skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are parts of the US that don't use first past the post voting. NYC is one prominent example that uses ranked choice. Many of these alternative voting systems make it easier for a candidate that is not part of the main two parties to get elected.

Also even if this party does not have success, just by running they can change the other candidates policies
Yep, a lot of mini-problems that are generally relevant. I also show "real-world" code for every concept. Then they can see how this is applied in the Standard Library or other popular Python libraries.
Source? At least the first gen Dishys have nothing of the sort, though they will draw more power when covered with snow - presumably due to increased attenuation and the need for higher radiated power to maintain a link.

Mine idles around 85W, 100-105W when transmitting heavily. Basically all that heat goes into the flat surface of the dish, which is enough to melt off snow. But it's not a dedicated heating functionality, and I've not seen a teardown that demonstrates a dedicated heating device.

Though I imagine a cat attenuates the link a good bit and encourages heating.
You're right. And bitcoiners have been saying this from the very beginning of the crypto madness.

A global, government agnostic money like bitcoin that no group of insiders and early adopters have unassailable control over, seems like the only likely candidate for something that needs a truly decentralized and trustless blockchain.

The rest is hype.
Exactly, People on all extremes of this just cant seem to understand the simple reality that “the market can bear it.”

The market can bear smart contract platforms whether that platform writes to a proof of work system, a faster distributed set of nodes, or on localhost with port forwarding.

It doesnt matter! People like to deploy that kind of code on a platform that can be accessed that kind of way.

If there isn’t a token then people DDOS it instantly, with smart contracts that take up too much processing cycles or memory. Simple. People dont want to use limited fiat payment rails to attempt to preallocate resources, it doesnt work very well at arbitrary amounts, it ceases to be permissionless and the author is agreeable here: its been 13 years of this other solution and is an international hit!

Think about developers on Shopify’s app store that try to sell to ecommerce merchants. Its the same people with the same goals! Sell tools that theoretically make someone else’s life easier. Extract value because commerce exists. Thats really valuable. Thats exactly whats going on in blockchain. Just because you and your friends are taking linear bets with your capital and cant quantify why things go up way too often really has nothing to do with the people that built that tool for you who are taking little basis points here and there.
Starlink dishes don't have a dedicated heater inside to melt snow. I don't know where the author of the article got that idea from. They are just power hungry and produce enough waste heat that it's not a problem.
I'm not aware of any serious financial application running at scale and relying on blockchain under the hood.

Are you? What is it? Specifically.
I agree it's probably easier to fence individual stolen items.

OTOH, I think your argument assumes criminals are lacking creativity... and that the police care and/or have the resources to track $8K worth of headphones. If $8K of headphones are stolen, how many % of total headphones sold on eBay/CL/FB/etc. per month is that? Also, who says they have to offload all the headphones immediately? What's to prevent a "criminal network" or a single person from creating 20 different eBay accounts, each selling one pair - location: obviously not near where they were stolen from. Repeat process once per x months or just wait a few months until the heat is lower. Or perhaps pass the headphones on to a larger "criminal network" who can resell them all over the US. Also on eBay one could just say "shipping from northern California" when in fact they are located in Southern California - who will verify that? Also you could take a few pair to pawn shops... some might even take multiple pairs at once. Also someone could gift a bunch to friends/family. I'm sure there are tons of tricks criminals use to offload stolen goods.
And he was right of his critique.

Of course, he's saying all that after pumping and dumping his personal centralized crypto crap MobileCoin into Signal.
I don't know, a blockchain?
First, wow, I'm a little hurt by that. "Mutilation" is such a strong word for safe, sane, and consensual body modification. Are you so bothered by a body part that only 2 people and a few doctors will ever see?

Second, it depends what you mean by sex.

I know that I probably won't ever bear children, and I don't want to.

I know that I probably have XY chromosomes, and I don't care.

I know that my skeleton looks masculine, and the only people who matter don't mind.

But I also know that I enjoy having breasts, and I have wanted a vagina for years. The same way that anyone else wants to have a nice car, or be respected, or be loved, or be successful. There is no deep "why", I just want it.

I am not planning a vaginoplasty so that I will be a woman. I am planning a vaginoplasty because I want to be a person with a vagina. I only transitioned socially because it felt incongruous to present in a highly feminine way and still be called a man. I don't take estrogen so that I'll be a woman, either. I started taking it because I wanted to have breasts, and now I have breasts, and that makes me happier.

How do you think dysphoria works for people like me?

Do you think I could achieve enlightenment and stop wanting a vagina? I don't think I can. I think, in terms of time, money, and QALYs, a vaginoplasty is much cheaper than enlightenment. Good for you if you were able to achieve enlightenment and conquer dysphoria without medical intervention.
Individual contributor. So writing code yourself, not managing other people.
Didn't pg write Viacom (shopping cart software) in 1995, and sell it to Yahoo in 1997?

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
What about compulsory licensing for music being expanded to cover tv and movies?
cool - I also hand crafted a CSV parser following RFC4180 a while ago, not sure if you have a repeatable way to benchmark the performance difference?

https://github.com/varchar-io/nebula/blob/master/src/storage...
> They still burn something and produce carbon for most of their power

Where did you get that statistic from? According to the 2021 data[0], Germany got 40.9% of its power from renewables and 11.9% from nuclear. I suppose you could be arguing that biomass "produces carbon", although that's not true in a net sense, or you could be arguing that these figures only relate to electricity production, not all types of energy, but that's also misleading because the article is about electricity.

Still, I would agree if you had said "nearly half", and if you had said "1/5" as the statistic for lignite. As you say, hopefully the extra imports come from France's excess production of nuclear energy, and not from a country whose grid (at the time of import) is even more CO2-producing than Germany's.

[0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
>To be explicit, the reason blockchains exist is to have a globally consistent database that doesn’t require trusting the operator.

which I mean when I think of that I think - that would be really useful for crime because you don't want to trust the operator because either 1. they're a narc 2. they're a criminal.

it's also useful for currency because not trusting the operator allows you to keep them from turning into paypal.

but then I just draw a blank on what it is useful for after that.
Some blockchain technologies are highly centralized, but even then I think it's more like an "active/passive" configuration than a truly centralized system. If the system goes wrong, it's still easy to move to a different one.
Following the same logic, the late 90s were not the web “early days” because the web started in the early 90s
Uh, 2001 happens to be the year that Amazon became the biggest bookseller in the world, having been founded five years earlier. That's literally about as mainstream as you can get, and it was half a decade.

Whether or not you agree with the arc of the linked article, the basic facts are correct: blockchains have been with us for a decade now and haven't done much or made anything that wasn't itself a speculation about blockchain.
I was being generous to the poster, but also I was assuming hourly was not salary but rather a contract/freelance rate.
Also take a look at Cloudron.io. It's not open source, sadly (source is available though), but it's basically what you describe.

In terms of automating things like handling certs for you, I'd say Caddy or even my own boringproxy.
Calling these Covid tests is disingenuous. They're PCR tests for viral fragments. We all know someone who had a positive "Covid test" and never showed any symptoms.
What is the big picture then? I've never got anything concrete that doesn't sound like the usual buzz word snake oil.

Blockchains solve the wrong problem for a lot of the proposed applications I've seen, like handwaving about "supply chain". The biggest difficulty is not that you don't trust the database, it's that you don't trust the connection between the electronic data and reality. How do you trust a person to have packed the correct grade of meat into the box you are buying? If they've dutifully recorded something on the blockchain and you can verify that nobody has tampered with that record, it still does not help you.

And if you have regulation to ensure supply chain steps comply, then you trust the regulators, then you can have a central database.

Crypto coins are unique in that you can verify them mathematically. They have no connection to anything else out in the real world so they don't have that problem.

So aside from coins, where else is it that you would not trust a central database, but you can verify/trust the entries being added to that database?
> But I don't understand why people get so invested in it being a scam or failure.

Can't speak for everyone. But from my perspective, it's because certain "applications" are being marketed very heavily to non-technical people who aren't able to reasonably assess the viability of the technology. I'm thinking of NFTs in particular. The only other popularized non-NFT applications are cryptocurrencies, which are pure speculation (i.e., gambling).

In short, that's a moral issue. People were outraged by the Madoff scandal (and others), and this doesn't look a lot different to people who understand the underlying technology. Nobody wants their mom going broke because they bought some hyped-up blockchain thing on the advice of some super-hustler internet marketing influencer out looking to make a buck.
A book I liked that intersects with drugs, history, and South America was "Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography" by Dominic Streatfeild.
It's hard to ask broader questions without it feeling awkward though; "what do you do" is so cliched it's "approved" small talk. Whereas something like "what are your hobbies" or "what do you dream of doing" or "what motivates you" feels very personal. There are some in betweens, but they all will likely be interpreted to mean job in the same way that "what do you do" is interpreted that way (despite being open ended).
Now you're making the argument against "leave it up to the states."

Laboratories of democracy work great when different states have different characteristics or preferences. It makes no sense to have a federal minimum wage because a living wage is a vastly different amount of money between New York City and El Paso, Texas. Maybe people in Massachusetts prefer to have high taxes and a lot of government services and people in New Hampshire the opposite.

But if something is a right, it's a right everywhere.
Given the price point these are selling at, the target market of “people without reliable electricity” seems a bit off. Shouldn’t this the MSRP be $10-20? It seems more like it’s marketed as a novelty to rich westerners…
Why 432 Park is my favorite New York building – Stephen Punwasi
NFTs are set up in a centralized way.

Every time there's a bull market in cryptocurrency, the charlatans jump out of the woodwork. They build a bunch of websites and scam a lot of naive people. When the market reverses, these project disappear one after another, usually with people's money, sometimes because they don't actually solve a problem. Almost every one of these NFT grift projects are going to disappear over the next year or two.
> Blockchains are good when there's a lack of trust and decentralization is absolutely necessary. There are very few problems that actually need a blockchain.

How about the current status quo of the Internet? Do you think being mined, sold, and endlessly tracked is OK?
Excellent management sort of covers it but I think good work life balance should be an option by itself.
This is particularly timely after the Taliban routed the US in Afghanistan in May to August of last year.

An interesting thing here is the central role played by energy in this analysis; this article was before the fracking boom (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil#/media/File:US_Crude_... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubbert_Upper-Bound_Peak_..., which shows the US fracking boom, though not the recent decline) and before the last factor of 8 or so decrease in the cost of solar panels made them cheaper than fossil fuels in much of the world. So it predicts Iran and Russia will be "energy kingpins" in 02025, which doesn't really seem to be in the cards.

Maybe China will be an "energy kingpin"—it could cover the Gobi with PV panels and run HVDC, which might be outside the state capacity of countries like Perú, Saudi, and Libya which control vast desert territories on paper. But, so far, despite installing more PV capacity than the entire rest of the world, China's PV capacity factor is a disappointing 13%, compared to 29% in California, so it's apparently making terrible choices about where to site its solar farms. (Still better than the 10% you get in Germany or the Netherlands.)

For the last 2500 years the "world's reserve currency" has been gold, except for the last 77 or so. That could easily happen again. Bitcoin was kind of gunning for that position, but China's thoroughgoing rejection of it forecloses that possibility for at least a generation, and Bitcoin could easily cease to exist in that time.

Although the knowledge of this article's author about computer security seems to come from Hollywood, the computer security situation is indeed extremely grave, and as more and more things become digital, any state that doesn't take it seriously and take effective measures to improve the situation is likely to be destroyed. Presently, that means every state in the world.

It's true that when financial and military collapse comes, they are likely to come very quickly.
I don’t think we even need to “get” web3/blockchain/whatever rebrand.

No one understands what it will be (and people involved in the space barely understand what is, as in what all exists, today).

But here’s something that is concrete to anchor to: there’s somewhere north of $1T floating around in blockchains today.

That’s an incredible amount of money and people that have problems that need technology solutions.
This is pretty misguided, if benightedly well-intentioned. People working on commercial software projects are ultimately hewing wood and drawing water, albeit with tools perhaps less clumsy and random than axes and buckets, but your project will not be more civilized for having heroes. Quite the opposite. Heroes are a sign of dysfunction and exploitation.

Lest I be accused of objecting to the mere frame of this blog post, I'll say that this post is little more than a regurgitation of numerous corporate training grafts I've been subjected to. By all means, encourage and aid your co-workers to become a bit-driving John Henry. Let their hearts die out in confusion over self-actualization and ROI. What are they but wielders of less-clumsy-and-random axes and buckets, after all?

Better by far than playing Yoda, would be to find solidarity with your fellow less-clumsy-and-random axe and bucket wielders. Consider clearly what you are doing, why, and cui bono.
From what I know of Tesla AI efforts they are doing essentially something like this.

The AI isn't trained to recognize a bike, person, car etc it's trained to recognize where it can drive.

I also know that they have revised the neural architecture more than once and that what happened 6 years ago is not representative of what is happening now.

There are so many different ways that this can play out but assuming Tesla cannot figure it out or that everyone is doing the same thing is a mistake.
A community of people dedicated to proving that Switzerland does not exist
Schrödinger's CRCs (2010)
I think the person you’re replying to is making a tongue-in-cheek comment.
Like lead for instance?
I don't think it's such a big deal, honestly.

I'm not a native speaker. I need a linter, not just a spell checker. I need a hint when I mix UK and US spelling and expressions, or when I use overly formal grammar and outmoded expressions.

To me, inclusivity is just an extra hint to add to the linter. You can choose to ignore it as I do other hints in PyFlake or jslint. The AirBnB JS rules made me a better programmer. Perhaps a similar tool could make me a better writer.

Whether or not you enjoy this aspect of our modern age, it's fair that a modern tool offers solutions for this age. Deliberately excluding a useful feature is as much of a statement as including it.

Next, I'd like to see more tools that encourage plain, unambiguous writing (like Hemingway), and rid us of the notion that business should sound fancy and elaborate. If more communication had the tone of the NHS website, the world would be a better place.
The proper metric is tests/feature - most test code bases are so bad you can't even pick out what feature is being tested, due to a blind adherence to 'code coverage'

It is the equivalent of spot checking a road 100 times for cracks but forgetting to make sure you put up stop signs at the intersections - I honestly believe if you are a tech lead or boss advocating this you should be fired on the spot for encouraging dangerous and malignant practices...
Funnily enough those screaming it was engineered loudest also were the ones saying it’s just the flu and we should react to it by not wearing masks.

I propose that what we really see is that humans have a very hard time without someone to blame (hence victim blaming, hence religion and a whole bunch of other coping mechanisms).
No. But you don't need blockchain to solve that. Things like BitTorrent work perfectly fine without the needless blockchain element.
At the inception of leap seconds it was unclear how well they could be predicted, but the agreement required 8 weeks of notice as a minimum. Since the inception of leap seconds the rotation of the earth has accelerated, not slowed.
"Non-deterministic tests" usually refers to a test whose output depends on the execution environment in a way that cannot be controlled. For example, a multithreaded test with a race condition, or a test that uses the real-time clock.

This is fundamentally different from a test that uses random numbers. Another way to look at it: Deterministic tests can be used in `git blame`. A unit test that uses a specific PRNG algorithm and sets the seed is fine. A test with a race condition is not.

Fuzzing is very useful, but it's not unit testing. If you want to run a fuzzer or some other kind of endless randomized testing in CI, it should be a separate job from the unit tests (IMO).
Curve Finance with $14B locked to its platform. Serves up low slippage stablecoin swaps.

Some background on Curve (and Convex): https://medium.com/coinmonks/convex-curve-curve-d7e28cd6c1d9
I'm still very opposed to the idea of taking a technology and then searching a problem for it. Why? Back in 2017 during the first hype cycle, blockchain companies raised hundreds of millions with ICOs. I became very interested in the technology too, and some friends still work in this space. 4 years later in the web3 era, there is not a single product aside from trading/finance that got traction. Use cases like storing the history of a car on-chain, transparent supply chains, public voting... this all sounds interesting but never made it to product-market fit.

I always assume that I'm wrong, so I'll keep looking for successful applications and I'm sure you can prove me wrong :)
That's reductive of my point. The overall being one's choices for a new smartphone are iPhone, Android, or abstain. When the parent comment elected Android for "ethical" reasons those reasons would not include the labor conditions of the phone's manufacture since that doesn't vary between most Apple and Android phones.
I'm okay with a ban if you don't want me here.
Just purchased it. Capitalist Realism is great as well.
Have you looked at TFA? there are some tweet messages of people using it
> It's very much an open question what the "correct" set of restrictions should be, and that list has changed over the course of US history

…which is the point of Federalism. The point isn’t what I think is important, the point is what we decide collectively as a country. And when such decisions are made, everyone must go along with them, because that’s how we accomplish goals. You can’t row a boat across a river if half the people on it are rowing in the wrong direction. However, if you decide you want to go back to shore, and everyone agrees, then the system should support that too (ie repealing prohibition).

For other stuff that the fed govt doesn’t care about, leave it to the states, and for the stuff the states don’t care about, leave it to the people. 10th amendment.
I don't think the complaint is about the lack of new ideas for coins. No shortage there.

There have been a lot of prototypes, trials, testing, and scams, but not a lot of hits.

The only major exceptions are the same old cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin and Ethereum) where the same old arguments still apply.

Part of the problem here is that, with no centralized authority, it takes much, much longer to make changes. Perhaps that's what the author is missing and that's why we're many years in without the kind of success you might expect for a web technology that's not destined for failure.
Off-topic: interesting that we often see IANAL, but very rarely IANAD (I am not a doctor) around here. Either there's a lot of doctors here, or people are more comfortable giving medical than legal advice, which is weird, as medical advice can have very serious consequences.
And I'm over here wondering why we don't just migrate with the seasons.
Was anyone advocating we adopt the 19th century factory model as our economic system?

No one ever claimed that period was great, but you’re somehow arguing that the past for peasants was all roses when it wasn’t.
...that quote doesn't say "never change." It says that "look[ing] at what we need to thrive" is a "more likely" way to change, rather than trying to "look at what we need to...change."
There's no evidence that they are being used to breed plutonium. In fact the BN-800 burns a mixture of uranium and plutonium to reduce their weapons stockpile.
'Zooming out and seeing the big picture' seems to mean buying into a libertarian vision of the world where the current money system is horribly broken and blockchain technologies are a viable and superior alternative. I profoundly disagree on all points of that analysis.
pipestroika!
object.__setattr__=lambda x,y,z:None

if we do this, the state will surely wither away![0]

[0]: Doesn't actually work :(