skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tons of business/trade with Ukraine that will evaporate immediately. Trade promotes peace and unity. This alone is enough to raise this as a political issue in the US. The same thing with the other NATO countries right now.
Considering how often vaccinated people spread Omicron, wouldn't it be unwise to let them act differently? Almost everyone I know who has gotten Covid in the last couple months has been vaccinated. Doesn't seem like there should be special rules since they're only spreading it more by thinking they're safe.
So far the biggest "feature" of crypto seems to be the lack of regulation that more easily enables scams. This appears to be more appealing than any other feature, to the point where well-natured crypto projects spend a considerable amount of time educating people on how to avoid scams.
There are some fundamental problems that no distribution can solve (not even Nix). Every level of abstraction has its own set of dependency issues, yet there exists no abstraction or concept that handles conflicts in every one of those levels. There are a lot of hacks and kludges used by Nix in order to try to get there, but it's only most of the way. We've hit the limit of what we can kludge.

I think the future of software dependency conflict resolution requires a fundamental shift in software design. We have to start new paradigms for software where handling interoperability with conflicting dependencies is a first-order feature of all systems.

BerkeleyDB is a famous example of conflicts. You can't have one BerkeleyDB database shared by multiple apps designed for conflicting versions of BerkeleyDB. If you have two apps doing two different things with the same database, but they use different versions, you need two separate databases.

This could be solved if both the database library and the applications were written with a version-independent abstraction. Regardless of the API/ABI, you have the app say "what versions do you support?", and then "you want v3? here's your interface", or "you want v4? here's this other interface". Internally, each app/db will use its own interface, but a translation layer will handle the v3 or v4 layer, without the application even being aware of it. As long as one of the apps is newer than the other, that newer app will have backwards compatibility with the old app. We won't need to install multiple stacks of dependencies (ala Nix) because different versions of apps will just be compatible. When in doubt, install a newer version.

At first this seems unworkable. What, require everyone to constantly support every old interface?? But I think we can start over with some new concepts and primitives to handle the majority of use cases so the programmer (mostly) doesn't have to think about it. We already have relocatable versioned ABIs for things like Glibc where it advertises what minimum/maximum version it supports. We just take that a few steps further and make backwards compatibility the default. Maybe we get new build systems and new ways of linking and calling code, and ship old code bundled along with the new? We need new research to develop these new methods, because the current system we're dealing with has no more fixes possible.
Preference is evidence. There is no obligation on others to validate your feelings by debating the merits.

Indifference is just fine as indifference is biologically possible.

There does not have to be a debate; agency cannot be forced.

Hacker News does not have to make you feel warm and fuzzy about every technology.

K8s and Kilo or Linux and Wireguard; boom federated

Web3 is an alternative option for machine state but it’s not the only one. It does not need to win or be debated.
Is it thought? Can’t web3 be, for an example, patient health data in a ledger? Who says it has to be tied to a monetary value?
"no evidence of this" is too strong of a claim. The folks who argue that fiat currency is dead, or should be dead, are implying they want a world where fiat currency disappears and then cryptocurrency emerges as the replacement. In that scenario, it is correct to say that some people are trying to force crypto on the rest of the world.
It’s pretty cool that I can send a text message to someone without an authority intervening, not to mention that nobody can stop the transaction from happening. And then they can print that out onto a sheet a paper or share it with all their friends.

Encryption is really great if you’re a terrorist or some kind of pervert.
Lower end of pay and almost zilch for job opportunities without a PhD, at least in the US.
Criminals use dollars, not crypto. You would not want to use a technology whose main selling point is a permanent, public ledger of all transactions.
It is definitely not immortal. If the price goes to 0, then miners have 0 incentive to keep the blockchain going. More realistically, once the price is sufficiently low and 51% attacks become viable, it has effectively died.
Digital cash gets a look from the Fed
https://defuse.ca/triangle-of-secure-code-delivery.htm was published in July 2014, which included Userbase Consistency Verification as a requirement... so I think that's when the use of transparency logs in solving this problem was earliest recorded.

But I'm no internet historian, so I may have missed something.
how are they supposed to come to your aid through hostile territory? its so much easier to protect you when you are within the borders.
The article points to a Facebook post that considers this method and then is subsequently invalidated [0].

The argument is that the continued fraction representation for sqrt(N) grows as O(lg(N) sqrt(N)), making the representation blow up.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/bshlgrs/posts/10215278471769811?com...

[1] https://mathworld.wolfram.com/PeriodicContinuedFraction.html...
I’m sad because it was keeping a lot of people out of competing with me.
I think the impedance mismatch is because some things are really simple, but are not documented in a way that is discoverable by someone who doesn't know, and is searching in the paradigm they do know.

I was trying to figure out how to install new machines from a central build host. Neither the straightforward install CD process, nor system.build.qcow2 made sense. I popped into the IRC channel to ask, and it turns out a 'nix build' 'nix copy', 'nix-env --store --set' and 'switch-to-configuration boot' did the trick. That's an extreme amount of power and simplicity that just kind of obviates a whole set of heavyweight processes (eg Debian automated-install). But if you are searching around for the usual type of automated install process, you just come up empty handed looking for it.
Current logic:
There are hospitals that are forcing covid positive staff to work but not letting staff that has had covid already but isn’t vaccinated work.

Similar logic: shutting down nuclear power plants and then complaining that there isn’t enough power.

More similar logic: allowing decades of fuel to build up on the bottom of forests and then expressing befuddlement when wild fires burn out of control.

What’s the common thread here?
A list of appeals to authority. I guess it is the centralized mindset.
You might draw comparisons to the stock market. The Dow Jones lost 90% of its value in the Great Depression, but we didn't do away with the stock market altogether. We fixed the structural problems because there is clear utility to the trading of corporate securities.
> Jury is still out on whether it can survive a prolonged bear market.

One thing we know for sure is that it ain't gold since it moves with the market rather than against it.
Actually the people of El Salvador are being forced to partake as their country is buying BTC reserves.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-21/el-salvad...
Can't disagree with that but it's important to draw the distinction between private companies that stand to gain from Bitcoin adoption and Bitcoin itself. Bitcoin does not have a say in how those companies conduct their marketing. It's not Bitcoin's fault if it is sometimes misrepresented.
Any cool innovations genuinely offered in good faith by web3/crypto are confounded by all the bad actors.
> You rejected one because they had a lower SAT/ACT

…due to where they were raised, and not because they were unable to do learn.

> It sounds like you want birthplace to be a major factor in admissions though.

I’m not sure how to address the problem without taking that into consideration.
So is encryption in general. Same technology that protects us also protects them.
In defense of complex games:

My favorite part of a game is discovering it.

I'm in it for the easy "a-ha!" moments and as soon as it starts to look like a particular game is going to have to become a whole thing for me to keep getting those from it (by moving on to "competitive" levels of play, memorized strategies, et c.), I'm done with it.

Complex games often throw enough variables in the mix to keep things interesting—to me, anyway—longer than simpler games. A lot of times all that's just smoke and mirrors, but it's effective smoke and mirrors.

> Small, highly-focused games tend to develop much more interesting metas.

Right—which is precisely what I don't want. If I need to start deliberately practicing or reading books or something to get better at a game, that's a job, and I don't want it.

[EDIT] Just to be extra clear, I'm not saying this is "the right" reason to prefer a certain kind of game, and I'm very aware that lots of people want the exact opposite: a game they can play for life, taking it very seriously, and never stop improving because the depth of play is practically unlimited. That's just not why I play board/card games.
Will do. I love cooking in front of the stove as much as anyone, but I am _never_ making risotto on the stove top again. The Instant Pot isn't any quicker start to finish, but it saves me 30 minutes of constant attention to the rice ladling in broth.

The IP has its uses, and for those things, it's a great tool.

Oh, it's also really great for making flan.

There's a gazillion recipes for it online, so I haven't worried too much about that.
> Counting Netflix as a FAANG makes absolutely no sense and we should just pretend the N stands for, oh... I dunno.

I always mentally treat the 'N' as standing for Microsoft. The letter isn't right, but FAAMG isn't as easy to pronounce as FAANG...
You are correct that it's very hard to find an apartment with access to an outlet, but it's less of an issue than you would think.

Having owned a Tesla in San Francisco and street-parking it for 2 years without access to a charger, I treated it much like one would with a gas-powered car: I went to the charging station about once every week or so and "filled up". The only inconvenience is that it took longer to recharge the car than to fill up an ICE vehicle. Everything else was the same basically. I never found myself in a position where I couldn't charge the car.

After I moved to a place where I had access to an everyday power outlet (120v, like you'd plug a desk lamp into), it pretty much eliminated my trips to the charging station.

The ONLY time it was every a question was when I took a trip to visit family in a rural part of the country where the closest supercharger at the time was 2+ hours away. My family doesn't do a lot of driving, so it was easy for us to just plug my car in and I had no problem leaving.

I ended up putting about 40k miles on the Tesla before I sold it, and I have no qualms about getting another electric vehicle.
How about how they convert to useable local currency for day to day operations? Off ramps are still guarded unless i'm mistaken.
I am so non-techie it hurts, but I've come to realize that the only way I'm going to get my projects (100+) off the ground cost-effectively is if I do it <at least the basics> myself. How do you recommend I do this without using most low-code tools (I don't trust the premise) or tearing my hair out????

Any advice would be appreciated-
Connecting networks with overlapping CIDR ranges using Aviatrix on GCP
I work in a relational lang as hobby. I have seen as many sql replacements as I can, and most commit some or many problems. The biggest one, IMHO, is they stay as constrained to be "just a query lang" removing any hope to be useful at large.

In mine, the lang IS actually composable:

https://tablam.org

for p in products ?where #price > 0.0 do
print(p)
end

let top10 = products ?limit 10
let positive = ?where #price > 0.0

for p in top10 ?positive do
print(p)
end

BTW, this is not new. This is more or less how was with FoxPro (with more verbose syntax, but same feel).

Instead this, like many other attempt, make "relational language" be embarrassed to be an ACTUAL programming language. And it looks more like a clone of GraphQL than of SQL, btw...
Not as an investment vehicle but as a savings vehicle: it did better than the average 800-year old bond or 800-year old company share. Numismatic premium aside; the gold maintained its value throughout war, tyranny and pestilence. It would presumably also survive a G8 summit ordering major internet providers to block port 8333.
Ask HN: Why does everyone wants to be an entrepreneur?
Applications for new businesses rose 20 percent last year, YC applications more than doubled, and business schools report increased interest in entrepreneurship [0]. It looks like people are starting their businesses because the pandemic made them think that now is the right time to do it.

As a founder myself, I'm glad to see the soaring interest in entrepreneurship. But statistically, the majority of them will fail. An economic downturn could further accelerate this.

Why do you think so many people are currently starting businesses in spite of this high failure rate?

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/everyone-wants-be-entrepreneur/
https://www.edmunds.com/most-popular-cars/ suggests that the Ford F-series is the most popular car in much of the US, and a quick search for its price suggests that the prices of some typical configurations are somewhere around $40k.

The top few results mention $29k, $35k and $53k, and the highest price I found in a 30 seconds of glancing was >$90k. Of course, one may still regard that as crazy money, no matter how typical. ;)
There's a new version of this:

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-7437-8
> NFTs - yes you can right click and save as. No they haven't figured out at scale how to attach the image / work to the ledger. Yes hype and pyramiding is a fucking disaster and people would go to prison trying those antics in any other industry. But digital art, music, & culture has a real deficit in ownership, provenance, etc.

There are several NFT "thought leaders" who have casually floated the idea of eliminating "right-click save-as" functionality for NFT'd images. So it seems to be slowly evolving in the direction of a DRM scheme.
Phone providers in Germany pass on customer data despite court order
"that every other decision he's made deserves intense scrutiny"

When it comes to calculated risks, its sadly a good bet that a judge wont be held accountable. This particular case got national attention, but judges do questionable judgements all the time that flagrantly ignore the law and nothing ever happens to them. This judge didnt really make a bad bet based on the information he had about what he could get away with. And the odds that he will face any kind of adverse action are small.

What is very interesting though, is that both left and right wing sources are lambasting this judge. (albeit for ideologically very different reasons) So he may actually receive some kind of adverse consequence if noise about it continues to ramp up.
I find it remarkable that a 2hr18m YouTube documentary that is mostly a guy talking directly to the camera has racked up 1.2m views in 2 days.

https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g

(It's an extremely well presented video, but still!)
> equivalent of having a nice cuppa on a cool, late summer's morning, while looking out the window at the long, brown grass swaying gently in the breeze

Obligatory BBC Shipping Forecast, because it seems right up this crowd's alley: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CxHa5KaMBcM

Recent: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qfvv/episodes/player
You're correct on staffing savings, but not on Ops savings.

I delved into this pretty thoroughly last month - https://medium.com/@rykrk/everything-is-just-build-vs-buy-d7...
depends on how frequently you need a car. I drive maybe 3 times a year. that's ~2k in gas/rent fees. that's less than insurance assuming each rental is for a week. never mind the cost of actually buying the car.

in practice I spend maybe 1k every year for cars. primarily for vacation. which owning a car wouldn't absolve me from spending.
> The relentless number of anti-crypto and anti-web3 articles on HN is tiring.

It's not really cryptocurrency that is fueling it. It is the absolute silliness around NFTs and the rush to import some "blockchain" to otherwise uninteresting products and companies to make them somehow relevant. This is a pattern we saw a lot with prior trends like search, cloud, machine learning and AI.

> Thousands of teams are exploring ideas on many different fronts (e.g. L1s, L2s, NFTs).

Skepticism is what happens when the thousands of failures start failing. There are sure to be some winners, but the space is overheated, and the silliness that has ensued over NFTs is the kind of thing that happens when a space gets overheated.

> Isn't that what Hacker News should be about?

Yes, but part of that is realizing that maybe your time is served better by hacking on something else where there are not thousands of failures happening. I don't see this as unhealthy community, it feels like maybe the market is maturing and you are going to get that signal earlier here than you will in the general market. Why? Because a lot of technology elites are here.
Mr. Yuk
It's interesting that the Metric temperature measurements aren't in Kelvin.
On this note. This recent video is probably the most detailed and incisive critique of cryptocurrency and NFTs that I've seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

It not only covers the technical limitations, but also the ideological flaws.
A large amount of knowledge is required to be a great programmer. The choices of what to learn are far more than anyone can learn in a lifetime.

C++ gives a good abstraction for very low level operations, and has a great long term backward compatibility story. As such learning the details can be useful for anyone doing low level work over the long term. Rust is aiming at this space but doesn't have the long term track record (yet?). There are hundreds of other languages that you can also choose from with pros and cons. No matter what language you choose though, because low level details are important to you, you must learn fiddly low level bits to some extent as when move vs copy is used is by nature important.

Of course part of this is about age. C++ goes back to the early 1970s (the C roots). In that time a lot of things have change. We have learned not to do things that seemed good. We have found better ways. The way hardware works has changed. What is important to speed has changed. Compilers now do optimizations. Whatever language you choose today will look dated in 50 years.
My vague understanding is Web3 will be distributed assets being loaded by people who have wallets that can receive small funds for distributing them and users that have wallets that can receive a split of the proceeds from providers that are orchestrating ideas+assets into user data that is valuable for marketers.

I don't actually see why people are skeptical of this, people who don't care about "data ownership", "distributed web", etc have incentive by some "free" money, decent amount of political incentive for some people to move to less "centralized" authorities of discussion and online socializing, and a growing political incentive for "privacy and ownership of your own data".

Whether you care or agree that it's a problem, or if it's solving any of the issues and arguments has very little bearing on actual adoption of this stuff when being able to get "paid" (even in shitcoins) for seeing ads/seeding assets/doing computations when AFK, is alluring and marketable to a lot of people and I think there are enough smart folks that want to figure out a way to get a more distributed web along with a profit model that I don't know if i'm as bearish on this iteration of "web3" as the comments on HN tend to portray.
From a couple minutes of quick googling I see that both Harvard and UNC consider legacy as part of their decision making criteria for admissions. If racism may have prevented some students from entering either of these institutions 1-2 generations ago then that racism is affecting current applicants. I'm fine with universities dropping race-conscious admissions but they should also stop considering legacy status at the same time.
Communism is an economic system too, so I suppose one could acquire capital and hire laborers under a communist system, using this logic?
How to build and run your Python scripts in a web browser
eBay: https://www.ebay.com/b/Scanning-Electron-Microscopes/185223/...
It’s like anything else, people get into law and chase money without thinking about what they are getting into and why the pay is so high. Don’t feel sorry for them, a bunch of type-a types killing each other for sport is by it’s nature a stressful endeavor.

Even in public sector, the mental toll of dealing with criminal prosecution and defense is high. Alcoholism is rampant, all sorts of personal acting out / implosions are frequent. (High-flyer prosecutors and corp counsel people in local government are looking for money indirectly through political aspirations or access.)

It’s the price of admission to working your way into a more elite strata of society. It’s much harder than the old fashioned way.

People who find a less lucrative, but sustainable, niche are like any other professional.
Sorry for commenting to myself!

I wanted to add that I have also taken part in marriage guidance. That counsellor was also a woman; I remember her describing me as "a tough nut to crack". This was the premier marriage guidance outfit in the UK.

It seems an incredibly stupid thing for a trained counsellor to say; who wants to be "cracked"? It certainly alienated me from that process.

Perhaps most of the men these people encounter from troubled marriages are objectively arseholes, but I doubt it. I don't think many arseholes go to marriage guidance, and I don't think they engage with mediation. I know that many psychotherapists are people who have been through therapy; I wonder if these cousellors and mediators are women who have experienced spousal abuse themselves.
If (hypothetically) I’m anti-crypto, why should I care about defi, which, as I understand it, is all about trading crypto for crypto?

e: This isn’t meant to be a rhetorical question. Ever since Mark Cuban tweeted something about some loans that defi enables I’ve been wondering why I should care.
For me, sex started to become fun around 1998 - after my first time.
Tonga volcano triggered record-breaking lightning
>> But in countries with deeply unstable economies and authoritarian politics, it is a lifeline.

Or a crutch. It may be allowing some countries to stagger along with support of a grey/black market rather than collapse, wipe out debts, and install new leadership. And it may be the worst type of crutch: one that you trust to hold you up but will one day snap and injure you worse than before.
>This probably should be made clearer, but: Reproducible builds are necessary for the security of any such system. It's outlined in earlier blog posts.

>Consequently, the inclusion of reproducible build verification is taken as a premise.

That is a bit funny. We have had issues making the PHP package reproducible on Arch Linux for years. And I believe upstream has rejected patches which embeds uname into built artifacts.

I'm a bit unsure about the premise considering upstream doesn't seem interested solving this?