented people that academia is most likely not for them. Which puts in question whether it makes sense for them to do a PhD at all.

The problem is, the PI has hardly an incentive to tell these valuable, lowly-paid and highly motivated people that they made a bad career choice by starting a PhD.
Did you just coin the term web4?
> Virtue signalling is at the core of everything nowadays.

An interesting thing about this phrase is that virtue signaling is obviously good (it's an important leadership technique) but is only ever used as a negative term.

Also implies "vice signaling" should exist as a positive term, but I've never seen that used.
Aren't modern notebooks a form of Knuth's style literate programming, are there any differences? True, they are more mainstream in analytics where there's a need to explain concepts/results more than the logic of the code itself.
When the advocates seem to focus on the monkey JPGs, it's not surprising. What do you think the state of the art in web3 innovation is?
You’d think CEO would resign after Windows(which they charge for) started showing ads. It’s not inconceivable that they’re going to offer mining or NFTs in the next couple of years. Especially considering there’re loads of people who think they can get rich from it.
Oh I don’t disagree with your comment about integrity. I just don’t think good work is enough in the corporate rat race. I know when I’ve done good work and I’m proud of it, and I do my best to put good effort into whatever I do, but I’m not naive enough to think that somehow that’s enough to get rewarded at work. Working for someone else is a combination of doing good work and managing expectations. Sometimes good work isn’t enough, or even needed.
I love what little Haskell I’ve managed to pick up. That being said, I’ve come across bugs and poor practices in published libraries just the same as in any other language I’ve ever used.

That is to say, “Nothing is idiot proof given a sufficiently talented idiot.”
It should, but it may need to be tuned to run aggressively enough, which can be tricky. Sometimes it's easier to just schedule a manual job that runs during your off hours. There are some interesting discussions on the Postgres development list on improving VACUUM performance [1] and other improvements to the overall MVCC mechanism to avoid the need for VACUUM in the first place if possible [2]. Postgres, like any complex system, does have pathological cases. It helps to keep an eye on performance and learn the system as your database grows. But it's good to see the community is thinking about how to improve the situation.

[1]: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CA%2BTgmoZgapzekb...
[2]: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CAH2-Wz%3DsSvMX5H...
Books like this sometimes feature in humble bundles.
> Rather, all of the messaging apps should interoperate with something better than freaking SMS/MMS and whatever this stupid email hack is the carriers have come up with.

In another comment I explained why SMS is so bad on Apple devices. I'll copy paste that here:

To text with non-Apple phones, iMessage uses SMS over the cellular network. This is pre-smartphone technology. A few years ago, SMS was upgraded to RCS (still over the cell network though). Lots of features were added. But Apple refuses to update their old SMS implementation in iMessage.

Now on the other hand, to text with other iMessage users, iMessage uses Apple's own proprietary iMessage protocols over the IP network (the internet); Just like Telegram and WhatsApp does. Apple refuses to bring iMessage to other devices and doesn't let other messengers implement it's proprietary iMessage protocols.

I hope you realize, the reason you have a substandard experience communicating with Android users is because Apple wants you to.
> I think this a very evil, ignorant comment. Sincerely: You should be ashamed of yourself for posting this.

I suspect we would all be better off if we were kinder to each other and assumed the best rather than judges each other in this way.

Before the internet I doubt most people would be called ‘evil’ in their lives, now it’s almost punctuation.