skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The answer is pretty straight-forward. Every time we tried this before it collapsed into a giant ball of flame.

Nothing crypto is producing is new.

We've had stablecoins before in the form of wildcat banks. [1] They were backed at some point by barrels of nails with a few flakes of gold on top, and what little gold there was, was spirited around from bank to bank in front of the inspectors. That ended predictably.

We've had "ICOs" in the form of blue sky securities. [2] Companies that did nothing sold on the premise that you could simply sell the shares to someone else for more money. That ended predictably.

We've had "high yield investment platforms" in the form of actual honest-to-goodness Ponzi schemes before. That ended predictably.

We've had free reign access to leverage to buy more securities before - it led to the Great Depression. We had rhypothecation of securities and totally baseless collateral generation before - it led to the Great Recession.

Crypto hasn't created anything new fundamentally, it's just re-hashing all the stuff we outlawed before because it was an objective breeding ground of fraud and crime and grift. The only thing new about the crypto economy is that the pitches are structured as "${previously_failed_idea} except on the Internet."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_sky_law
First paragraph intro is helpful for understanding if you want to bother opening the PDF:

What this paper is about and for whom it is written.

In this paper, we try to explain that mathematics as a scientific discipline enters the period of crisis. In plain words, research level mathematics is becoming too complex for human comprehension. This has serious implications for mathematics education, and our paper is written for everyone who cares about it.
Since the beginning of covid i I have been living with 2 friends in a shared house. The house is 1600 square feet, 105 years old, only has one bathroom. And you know what? We get along great, with a yard, space to play music, and shared cooking responsibilities (its just as easy to cook for 3 as it is to cook fr yourself!)

For the same rent I pay I could live in a tiny studio apartment with a non functional kitchen and a view into someone else’s non-functional studio, and I would go totally insane. But the tiny studio is all that is a large part if the new housing stock in my city (seattle) right now, with no sign of stopping.

My take is that our collective focus on individualism has somehow tricked people into thinking that living alone is an important component of success, and people seem to want it at the expense of having a functional life and functional community.

I understand we can’t all live in (multi family) single family housing arrangements, but it saddens me to see that new construction doesn't make space for more shared living. It is cheaper, more efficient, better for mental health, arguably better for children, and wildly unpopular.
I think this is more clear cut than unlimited PTO policies that companies tout (I try and avoid working for companies with unlimited PTO because it often translates to "what your boss determines is appropriate, and if they think it is 2 weeks then you are out of luck").
But yeah, people taking it will depend a lot on company culture. If none of the higher ups take advantage of all the time, then the rank and file will see that as a signal that maybe they shouldn't take all the time.
"I doubt that the 'must accept' is part of the definition"

You can doubt it all you like.

https://thelawdictionary.org/legal-tender/

> Legally required commercial exchange medium for money-debt payment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender

> a form of money that courts of law are required to recognize as satisfactory payment for any monetary debt

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/5103

> 31 U.S. Code § 5103 - Legal tender:

> United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues. Foreign gold or silver coins are not legal tender for debts.
Humans more than any other life form seem to constantly be playing with social, economic and political self-organization. How energy is distributed and what is fair. We’re a highly social almost hive-like species that is constantly trying out new hive patterns and arguing about them.

Crypto is useful because it lets people play with their own schemes and nobody can stop them. It seems like most uses of crypto are for some form of token gated community.

While token gates are a valuable concept, it is true that many communities themselves are not worth joining and are inflating their perceived value.

I do think that the recent spate of critiques are fairly poor also. Critiquing antiques like bitcoin or lolling about say early DAOs falling over due to bugs doesn’t really make a compelling argument.
I have worked ~ 10yrs in each.

Larger companies can have better structure and mentoring available. They can also have more resources and work on more impactful problems. Public companies can have more liquid equity if that is part of the compensation.

Smaller companies can often provide opportunities with more customer impact earlier in your career at the cost of drinking from a firehose and with less resources available. Total comp wise, on average, startups will pay less because their equity is often illiquid and ultimately worthless, however the home runs can pay dramatically more than a large public company will.

I self identify as a roboticist and a generalist. Holistic systems thinking can be very valuable to a broad range of businesses in my experience. Keep learning the mental and mathematical models of your field and it is likely to payoff.
1. To have a unified (S3-compatible) interface across clouds storage backends

2. To use the same deployment code everywhere. If you're multi-cloud, maintaining different storage backends is complex.

Also, you can deploy Minio backed by either your own storage (like AWS EBS) or as a layer in front of cloud storage (S3, GCS, etc). So even with the Minio interface on top, you are still using managed cloud storage.
Like how they spoke up about surveillance, misinformation, manipulation, tracking, walled gardens, monopolies, dark patterns, demonetization, censorship, encryption? Technologists don't rely on voice and speaking up, code is louder
No doubt. That's why we need to beat these companies into submission until they do the right thing. For, you know, society as a whole.
shadowbanning. Twitter says they don't shadowban[0] but they absolutely do if you tweet things that trigger their sentiment analysis algorithms:

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/comments/p1ggm4/rtwitter_at...
I worked as a project manager doing construction contracts for federal and state governments at one point for nearly a decade.

My take is that more tax money might not necessarily get better results. At least not at a cost in proportion to value realized.

It would also take capable leaders at multiple levels extremely focused on end results rather then various forms of grift, and those would be fought every step of the way by numerous and very clever trough feeders.

I don't know the answer but certainly we can do a little better with what we have and eventually we will have to. Or do without. There is no free money in the end.
Fed should have hiked rates or started QT a year ago. Even 6 months ago it was pretty obvious the economy was rapidly approaching full employment.

Feds policies led to artificially low interest rates which juices prices. But the prices become sticky when rates rise again, which they are now.

All locales should allow for greater density, and YIMBY attitude needs to prevail over NIMBY. Plenty of people would love to live in small place in a great neighborhood. It's exclusionary and increases wealth disparity to prevent construction in desirable areas. Though denser zoning can actually be lucrative to homeowners (landowners).

Government could also easily curb investor activity in residential by limiting the amount of leverage investors can use for buy and hold rentals. E.g. investors need to put 50% down if it's a buy and hold, and not just a flip. This would clearly kill large amounts of speculation in the SFH market.
And healthcare. And education.

And I'm convinced that if these basic necessities were fulfilled, the US would see a dramatic reduction in crime and violence.
«We're in the early phases of it»
I've been hearing this for years now.
How long can something stay in early phases ?
> To me, $8 represented 40 round trips to the beach by streetcar, or 80 admission fees to the movies.

I guess we can be impressed that round trip municipal public transit is now cheaper than a movie admission fee.
The leviathan is loose and it's never going back in a pen until the whole thing collapses under the weight of the fraud. Even legal restrictions on it will only help a little bit as enough moneyed interests are invested in keeping the hype train rolling.

I've consulted for several companies trying to do blockchain based non-money things and can't emphasize to them enough that no one outside computer science and math fields will ever associate them with anything but cryptocurrency (and thus scams) for the rest of our lifetimes.
I didn't know that, but that makes sense.
I'm Google's public liaison for Search, and I communicate on this stuff all the time. Typically I'm most active on Twitter. You can always ping me here: https://twitter.com/searchliaison

I'm looking into the thread deletion, but I believe anyone who starts their own thread can delete it. That aside, as I shared elsewhere here, this is spam, not malware. We appreciate the reports and apologize our spam systems weren't doing a better job. We're working to improve that now.
I reported a security issue in Supermicro's IPMI implementation to them. They dismissed the issue and never fixed it.

These companies don't care if there's no way to stop a remote control service (iLo, iDRAC, IPMI) from binding to a motherboard ethernet port. In the case of Supermicro, you can't configure via the built-in BIOS, there are no jumpers you can use, and you must have a full network setup and installed tools to configure a new machine. This makes deploying in the field much, much more problematic.

If the BIOS battery dies and settings set are lost, the motherboard defaults to joining whichever ethernet is active, with default credentials. It's incredibly stupid and insecure.

I will never buy Supermicro again, but for the hardware that was already bought, I mandated loopback plugs for all IPMI ports so the IPMI wouldn't switch to the system ethernet.
This is hyperbole. We know private permissioned blockchain solves real world problems.
Why is Proof of Stake bad for the planet?
My goodness you read far too much into my comment: acting as though I thought every piece of sensitive information should be closely guarded to the death is...less than charitable.
The author also has a page with text descriptions for various animals in a similar vein: https://www.uliwestphal.de/retrozoology/index.html

> The octopus as a rule does not live the year out. It has a natural tendency to run off into liquid; for, if beaten and squeezed, it keeps losing substance and at last disappears.

Well, can't say that I won't do about the same if beaten and squeezed.

Also, another animal with plenty of wild depictions is the tiger. East-Asian paintings especially walk between hilarious and cool, and it's often clear that the artists didn't particularly want to see a real tiger close.

Itō Jakuchū:
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/14/63/f8/1463f891232e00f9165d05809...

Marked as ‘Meiji’, so fairly recent, but I like it: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/9e/d1/6a/9ed16aad46e17fcbe521d68e0...
Romania had something similar going on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caritas_(Ponzi_scheme)

> An estimate of Romanian newspaper România Liberă gives the amount of money involved as 1.4 trillion lei or about 20% of the 1993 expenditures of the Romanian government of 6.6 trillion. The New York Times estimated the scheme attracted between $1 billion and $5 billion

Anecdotally, people got involved in it fully knowing it was a Ponzi scheme, but hoping they could get their money out before the music stopped playing. And some of them did!

In fact, my first computer was bought by my parents with Caritas money.
> None of the people I know involved with crypto, including miners, daytraders, and HODLers, have not crushed the market in the last nine years.

This is what we call survivorship bias.

> Also, if mainstream crypto is a Ponzi scheme, how is fiat currency not?

This is utter nonsense.

Fractional reserve lending means that money enters the supply on loan. It has to be returned to the issuer, and once its returned, it blinks out of existence. The demand for repayment of the loan is what backs every dollar out there. Each dollar is fully backed by the demand to repay the loan that issued it and the social and institutional mechanisms that enforce this including the courts.

The attributes of a Ponzi scheme are:

1. People invest into it because they expect substantial profits, and ...

2. ... that expectation is sustained by such profits being paid to those who choose to cash out. And...

3. ... there is no external source of revenue for those payoffs. Instead...

4. ... the payoffs come entirely from new investment money, while ...

5. ... the operators take away a large portion of this money.

Go ahead and explain how that maps to the world's reserve currency. After all category (1) is patently invalidated because nobody holds USD expecting a return in USD. They expect to lose 2% on average to inflation.
But aren't the current users the problem?
thanks for sharing, never knew this. Got a good source to read more up on it?
Nuclear energy vs nuclear bombs? How you use it makes a difference?
Wow. I have no idea how I missed that. Mea culpa. Albeit those numbers are still radically different to the poster I replied to.
But scripts calling /usr/bin/python want to use the "system" / "bundled" Python - why would you want those to run with your version of Python???
Please try DomTerm (https://domterm.org). The 2.9.4 AppImage (https://github.com/PerBothner/DomTerm/releases/tag/2.9.4) should have the needed support for grapheme clusters and hopefully work on reasonably up-to-date Linux systems. Of course there are more recent fixes and improvements if you don't mind building from source.
Of course you're right. It's also a massive energy sink, in an era when the question of how that energy is produced matters more than almost anything else on the planet, for the very future of that planet.

And do you think anybody in the tech industry gives a shit? It makes easy money, and that's literally the only thing that matters to most people in our industry. The tech industry's general attitude is that all tech is morally and ethically neutral, and that we have no responsibility as to how people use or misuse it. If that's your initial position, what on Earth is going to make you care that most of the people in the blockchain world are sketchy and that it serves no practical purpose other than feeding into bullshit ancap ideology and making it easier to buy coke online?

HN is built off a VC incubator, which means that most of the people here buy thoroughly into free market capitalism and entrepreneurship as the heroic model thereof. So who's going to speak out about something they can pimp to Main Street as the new hotness and make a quick turnaround on?

I'm with you, man, but I doubt many other people are. But don't stop trying, by all means. Just from reading this, I know you have infinitely more faith in people, and people in tech especially, than I do, after 25 years in the industry.

Vaya con Dios, dude. Good luck.
i was once accidentally taking 25.000 IU daily for a few months instead of 5.000 (400-600 IU being official recommended dosages, although many sources claim that that's way to little, hence the 5.000). went to an endocrinologist for really weird bouts of whole body weakness and exhaustion after even light activity. nothing like i had ever experienced. lab results came back with a vitamin d level of the maximum measurement level (so probably more, maybe a lot more). that's when i realized i was taking 5 times more than i had planned. i looked up vitamin d toxicity and found fatigue and muscle weakness as symptoms and had the answer to my condition. i don't want to know what would have happened if i hadn't looked it up myself, because the doctor didn't even want to see me again, claiming by letter that my blood work was just fine. so yeah, pay attention to your supplement regime.
At this point the enthusiasts need to start getting very specific about how blockchains or cryptocurrency is making the world a better place if they want people to stop calling for it to be banned globally, because the explicit harms caused by it are piling up really fast.
There is an interesting, but very incomplete list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work#Classical_w...

Some of this would obviously be lost in a civilizational decline regardless of existence of extra-monastic science. But I mentioned books of Livy histories which would be preserved if people were actually interested in lay history of Rome, their supposed quintessential state. Today we cannot figure out many facets of Roman Republican system in like 1st century BCE and before. If Classical-style philology survived on a serious scale, we would get the second part of Aristotle's Poetics and more of the classic Greek tragedies and poetry. We have only scraps of Hellenistic philosophy (Stoic and even moreso Epicurean, Sceptic), and mostly only the Latin imitators, because again they stopped reading Greek and had to avoid these "suspicious" worldviews. The books on these topics, if you actually read them, have to largely rely on connecting scraps and conjecture. We cannot really say we "actually got their most esoteric and intellectually interesting stuff" with any certainty.

I think the point of monasteries monoculture stands, but it's really secondary. My main point is that cultural decline cannot be explained and nuanced away. Say, we wouldn't get the Arabic and Byzantine retransmission, and got only the things preserved in the West in 700 CE, would you also be so content?
Happy to take a look (next week, realistically, as I'm UK based) - you can dm me twitter.com/nickrw
We can judge it just fine as it's plain to see.

Take an account that attracts bots, Elon Musk is one of many examples. What do we see...

a) Hundreds of replies in the very first few seconds. It's humanly impossible to post this fast.

b) Replies share the exact same profile photo, typically of a well known original account.

c) User names are all a slight misspelling of a well known original account.

d) What they post is repetitive, same spam links and texts.

Every single pattern above, as well as combinations of them, are absolutely trivial to detect. But absolutely nothing is done about it.
> There are many conflicting views, and to me it is an objective fact that barely anyone really understands the technology and what its ramifications will be.

This isn't a new paper on quantum computing. Many of us understand the technology quite well.
As the tools improve, the craft and skill decreases. More people get into a field that are less idealistic, just for the money, not that its a bad thing, but certainly changes it.

We can see that in code, food, design, construction, education, woodworking, even tanneries.

Photography is a good example, it used to take 15 years of studying and 20k camera to take a photo that now an average influencer takes with iphone 13 for 2 seconds. (extreme example, even though there is more nuance, but it illustrates the point)

There are few titans and romantics that keep using the old ways, and it is still viable for them, but it is already done, there is no going back.

Technique only moves forward.
I don't think you understand what Bitcoin has brought to the table. Consider its fundamentals and its network effect. Other blockchain tech, most prominently permissioned blockchains, should be reprobated, since they don't require blockchain tech and could be better implemented using tech that relies on standard database systems.
I never understood this, because surely some huge percentage of developers use Macs. Enterprises buy stacks of them nonstop. Just making that group happy would get you the reputation of being a developers machine, for serious computer people, which could translate into laymen purchases too.
You're probably right. To really break the duopoly we need Ranked Choice and open primaries.
Easy: they can provide an option to remove the SD functionality at compile time, and if you really care about the executable size, you can compile the code with this option (and `-ldflags="-s -w"`). The standard build would still be the "all batteries included" one to avoid support issues (people downloading the smaller binary and then asking why SD isn't working).
I'm actually not a huge fan of the Beatles* but wow, I really enjoyed this essay.

* I think it's because they are simply so good (an the sense explained in this essay) that I just heard them too much over the last 50+ years and they have become as much a universal cultural cliche as, say, Shakespeare. I have certainly listened to them a lot, with pleasure, but not so much in the past couple of decades.
Today we have software that span 1M LOC or more, because there are companies
(software companies) who just sold software! so they can be payed millions $$.
Can a software company be payed well if it just ships a solution with just 1K LOC
or less?
Midsize SaaS here -- we switched from feature branches to feature flags a couple of years ago; major improvement in our process. Once or twice we've been tempted into foolishly "just this once" working on something out of a feature branch instead, and it always always always leads to messy merge conflicts.

Our React app just uses a simple home-rolled set of keys in localStorage; we have a "secret" route that lets users turn their own flags on or off, and we encourage developers to duplicate big chunks of code while working behind a flag instead of mixing old and new, to make cleanup easier.

(And yeah, someone does have to stomp around every few months and remind everyone to clean up their dead code again. Still worth it.)
They made a fair point. While it might sound nitpicky to you, they were trying to fine-tune one of the points because getting an accurate summary of the issue is how you start on finding the solution.
Let's hope it's more effective than their shitty covid vaccine.
Yeah, I read that. I wonder if in another 75 years we'll have become as much more enlightened about race as we did from the 1950's to now and look back on some of our present policies and practices with horror and disgust.

Seems unlikely, the first 80% of improvement is the easiest and we've got to be somewhere close to that now, but I could be wrong.
The word immutable has a meaning.

Blockchain does not fit that meaning.

Immutable doesn’t mean, “as long as 51% of miners want it to not change”.

Immutable doesn’t mean, “doesn’t change unless we get hacked and then we’ll change it”.

I could give more examples. Blockchains are not immutable.
I think that's because those items are the only ones that work to a mall's advantage.

There are four ways of providing suburban style shopping that I can think of:

* malls

* strip malls

* big-box stores

* big-box stores which oppose a strip mall

I think malls main advantage over the other archtypes is that it makes it easiest to evaluate multiple stores before committing to your choice. That is handy for clothes and gifts.

For anything else, that isn't handy. As a shopper, why then go to a mall drive to a mall, pay for parking, and then spend a few minutes navigating to get to your desired store when you could instead go to the same store in a strip mall, park for free, and enter the store in less than a minute after leaving your car?