skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Maybe I'm just not smart enough to understand BTC.

I don’t think that’s true. I suspect it is more likely that you’ve given Bitcoin only a cursory study where you compared it to a very inefficient database, recognized that on-chain transactions are slow and expensive, energy-consumption is significant, and it isn’t as easy to spend as US dollars - and so you dismissed it as a fraud.

Everyone I know who eventually embraced Bitcoin, initially rejected the idea - myself included. It is not easy to appreciate the brilliance of Bitcoin unless you first understand the problem it is trying to solve.

Unfortunately few of us really understand what fiat money is and how it is created - or at least that was true before Bitcoin forced us all to investigate. One of the funniest implications of Bitcoin is that now every time the talking heads on CNBC or CNN mention US dollars, they now refer to it as fiat.

Bitcoin proponents call it the hardest money ever created. Unlike fiat, Bitcoin is virtually impossible to debase. The supply of Bitcoin is predictable for the next 10 minutes or the next thousand years. No other currency has a predictable inflation policy. No other currency is resilient to the desires of centralized actors to manipulate the money supply.

Here is an exercise I like to do on any complex topic I don’t fully understand. I ask myself what the proponents know that I don’t know? (and vice versa, what do I know about the subject that the proponents don’t get?)

Here is a list of mostly billionaires who all hold and advocate for Bitcoin. Ask yourself, what do they know about Bitcoin that you don’t? Also, what do you know that they don’t which makes you so confident it is a scam?

Bitcoin Proponents:

Elon Musk, Barry Silbert, Mark Cuban, Michael Saylor, Mike Novogratz, Tyler & Cameron Winklevoss, Paul Tudor Jones, Tim Draper, Bill Miller, Stanley Drunkenmiller, Anthony Scaramucci, Jack Dorsey, Steve Wozniak, Tim Cook, George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg
Innovation/genius/vision is overrated and most of what drives progress is lots of hard work on mundane tasks by lots of people.

Waterfall is a perfectly good methodology in many cases.

China and Russia aren’t trying to take over the world.

We are under-treating some mental health issues as an over-correction to historical bad treatment practices.

Some important cultural glue has been thrown out with the bath water as traditional religion has declined.

Quality of life is generally great and getting better all the time.
5. Resist empty generalizations
3D Interactive Geometry Program
They revert the money (if they like you), but usually if money flows one way, something else flows the other way, and they can't revert that half of the fraudulent transactions without great expenditure. Often it's not worth it and they just write it off and the whole economy bears the cost.

I'm not saying it's a better or worse plan than whatever might happen under an alternative system, but just that it's not exactly a clean solution either.
I'm puzzled that Amazon - a company which made its billions disrupting the retail economy, and subsequently the datacenter/managed infrastructure economy - is lumped in with Facebook. I think it might be worth unpacking what you are uncomfortable with in more precise terms.
The inability to over customize your page with html/css and blast autoplay music are one of the reasons Facebook won out over MySpace.

Personally my ideal "social network" would be personal RSS feeds for everyone, but that's never going to be the winning method. It needs to be something dead simple for a non-techie.
I agree with this. The ideal language has a minimum amount of complexity while also being human readable. C has stood the test of time because of its simplicity. You cannot reduce the complexity of a system by adding more complexity.
In our current context with COVID? I don't really think so.

But keep in mind we've had mandatory childhood immunizations for decades and almost everyone supports them.
I build my own wheels too. There's another reason for these kinds of comments, which is that a lot of cyclists have been persuaded that wheelbuilding (and other kinds of bike work) is a deep philosophical mystery requiring decades of experience and a shop full of specialized tooling. Yet people have maintained their own bikes satisfactorily with basic tools for more than a century.

This happens in any technical discipline -- two people will disagree diametrically on the amount of gear and technique needed, yet achieve identical results. And nobody knows why.

So my own reaction is that equipment like this could benefit someone who is supporting competitive cyclists (including themselves), such a person knows who they are, and has already built a few wheels. But "the rest of us" sometimes just need a reassurance that much more modest tooling will get you to a satisfactory wheel that will last a long time. Likewise for routine periodic maintenance such as tensioning and truing. My goal is decent truth, zero spoke breakage, minimal re-truing later on.
this is very insightful. I realize I don't have socials because I want to present content, I have it to receive chronologically sorted updates on people I know in real life. Except now it's not chronological, and so I'm disinterested
Introduction to Scrapy Framework
A thought I had a few years ago was what sort of technology was in Star Trek (TNG, but any of the series is a reasonable point), and what technology we have now.

Star Trek had a very utopian sense about technology, were tech giants have a much more distopian sense about it. For instance, in both cases, we want an AI that can understand regular language, and give us accurate results for our requests. In Star Trek, every ship has this tech, and it's all used without any thought of privacy concerns or what it means for a computer to be always listening. In fact, as far as I can think, Star Trek never really had self-awareness about what the technology the people of that time used and it's implications (like privacy, but there are likely many more ethical concerns).

This led me to a bit of a split mind on technology. Using speech recognition as the example. Yes, it would be great if I could ask a computer something and it can answer me. No, it would not be great if that information was used to manipulate me or exploit my situation (like suggesting products to buy).

I do think all advancements are a two-edged sword. Is it orwellian? I definitely agree. My phone is always listening (even when there are claims it is not, or it's in standby mode), cameras are small enough to fit in a pocket and be used any time. Outside of living in a cave, you can choose what you participate in. You don't _need_ a smart phone - your emails can be answered when you sit at a computer, your calls can go to voicemail when you're not home. You don't _need_ to be on facebook - get your photos printed, save your videos to DVDs, share them with people when you invite them over.

A popular saying is vote with your wallet, but it can also be vote with your attention, too! Don't use social media if you think it sucks. Just log out, deactivate your account, and live your life. Don't share information on the internet you don't want to be used against you, and that even includes things like purchases on amazon, your address, or anything else.

It's only too late if you're not willing to do anything about it. Don't blame big tech if at the same time, you're logging in and feeding them your attention. It's not up to you how other people waste their time, either, but you can encourage different behaviour by having real-life interactions without technology in the way.
> So do cryptocurrencies.

C'mon man don't let the narrative get to you!

Cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) will separate money and state, no more wars no more lopsided battles no more power asymmetry, no more printing and giving to those closest, no more printing machines in the hands of the 3 letter agencies, etc.

It will bring great progress to humanity if we adopt it.

> The internet is like an opiate

Yeah

> as sheep and resulting in time and energy being wasted by literally billions

The people that are manipulated by Big Tech would be manipulated anyways by Big Media, sadly. But maybe it's more worrisome with Big Tech.
I hear you and I often have thoughts along the same lines. Here are my (very unorganized) thoughts on this.

First: have faith. Nothing of what you mention is really new under the sky. Many people lost their wealth (and sometimes lives) in tulip mania in 17th century, yet we learned important lessons about how markets work, collective behaviour, boom and bust, financial instruments. We are bound to repeat the same mistakes again, with different things, but that is just how learning works.

Second: look into both sides. Social media, while rightly blamed for feeding the fires of division in the society, brings a lot of good into the world: extended families spread over the world keeping in touch, charity and community organizers using it for outreach, people being informed of what is really happening in closed-off autocracies and dictatorships from the first-hand accounts. Even with all externalities and mistakes, you can reach out to so many people anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds, get any peace of publicly available information without going to the library and sifting through the books and newspapers, or get almost any imaginable product shipped to you in a matter of days and sometimes same day.

As to what can be done: tools are also well-known and have been working for a long time. Education and teaching critical thinking. Creating wealth and spreading it around. Reducing inequality. Elimination of menial labour. Finding new solutions in energy and raw materials, so that some countries having those resources and ruled by oppressive leaders are not able to exercise undue influence. Cheaper energy. Inventing new materials. Creating new tools. And yes, applying regulation and better legislation, where needs be - it worked for alcohol and tobacco, workplace safety, fire safety... We are still trying to figure things out as is the case with war on drugs, but there is no reason regulation would not work for social media or "web3".
Outside of the west, tobacco companies are like tobacco companies in the 50s and 60s.

They haven't learned anything except how to be sneakier. They haven't changed, except as to the minimum possible extent demanded by law.

Which I think helps prove your point.
You’re wrong in many different ways:

- Long term vs short term

- different rates

- state capital gains taxes

In this case, with the receiver being a CA resident, he pays almost certainly more than 50% in taxes on this bounty.
I would love to work in a similar company but I can't see Rust challenging C any time soon with so few Rust developers available and no functional safety compiler on the market.
Sorry, but that's just bullshit. Most Apple threads here are full of criticism that isn't downvoted.
You'd be surprised at how vehemently people can disagree with seemingly innocuous platitudes.
So, specifically for containers, cgroups were donated by google. Of course innovations build on existing innovations.

My point is that the by-product of big tech is a useful set of tools which would not exist without substantial R&D investment subsidized by revenues from ads.

Also, I am looking at reality vs what should be. If given an option, consumers would not pay, not even 0.99. This is reality. I.e. consumer are willing to give away their privacy for 0$ and free tools.
UBI for the rich (aka QE) has existed for ~10 years and they love this kind of socialism. It's just the poor people that need to pull themselves up by bootstraps unassisted.
Blockchain technologies are great when few people use them, are dangerous when many people use them, and are utterly dangerous and stop being decentralized when nearly everyone uses them.
Agreed, but there's a higher baseline mental overhead due to increased complexity of Swift that Objective-C doesn't have, at least once you get past the weird square bracket syntax. This is mental overhead that distracts from the actual problem needing to be solved.

Swift isn't alone in this respect. I think TypeScript is another example of a language which started out claiming to offer a better experience than Javascript only to become very complex. I'm sure that this added complexity helps some programmers some of the time. But just like CISC was a dead end and all computer chips are essentially RISC-based today, I suspect the pendulum may have swung too far in terms of adding features to some of these developer-friendly languages.

But, it's a contrarian view for a reason. I'm just somebody who fell in love with the simplicity of Objective-C almost 20 years ago, before the iPhone was a thing. So I may be looking back at things with rose tinted glasses.
I hate the gaslighers who try to downplay this by putting into some BS "context". The situation with tech is abysmal right now. I do think it's fixable, though.

> What can we do or is it already too late to save the world from the big tech monster?

We have to use extreme lateral thinking and build systems that support themselves and over time outcompete garbage like social media and "crypto". Neither are long-term stable anyway.

One of the problems, though, is that this needs to be worked on over time. People who see the problem need places to cooperate. Social media is clearly not the place to do that, because pretty much by definition it is ran and inhabited by people who aren't interested in solving these kind of problems. (In fact, they are interesting in the opposite.)

One of my biggest regrets right now is that I spent too much time on my normal work in tech, while spending not enough time and effort on cultivating independent communities of people who actually think about stuff like this. It was easy to find interesting and interested people to cooperate with in late 90s and early 00s. Today it's really hard. Everything is filtered through social media. We are on social media right now.

Another problem is that we have no good conceptual vocabulary or an analytical framework to precisely talk about these problems. Everyone just repeats terms like "misinformation" and "censorship". Public conversations about this spin in place, going nowhere good. I understand (at least I think I understand) what you're talking about because I've already independently reaches the same conclusions. That's not enough to conceptually advance anywhere.
> Not even close. There's no reliable way to get a fixed income, and inflation is very high.

The market historically has been going up, so at least historically it's been reliable to get a fixed income. I don't think $2M is sufficient to retire very early, mostly because of bad years and that your initial capital loses value over the years, but it can generate a nice income and most people can have something on the side that generates some extra money as needed. With $4M I would be more comfortable retiring at 40 let's say, depending on cost of living of course.
Not sure it's actually applicable. That Reddit comment is about poor people winning lots of money by chance, not smart people earning lots of money by working. The risks are very different, not to say that the scale between 2 million and 170 million is way bigger than you seem to think.
These probably aren't contrarian here, but in general they are based on how software companies seem to run.

- Slack has an enormous cost on productivity by having everyone exposed to way more communication than is necessary across an organization. There has to be a significantly better way.

- Relatedly, tech companies in general should be doing significantly more to protect their engineers' time, and the ones that get good at this are going to have outsized impact, but it requires top down leadership from people whose job it is to be in meetings all day. The default at most companies seems to be to have days filled with meetings as a senior+ engineer, and it's swimming up river to fight back against this.
None I feel comfortable sharing, even under a pseudonym.

I will say that HN is becoming more of an echo chamber than I experienced even a few years ago. I downvote and upvote but I'm starting to feel sick of myself every time I do because the observed effect is that it largely makes people feel bad or radicalizes/entrenches the opposition.

Perhaps my most contrarian view I feel comfortable sharing is that I think almost any form of cancelation is a net negative for society: it sends the canceled group or individual underground where any extremist views are amplified more than they would resident to whatever platform canceled them.

I think we as humans don't realize how badly we're doing in the hyperconnected world. Our brains can't cope. No one is forced to sit in the same room with someone different so tolerance (actual tolerance, interpret that how you like) is in the gutter.

I think the only way we can really do this thing, survive and prosper in kindness, is by retreating to dramatically smaller communities with local networks. That's my dream.
These sorts of articles don't help me as much as they might, because my motivation to work isn't really 'doing what I love', it's more 'making the changes I want to see'.
By definition an "L2 scaling solution" is not the Ethereum blockchain.

Ethereum itself clearly is a secure blockchain given the fact that it has not been exploited directly ever, as far as I am aware. Smart contracts running in the EVM obviously have exploits galore, but that is different from Ethereum itself being vulnerable. Just like it is different when the Java Virtual Machine itself has an exploit (uncommon) vs when a program that runs in the JVM does (very common).

You can of course argue that the lack of inherent soundness / correctness in Ethereum smart contracts makes the entire chain less useful since running smart contracts is kinda the whole point, but then you should make that argument rather than saying dumb things like:

> ETH was an insecure blockchain
I think you're implying a value judgement I'm not making.

Who's to say they think they're skimping?

Who's to say that they didn't buy exactly what fulfilled them, and it was only 20% of their take-home pay, so they just shoved the rest of it into investments?

Basically - money certainly matters, but only to a point. Once you're fairly comfortable satisfying your genuine needs (food, clothing, shelter, time) more money isn't really going to change how you feel.

It's a mental trap to assume that happiness can be bought, if only you had a bit more money. It leads to empty, hollow, soulless people.

---

> Best way to do it is to buy exactly what will fulfill you

My advice? Buying things will never fulfill you. Real fulfillment isn't about having the next shiny ____.

I'm not saying you shouldn't buy that thing, but you should be doing it with intention - How does this fit into my life? What uses do I have for it? Who will I share it with?
People did in fact sell their children when faced with hard times, by the way. The 1920’s era was rough. https://www.ranker.com/list/story-behind-photo-of-children-f...

You are asking what I would personally do. But it’s better to think of limit cases that everyone would do — such as lie to their wife for a billion dollars. Since it’s guaranteed you fall into the bucket of “everybody”, that means you can locate your ethical price tag.

It’s helpful for people to do this mental exercise. At least, I find it comforting knowing my own price tags in advance.
> That might be how you learn, which is a good thing to know, but the presentation of your personal understanding of yourself come off like “this is the way for all”, which gives me the yucks.

Not sure why you assume OP is speaking about his own personal experience?

I am unsure what OP background is, but I will assume he knows what he is taking about.

there are theories of the mind that actually supports this view.

It goes back to early attempts at AI [0], and different perspectives on this also caused a split amongst researchers.

> If I can express it in simple language in a way that hangs together, and go into detail about complicated parts of the system, I’m getting somewhere.

What you have said does not actually contradict what OP has, but rather could be used to support what he said.

Yet it seems you believe it contradicts him?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_symbol_system
This might sound kind of bizarre, but I don't really try to learn. I think I have a minor learning disability where I have a very hard time remembering things that I deem (consciously or not) as unimportant in the long term. Instead, I try to focus on extracting the nature and patterns of relationships, instead of the specific details. An example might be: learning the purpose of a wristwatch and its power source, versus understanding how all of the gears work together. Unless I'm working on a specific problem involving how the gears work together, I won't remember it. Even then, I'll put it in my working memory just long enough to solve the problem and then forget it. But the patterns of relationships stay forever, and it's easy to associate with other patterns of relationships, once you forget the specifics.

In tech this can be an obstacle when communicating because many engineers have an extremely fine-grained memory, seemingly all the time. I will hand wave different concepts as a black box that we don't need to know right now, where they are happy to explain them at length, in detail. But if it's not relevant, I just don't care. They will also expect me to explain concepts that (to me) aren't relevant to the problem, and I have to say "I don't remember."
There's this: http://www.deadlysins.com/guinea-worm

I also remember seeing that website years ago, and I feel like this isn't it (or at least that it's been redesigned). I seem to remember the classic unstyled text of the early web.
Testify – Thou Shalt Write Tests
In 2020 when my provider still gave out a /64, I recall (via Ubiquity router stats) at least 60% of our household traffic was IPv6. Not "exclusively", but a majority. Most traffic overall was streaming services.

Now I have better service (reliable 1gb fiber) but no IPv6. Once providers are better motivated, I predict a jump.

Agree with issue on server cloud provider support though, sadly.
> It really depends on why you need anticoagulants to begin with.

Of course. I have atrial fibrillation and it is more or less standard medication for that in the UK (along with god knows how much other stuff). My (late) Dad had the same problems as me, and he was never confident he had taken the right amount of warfarin. But if you have heart valves, stents or whatever, or indeed anything, please don't take this as medical advice - IANAD.
> I would never have imagined that you’re expected to make struct types public in order to return instances

You can return unexported ("private") instances; for example this is perfectly valid:

type unexport struct {
Str string
}

func (unexport) Method() string { return "export" }

func NewUnexport() unexport {
return unexport{Str: "asd"}
}

And you can get/set the exported Str field from another package without problems, as well as call the exported Method.

You don't even need to make an unexport package type and can use an anonymous struct or type declared in the function too, although you can't add any methods like this and is often cumbersome because you need to declare the anonymous struct more than one.

And, of course, you can make parts of a struct private by just not exporting them. It's really not all that different to how OOP languages work with public/private, except that visibility is dictated in the name itself.
The best part about Zoom meetings is that you can be completely disengaged when your presence is superfluous. Have your ear out for any key words, camera off, and mic muted and let the brain focus on other work or daydreaming.

In-person meetings like this require you to put in effort to appear to pay attention.