skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Having the promises of blockchain sold to us for years now without a single, useful purpose for it in sight other than, well, cryptobros.

the issue is that we show the things being made and hn calls them all scams and ponzis and fraud.

we show the rates adoption, and the growth in use and hn says its all speculation and fraud and needs to be made illegal.

we point out that crypto is in many ways doing better than other industries to represent marginalized communities and we all get labelled cryptobros and any of us who arent that get erased from the picture.

if we post anything positive linking to a twitter account that account starts getting endless abuse.

there are very few people who bother coming to hn anymore, pretty much everyone working in the space has given up on it.

We have automated stable currencies, permission-less loans and lending, streaming payments, UBI experiments, co-ops governing land use, automated taxation and public goods funding experiments, sybil resistance mechanisms for 1p1v governance, resilient p2p infrastructure that people are using every day to pay each other and run their businesses. Composability for all of these things to quickly build your own business logic on top of it. Standards for tokenising royalties/payments/tickets... All running on p2p infrastructure anyone can participate in. Thats pretty amazing imo.

At what point will what we've been building be considered useful?
If you took any of these things and wrap it in a saas startup connected to stripe hn would eat it up and claim its the greatest startup of the decade.
but because its built on crypto it can only ever be world destroying disaster capitalist alt-right incubating cartoon villain fraudulent vc led scammers right? its just so tiring.
vitalik buterin has entered the room
lol! I think we're all uploading to the NSA's cloud service, whether we want backups or not!
Not your main point, but bottled water is not progress. Clean tap water is more sophisticated and efficient.
Blockchain is being used in supply chains (IBM tradelens) for immutable record keeping, NFT's (outside of selling URLs to jpgs...) are a good application for certificates of authenticity (some artists are selling their NFTs WITH a physical copy and using the NFT as the certificate of authenticity).

Any application where you need an immutable ledger is a good application for blockchain. Just because crypto enthuisiasts are trying to shoe horn this technology into anything and everything doesn't mean the above isn't true.
Currently I run a freedbsd zfs nas as well. I had planned to do something similar but I wanted to allow the places I store backups, some access to the storage. In your example, it would be your parents. I figured it would be a nice way of saying thanks. I was thinking syncthing or something. How do you do NATing?
Microsoft Nears Deal to Buy Activision
There are plenty of website builders out there. Most of them allow to create without coding and get a mobile-friendly, responsive website. They have been around for many years and are proven.

So kindly ask: What's the reason why someone should be interested in your product?
I was "out of the loop", too - until I read the article. It's all there, just a few paragraphs down.

Even if you believe the "maximize shareholder value" line - it is the very definition of the CEO's job to prevent stuff like this from happening.
except those KYC and AML laws still apply to the companies making the transfers. And some of the regulators are extremely aggressive in their enforcement.

so your company either has to set up its own KYC/AML compliance department (noting that this is often a regulated profession) or it is probably breaking the law.

International bank payments are slow, but they are also reversible and compliance is not your problem.
Ways to save an image from your webcam in 2022
Microsoft Buying Activision for $70bn
Used to be the case for Steam with their official "no refunds" policy, but unofficial "you get one refund" policy..?

But is it just a rumour ? How many times is too many ?
It's been over a decade and I still find this joke amusing:

> @wilshipley git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space.

* https://twitter.com/agnoster/status/44636629423497217

(It's a 'spoof' on the Monad joke.)
They confirm _salary_ ?! How on earth is this not private information? When negotiating salary for a new job, the employer will sometimes try to coerce you into giving this info in order to low-ball you and now all they have to do is call your former employer... wtf

And yet I'm sure they try to keep anyone still employed from revealing their current salary to their coworkers.
It would be interesting to work out the "how much is too much" limit when it comes to watching arknob/RT.
> All the interest in Bitcoin is in the price going up.

For years I have been interested in blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies for what they are technically and what they could enable, not what profit I can make. There are certainly others like me.

There's some really fascinating stuff being worked on in the cryptocurrency community, things like ZK-SNARKS or automated market makers. The original bitcoin paper is at the very least an interesting and novel solution to the double spend problem.

I think I could make a similar argument to yours about how the vast majority of people in the hackernews community are just there because they want to become rich. Or perhaps how the vast majority of anti-cryptocurrency arguments break down to soemthing like "I didn't buy bitcoin, so I don't want it to become the currency of the future since I will have missed out on being rich". There are elements of truth to both of those, but they're both pretty uninteresting takes on an interesting topic.
What you're describing is the central concept in Computational Complexity Theory. It's how complexity classes like P, NP, #P, etc. are defined.
I've been one for over 20 years, and wouldn't trade for FTE, ever. What you describe does happen, but usually it's the reverse. In financially hard times, companies often downsize their biggest expense -- employees. They can control costs easier by instead hiring consultants, to whom they owe no benefits or long term financial commitments.
Satoshi vanished more than a decade ago. He didn't get to comment on what became of his creation.

The current state is:

* Bitcoin (BTC) development is driven by a very small development team.

* Main discussion spaces (eg, /r/bitcoin) are owned by a small team.

* NFTs are almost exclusively sold on centralized marketplaces with the capability of banning a NFT from it if they don't like it.

* Miners aggregated into something like a dozen relevant mining pools.

* The main way of obtaining BTC is at large, centralized exchanges. Who often hold your balance in a database and not in the blockchain, because BTC transactions are expensive.

Yup, he completely fixed it. Rather than trusting an elected government in BTC people put their trust in whoever now gets to commit to the github repo.
Tangential discussion: my daughter recently asked to look through our family videos and we've been getting through them the last few nights. It's wonderful. Both kids are enjoying seeing themselves being ... themselves, embarrassingly unbound by the learned shame and anxieties that come from moving into teenage-hood.

I'm glad my backup and storage setup has stood the test of (thus far a relatively short) time.

Most videos are from mobiles, and I use syncthing on each device to automatically back them up to NAS. The NAS has an external USB drive to which back ups are directed, plus another NAS in the shed as a secondary on-site backup - which also has an external USB HDD that gets backed up to. All of the backups other than mobile device to NAS via Syncthing are done with crontab'd rsync scripts.

I then irregularly rotate portable USB-caddied HDDs from my parents and in-laws houses and backup to them as well. This rotation is well overdue, thanks for the reminder.

I don't do cloud. It feels too ephemeral in the context of my history with online services - I change my mind and switch around a bit, and lose interest here and there. I'm the kind of person who would host their own email server if I wasn't already gigabytes deep in a grandfathered free custom domain plan from Google. (I do actually host my own email server using Citadel, but it's a domain that's very rarely used and entirely non-critical).
Seeing the OPs question, I'd might add another feature which I feel is tricky.
Backup of data is pretty simple (I guess most HN user could easily make an simple upload/backup app for photos quite easily).

- But what about searching...
That moment when you're looking for a specific moment or latest photos of your dog? or pool to find a specific pool.

- Dupe detection.

Those unique features that for example, Dropbox is an inferior tool for the job.
Are you saying they can't ever be hired again then?
I (well the whole family) use iCloud and Google One & Photos as a backup. I stopped using Amazon Photos, well, paying for it given that it syncs the photos just fine too and I have the videos in the other 2.

Every 3 or 4 years I get paranoid and I make a backup in a random HD drive that it takes me days to find, which for a backup it is not ideal.
Not the person you're replying to but also a consultant. While I realized this is an extremely privileged position, the above does not ring true for tech consultants in general.

I know this is all anecdotal, but the pandemic has been a huge boom to tech consultants. Yes, some companies fired theirs, but also a massive influx of companies seeking help with completely new systems and procedures, especially by people who are familiar with remote work. 2020 and 2021 were my two best years by far (like one order of magnitude).
11 Years of ToaruOS
hmm, given the amount of milk they had available, hmmm
Annoyingly, they were also unwilling to refund me when I wasn’t able to even start to download a game I’d bought for over a week, due to a faulty console update patch. After over a week of back and forth emails (pointing out that I hadn’t yet lost my right of refund), they fixed the issue.
I hope you bury a reader unit as well :) I bought two units of different makes and do small tests like once a year after computer/os updates, just in case...
It replaced sublime text for me for scripting languages like PHP, bash and stuff. I still prefer VSCode for js/ts and native IDEs for compiled languages.

I love it.
“You need to use git diff --cached to see what is actually in the index: the staged changes.”

Like LOTR, everyone has more than one name.
I think this is like the difference between homeopathy and medicine. If you're sick and go to a doctor, you have a chance that the doctor will find a way to cure you. If you're sick and go to a homeopath, there's no chance that the homeopath will find a way to cure you. Similarly, peer review has a chance to catch errors before they make it to print, while absence of peer review has no such chance.

Peer review is not infallible, neither is it a mark of scientific quality, as you say. I appreciate that people tend to use it like that- you read, in articles in the lay press, that such-and-such study was "not published in a peer-reviewed journal" as if to say that we can't be sure of the quality of the study and that, conversely, if it was peer-reviewed, we could. That's not right. Peer review is not a sufficient condition to guarantee correct results. It's not even a necessary condition. Like I say in my comment above it is one mechanism of modern research practices that helps improve the quality of published papers.
I had the same problem building Kakoune on more elderly systems, and settled for building a static binary on my own machine that I could then run on shell accounts on other people's boxes if the toolchain isn't new enough to build in situ.

kak locates its runtime library relative to the binary path, so it works fine in ~/bin & ~/lib or ~/.local/bin & ~/.local/lib even if your home directory is different on different machines.
The most important question I have is: will they replace Bobby Kotick?

EDIT: "Bobby Kotick will continue to serve as CEO of Activision Blizzard. [...] he and his team will maintain their focus on driving efforts to further strengthen the company’s culture."

Shame on you, Microsoft.
> I can't imagine that there's a single area of land on earth that's remotely as smooth as the surface of an sphere

Salar de Uyuni - "As a result, the variation in the surface elevation over the 10,582-square-kilometer (4,086 sq mi) area of Salar de Uyuni is less than 1 meter (3 ft 3 in) normal to the Earth's circumference".

That's less than 1 in 6371000 - pretty smooth, no?

> That's too prone to terrain irregularities

Nah, it's still doable, especially on that^ salt flat - if you have two close holes and a 3rd one 55km away, a flat earth will let you line up the laser through all three with less than 2m of adjustment. By my rough calculations, on a spherical earth, the laser will be ~250m above ground at 55km - pretty obviously proving the hypothesis incorrect, no?
Microsoft to buy Activision Blizzard for $68.7B
Welcoming the Legendary Franchises of Activision Blizzard to Microsoft Gaming
In my experience and from what I hear, the rates are nothing like working for yourself - just the usual distribution of salaries for what you work on. If it's SAP consulting, yeah you might earn well (Germany - SAP stuff pays like 50%+ more).
> I find it interesting you use the word 'other' here, as usually this is said when trying to frame a dehumanisation argument, where the 'other' is a suppressed minority of sorts

Interesting, maybe, but definitely correct. The unvaccinated are routinely dehumanised and you even do so in your own comment.
> There is no other conceivable reason why

Perhaps there is no other reason you can (or are willing to) conceive, but that does not make it fact.

A major issue with cryptocurrency and blockchain discussions is that vocal proponents speak as if they’re arbiters of truth with perfect knowledge of the the world and everyone who doesn’t subscribe to their view is an envious dunce. They speak in insults and talking points and seem to be more interested in sounding superior than having a conversation.

Humility and openness to be wrong are sorely lacking, but both are needed for a good-faith dialogue.
https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2022/01/18/welcoming-activision-...
I made an Android live wallpaper with a similar premise:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.machineryc...
Yes, since WoW it was basically not Blizzard any more, but Activision-Blizzard ("ActiBlizz"), a quite different company...
While I don't think you are wrong, and that is a very common viewpoint - in my own experience I always preferred fixed price jobs - but you do need to be careful about the projects you choose.

I love the freedom of just building what the client asked for, without tracking my hours and billing for them. Some projects I might spend more time on them - beyond what I had estimated - just because it was a fun project, was learning something knew - or knew it was something I would be able to leverage up with for the next project.

On the other hand, sometimes projects would turn out easier than I thought, and be done in less time - and would end up making more money that I thought.

It does help if you are good at estimating - I always thought it was one of my strongest skills; rarely was I off much - but my general rule of thumb was estimate how long it would take to do, and then add 25-50% as profit margin (or buffer if I was off). Can't remember it ever turning out bad for me in a financial sense, though not all clients are nice to work with.

Always worked out OK for me, for small to medium size clients and projects - I wouldn't take on a 7 figure project on fixed price, but once you get into this sized projects - getting the project 'done' usually has many, many layers of different stakeholders who might choose to jerk you around and who are very removed from the actual delivery of the project - i.e. legal, marketing, some guy in purchasing that enjoys squeezing vendors for no reason etc; but smaller companies often you deal with 1-2 stakeholders that are easier to communicate and can make final decisions and who are happy to have the predictability of a set price.
with money everyone has an agenda.
the biggest thing i've seen from blockchain is the emergence of stablecoins.
we will definitely see digital currencies being normalised globally.

but since bitcoin doesn't have any central authority it's not really fair to conflate the purpose/value of btc, blockchain tech with idea of cryptobros/scams/ponzis.
You're not wrong. I get more stressed when I can't just think and live in the moment. Not that we should ignore the big picture, but life is the moment to moment. Trying to live like all we do is what people post on social media would just lead to a downward spiral.
That's what I did! I saw a lot of people recommending doing basically:

const $ = sel => [...document.querySelectorAll(sel)];

But then you get to it and are adding a lot of classes, so you might add a couple of helper methods:

const addClass = (col, cls) => col.forEach(el => el.classList.add(cls));
const removeClass = (col, cls) => col.forEach(el => el.classList.remove(cls));

addClass($('ul li'), 'list-item');

Oh and you might need to inject content before/after, that's a bit trickier but thanks to the classic You Might Not Need jQuery[1] we know how to do it:

const insertBefore = (col, html) => col.forEach(el => el.insertAdjacentElement('beforebegin', html));
const insertAfter = (col, html) => col.forEach(el => el.insertAdjacentElement('afterend', html));

insertAfter($('ul li:last-child'), 'New todo item');

Keep going a bit like that, until you realize you are basically reinventing jQuery but pretty badly, undocumented, and untested.

Add a couple of very nice-to-haves, like chaining (instead of nesting in these examples above) and prototypes and that's what Umbrella JS is, very thin methods to manipulate the DOM and handle events. In fact, compare our "addClass" implementation in this comment to Umbrella's addClass[2], it's almost the same size but hundred times more flexible:

// Add class(es) to the matched nodes
u.prototype.addClass = function () {
return this.eacharg(arguments, function (el, name) {
el.classList.add(name);
});
};

[1] https://youmightnotneedjquery.com/

[2] https://github.com/franciscop/umbrella/blob/master/src/plugi...
What's your point? That doing illegal shit will strip you of your rights?

You know, I hear that if you go around stabbing people, you lose the right to not spend a bunch of time in prison, too.
No, you've got the distinction right. Many folks don't understand that difference. Many consultants crank out a lot of code, but they also do advising, planning, recommending, analyzing,...
can second Dicio to give Vosk a try. For a local model it worked surprisingly well. But you can't yet mix languages mid sentence - difficult when searching for restaurants that have english names but are not located in a english speaking country.
Let's be real, the anti-cryptocurrency arguments are something like this: It eats to much energy so we should ban it (just like gaming! Oh wait...)

Meanwhile we suffer from a hugely incompetent global payment network that is horrible to deal with and makes some creators actually opt out of receiving donations because of the sheer annoyance and complexity of the system.

Yeah, we all want it to use less energy and perhaps we'll get there. But not by banning blockchain tech.

The fact that Venmo is free, is the problem, how can you deliver value for free... Because it's not free, the value is extracted elsewhere. I thought we were past this.
Avoiding common mistakes in your Ansible Playbooks
Haven't used it yet, but want to set it up when I get some free time:

https://photoprism.app/
Not if regulation is a smoke screen and the real cause
Peer review is important but lets be sure to not conflate it with the established way it operates. There is nothing that says peer review can only happen through submitting to an established Journal that conducts a traditional peer review process. We already know that process isn't perfect so there is no harm in looking to improve or replace that. Does that mean ArXiv as it is works as a replacement? No, and you make some good points why it doesn't.
> I value job security, and therefore a financially secure life, over any of the benefits this consultant has.

As someone who has done contract work for most of my working life I think it's kind of the opposite.

When doing contract work you have the option of having multiple part time jobs. Not everything is based on full time yearly commitments.

You might choose to do 15 hours a week for 2 different gigs, or maybe 4x 10 hour ones. Or maybe you have a few where you do 2 hours a week (code review type of stuff) but you have 3 of them.

Any of the above combos could be range from 1 off things to sticking around indefinitely. I've had so many multi-year contracts, those I like because it's quite stable and lets you maximize your hours on doing work instead of finding new clients, reading new contracts, etc..

You're diversifying your income streams. If one goes away you're not left scrambling to find another one as soon as possible and you can continue paying bills with your income instead of dipping into your savings.
That's true in the US. For many in Europe, it's the other way around.
Have you?

Financial crises have been more severe, longer, and more sustained since the introduction of central banking. Let us also not forget that the industrial revolution and the extraordinary growth of Western economies in the late 1800s were mostly conducted under free banking without a central buyer and lender of last resort, and in some jurisdictions where a central bank existed it was regulated to follow a strict gold standard.
This is alot of words to repeat what i said. He never came out against vaccines and even supported them recently (to right wing ire). He clearly views their existence as a credit to him and will likely campaign on that point in 2024.
200-250 on average, bigger when working fulltime (average around 28-30h a week)
I honestly think the big issue here is using Java for these use-cases. I know that sounds flame-baity, but I'm being sincere.

Java is a very primitive language. For the vast majority of its life, it's basically been C + basic classes + garbage collection.

As a result, it's very verbose, which is totally fine for a low-level language. But, when building large, high-level, business apps, it's just a weird fit. I think that's why we see all of these annotation-heavy band-aids on top of Java (Lombok, Spring, JPA, etc)- it's because Java is actually not the right tool for the job, but instead of migrating (or inventing) a better tool, we just sunken-cost-fallacy ourselves to death.
You are responsible for your actions. What you fund, you encourage.
For perspective, elsewhere in the world it's already been rolled out - in some cases with less buffer than is proposed in the US. The carriers have already delayed their rollout multiple times and the FAA still hasn't been able to prove there is an impact, rather they keep issuing defensible statements that it could have an impact despite having had years to work on this.
The name Blizzard is still magical to me. As the maybe 15-year old playing Warcraft II and drawing strategies on a piece of paper.
I don't play computer games anymore. But it was magical.
I would hope so. It's easy to finish a game in 30 days, so the system is ripe for abuse.

Assuming that the games have progression achievements, GOG can easily see (a) how much time you spent in game, and (b) how far you got. If you choose to abuse the system, you're going to lose the privilege.