skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember taking a course at university where the teacher bragged the first day that half the students will fail. It struck me immediately that this professor was bragging that he sucked at his job of teaching.

If I said half my patients won't live through my treatment, or half the cars I fix will crash, I'd not be the person others would seek out.

If you are so good at your job (of teaching people a subject) that a coin toss is likely to do a better job on the exam, you suck at your job.

You are a Teacher. That is what the person sitting in the class is paying you for. To teach them. You work for the students. For all the high minded ideals, you are just staff to the people sitting in front of you.
I agree with the process of discovery - but would personally prefer that to be communicated in the first person (which I personally find clearer and more enjoyable to read).

As in telling the true story which is probably “I wondered how ports work, then I did this, then I wrote this script, then it had an unexpected result”, which still reads as discovery to an audience (but is the authentic and true story).

IMO Readers will find a true story interesting if told with authenticity and passion.

For fiction, you generally need ‘an ununsual thing’ in the story that happens that breaks it away from normality.

I think this treads the awkward space inbetween - it’s made up (so no authenticity) but that authenticity isn’t replaced by something ‘unusual’ that drives the story forward.

> Maybe the prose went a little further than it needed to, or as you suggest not far enough.

I think this is right - although I don’t think there is a happy medium between those points. I think you can go in either direction (further or less), but straddling the middle is the tough bit.
why was $FAMOUS_COMPANY lowercased to $Famous_company in the title? That's weird.
How on earth is cryptocurrency going to solve the Prisoner's Dilemma? I don't think the cops are gonna let you have access to anything that lets you fuck around with your crypto wallet while they've got you and your buddy in the interrogation room.
I think the NIST flowchart helps explain the use cases well

https://twitter.com/sweis/status/1049047164117078016

IMO the main use case is a decentralized currency that isn't centralized by any specific government (but may be, given enough power). Also things like escrow in a 0 trust system are possible.

That being said, like everything, there are _massive_ tradeoffs to this. Almost nobody actually needs this. IMO buying and selling drugs on the internet was one of few actual use cases, whther "right" or not.
> And for 2 they can just take other assets in lieu.

Assuming you have any other or the bulk of your net worth is not stored as crypto.
Banking...

- Does that COBOL code do the thing(s) it's supposed to in a reliable and 100% predictable way?

My guess is : Yes it does.

So let's go down your path. You rewrite that COBOL program using your hot new recent language of choice. How many new bugs will be introduced? What other risks are there in this new language; CVEs? RCEs? Simple coding bugs which could cost that bank millions/billions/trillions - or just as bad, the bank's customers their savings/livelihoods?

Which New Hotness language would you rewrite that crusty old COBOL application in?

Rust? [0]
Golang? [1]
Something else?

There are times when it's better to leave the New Hotness to some new application rather than trying to replace a known reliable/predictable system with New Hotness. Especially for banking.

[0] https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=rust
[1] https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=golang
Here's an interesting revelation that likely has something to do with why letters are shaped the way they are. We have a 26 letter alphabet, plus space, plus 10 numbers, plus the punctuation !?.,;:/-+#()". That's 50 symbols in total which works out to a bit rate of about 5.64 bits per letter. Nearly all of our glyph's can be written as is on a 7 segment display like you would see on a microwave. With just a tiny amount of redesign, our writing system would be exactly 7 bits. Meaning, without any intent or understanding of information theory, our ancestors gradually gravitated towards a writing system that has just 1.36 bits of extraneous code space. This is far to efficient to ignore.

It wasn't until the digital revolution that the 7-segment pattern belying most letters was apparent. There is no "7 segment font" for the Guttenburg printing press. Most of people through most of history would not have consciously known there were atoms of writing smaller than a single letter.

Vocabulary almost certainly has evolved in a way that efficiently compresses semantic information. We just haven't noticed the 7 segments yet.
Tudor Networks
Nils van der Poel returned to the sport of speed skating last year after quitting it years before, saying that he would win the 5000m and 10000m at the Beijing Olympics, endurance events.

Known for spicy interview comments like "I don't want to say that my competitors aren't going to win because they trained too poorly. I want them to have hope left."

He won the 5000 with a tiny difference but smashed his own world record and the competition on the 10000.

He announced he would retire again and would make his training regime public, this is that training regime. It is incredibly tougher than what other speed skaters do.
The Tudor government maintained a communication network that criss-crossed the globe. This visualisation brings together 123,850 letters connecting 20,424 people from the United Kingdom’s State Papers archive, dating from the accession of Henry VIII to the death of Elizabeth I (1509-1603).
On this page we can see all people who sent or received letters from two or more people, arranged chronologically left-to-right.
https://www.businessinsider.in/investment/news/bitcoin-does-...
„It’s excel all the way down“ is the answer to a surprisingly large number of working business solutions, from small shops to Fortune 500.
Super-elastic alloy is first known metal to get springier as it heats up
chat system: I see. I never use it as I prefer PMs, so I didn’t know about that.

Long threads: As you said, it’s a general issue ;)

Crippling: Maybe, but so far they haven’t.
I was searching some information on what are the principles behind the TikTok algorithm/recommendation engine and I found this very recent preprint. I wanted to have some opinions on its validity.
Hey, I was there. You were lied to when you got reports of 'the violence and chaos and rioters', I know this because I got a call from my grandmother worried I might be near the war zone.

Oh, unless the violence you are referring to was the tear gassing from cops. There was a shit ton of that.
The criminalisation of gambling in Asia and the United States (in both cases widely but not entirely).

People have always found alternatives, for example in South Korea index option trading was historically popular. In the United States it was originally illegal online poker, now single stock options are popular. In Europe trading FX was once popular.

Many of these outlets that either replace or augment gambling have now been supplanted by crypto trading. In many markets you can actually see how declining activity in one aligns with increasing activity in crypto.
It's a shame most handset makers stopped putting IR blasters on phones.
If it's for a side project, i would think about resiliency and lasting for long time once there's a need for it. This's also contributed by the stack or how you setup infra. So don't bother initially.

You can pick a framework if you're comfortable with mix of frontend and backend (rails, django etc)

If you are more on backend, pick say react in frontend and your choice of language in backend and write monolith. Have a database if needed. Avoid cache completely (You don't need to scale or make it performant). Infact you can use file based db (eg: bolt) and add Pg/Mongo/Sql later.

My usual setup is,

1. Go for backend, react frontend
2. Deployed backend in free-tier GCP VM
3. Deployed frontend in Netlify/Heroku
4. Use free pg database in Heroku

Avoid self provisioning as much as possible if you don't need the control.

If it's for Indiehacker project, would suggest to not build it right away, use nocode platform or template to setup landing page, validate and do things.
It hints at Europe performing yet another economic suicide.

No one wants to live in a museum.
Typically, the IP stack places the port in TIMEWAIT after the listening process has exited, in order to ensure that packets that were in flight on the network at the time of exit has a chance to dissipate before the next program starts.

But, when you say "I am OK with this co-existing", you can listen to a port that is in TIMEWAIT, and quick restart is then possible.
Aircraft are kind of silly in many ways.

The default speedometer doesn't actually tell you how fast you're going, and the default altimeter doesn't actually tell you how high you are.
PayPal for b2b transactions,
Transferwise and similar services for cheaper remittance transfers.
Crypto takes electronic payments and adds an ungodly layer of complexity to them.
> seems pretty darn useful

In societies so broken and unsolidaric that individuals have to fall back on such matters, maybe. Also very useful if you are a drug cartel, a shady bussines or similar — so people that totally won't do damage to the cohesion of society in historic experience.
I feel the author’s pain of not reviewing back links on Roam. But I think there’s a larger point to be made here: do folks review their notes at all? I suspect back links aren’t the actual problem.

During undergrad, I found I rarely reviewed my class notes, and when I did they weren’t very helpful. I simply stopped taking them, was happier, and giving my full focus to lectures improved my comprehension. Notes that don’t get read again are a distraction in my opinion.
Yes and no ... I love Haskell's Parsec derived family of libraries (especially Attoparsec for fast and Megaparsec for detailed parsing).

But sometimes you just need to throw something together fast. Eg search and replace in Vim uses regexps.
> I've lost my phone and wallet, I can still get cash from a bitoin ATM using the crypto I'm storing in my brain.

To be a bit mean but how do you find the Bitcoin ATM?
> Other protests were met with stronger state resistance.

> It’s fucking disturbing to see people equate BLM protests with what’s happening here. It’s not the same.

Other protests met with stronger state resistance also also involved more aggressive protest behavior. Rights to free speech and assembly have very specific legal boundaries, but that boundary isn't defined by the level of inconvenience felt by the locals.

Yes parking trucks and gathering thousands of protestors in one city has both economic and social impacts, but I have yet to see any legitimate reports of a pattern of violence, destruction, or intimidation.

The city recommended that restaurants in the area close, and on at least one occasion the government was also attempting to have all hotel reservations in the city cancelled. If economic impact on Ottawa was the primary concern, why was no one calling for the government to stop interfering with local businesses that could have provided their services to the protestors?
Might be unrelated, but Perl does have a hard limit on recursion within the same function; after 100 recursions it'll die with an error and you have to unroll your loops.
If he plans to abandon skating, this is good marketing for entering the speaking tour cycles. I think his training plan has gone viral.
Problem is that any source of data will have the same quality issues. Not alleging general propaganda, but I guess it always tends to confirm the initial suspicions of researchers as the data can be molded either way.
This story is well written and simply devastating.
Have the mods been working overtime on this discussion or something? I see lots of concern about people celebrating this hack, and very limited actual celebration here.
Buying drugs online, that's what i use it for anyways.
I'm starting to accept that maybe our current social media sites and aggregators are inherently vulnerable to manipulation. IRL social structures without broadcasting capabilities has fewer of these problems, since the reward is less.

Maybe there's some way to have the best of both worlds, but I don't know how.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30320977.
Two responses, as the context differs dramatically.

For coursework, I would take notes. At the end of the day, I would reread the notes and complete them. Completing them means correcting errors, filling in details from examples, and using assignments and course material embellish the notes. Embellishment means adding notes of personal interest from other course material, and also adding examples from problem sets. My notes were my source of truth, and I kept them in good order. For exams and future coursework, I would only use my notes since they were complete.

In my professional life, I consume a lot of material but do not take notes. I find that there are two important aspects to learning. The first is high exposure to material. Being able to put a name or provenance to an idea is helpful in finding my way back there again. The second, which is similar to what nickjj mentions in a comment above, is to close the loop. To wit, my engagement with material is to find aspects for which I can test it outside of the scope presented or examine in in contrast to another idea. By engaging with the idea, I am able to come to an understanding of its verisimilitude and utility to me.

In the later, I do not take notes while attending lectures and reading. However I maintain complete lab notes for my work. Lab notes include random thoughts, references, uri:'s of data sets, links to papers and wikipedia articles. The lab notes are written for me, and are mostly in chronological order. By the contain as thorough an appendix as I have the patience to maintain.
When I went to school, I paid X dollars per term. I figured out how much that translated to lecture hour. It was more than a movie. If I paid for a movie and it shut down half way though, I'd be rather pissed. :)

I focused on that for each lecture.
Some major FPGA tools still use it.
Why would your buddy have your keys or any way to help third parties empty your wallet?
Scott Alexander recently ran a grants program (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/so-you-want-to-run-a-m...) and wrote this about the experience:

> Then you have to actually give people money.
>
> You know how, whenever there’s a debate about cryptocurrency, some crypto fanboy gushes about how it makes sending money so much easier? And if you’re like me, you think “yes, but right now you can just enter a number into Paypal, that already seems pretty easy to me”?
>
> I take it all back. The crypto future can’t come soon enough. Sending money is terrible.
>
> Paypal charges 2-3% fees. If you’re sending $50K, that’s a thousand dollars. Your bank might do wire transfers for you, but they have caps on how much you can send, and that cap may be smaller than your grant. Wires can involve anything from sending in a snail mail form, to going to the bank in person, to getting something called a “Medallion Signature Guarantee” which I still have not fully figured out. Sometimes a recipient would tell me their bank account details, and my bank would say “no, that account does not exist”, and then we would be at an impasse. If you have double (or God forbid, triple) digit numbers of recipients, it all adds up.
Found a link to this library in the documentation. For esp32/8266 it says. Haven't tried it myself.

https://github.com/crankyoldgit/IRremoteESP8266
It's actually very possible to synchronise any number of Pi cameras, to sub-millisecond precision if required. We do this for a machine vision task, measuring the angle of rotating disks at a very precise time (and use an IR flash which is also precisely timed, which avoids any issues with the rolling shutter).
buying and selling of drugs/weapons/child pornography

Yes, I'm aware of the fact that the ledger is public, but not everyone is.
Is this concept often mentioned in mainstream media? This is mentioned a lot around here.
My hypothesis is that a "hn-bias" makes commenters more likely to mention it because they learned here that there is an explicit concept to arrange these funny coincidences, and moreover there is some quantitative work that has been done on the subject.
But it could be a variant of frequency illusion/Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (what would be its name?).
Everything is getting louder (2019)
One thing I don't see mentioned in TFA (I quickly skimmed it) is the relationship of the rule to continuous compounding. The article does say that it works better for "small R", after all - if interest rates where 100%, it should obviously take a year to double, not .72 years, right?

Well...no. Theoretically, if interest is 100% paid continuously throughout the year, you'll double your money in about .72 years. The issue is that we generally quote interest rates as annualized rates _after_ taking into account the compounding frequency (this is the difference between "APY" and "APR"), so the rule is usually applied to annualized rates, in which case it's correct to say that the error increases as the rates increase.

But suppose rates were actually quoted as the annual rate before compounding frequency is accounted for.

With monthly compounding, your return is

> (1 + r/12)^(12n)

where r is the annual rate and n is the number of years.

With weekly compounding, your return is

> (1 + r/52)^(52n)

Daily:

> (1 + r/365.25) ^ (365.25n)

More generally, if p is the number of interest periods in the year

> (1 + r/p) ^ pn

Taking the limit of p as it tends to infinity (ie "continuous compounding) it can be shown than the rate is

> e^rn

Some text books write this as "Pe^rt", where P is your starting principle and t is the number of years. Same same. Anyway...

To double your money, solve the following for n:

> e^rn = 2

> n = ln(2) / r

> n = ~.69 / r

Thus the rule of ln(2) is actually perfectly accurate if you're looking at an annual interest rate that is paid continuously, or close to it. Round ln(2) to 72 for simplicity and it's still pretty close. The big error bar comes from the lack of continuous compounding, which is what forces the hand-waving in the articles derivation ("for small R...").

P.S. Written off-the-cuff, it's been years since I looked at the math for this and I might be totally way off. This is not investment advice, this is hacker news and I'm positive some kind soul will correct my mistakes. After all, the best way to get correct information on the internet is to post something wrong on a forum of smart pedantics.
This is interesting I have seen Gephi before but never used it. Do you have any links or posts explaining how you use it to visualise connections in MySQL? I would like to do something similar with Oracle.
You can remember words, easily.
There's not that much celebration here on HN, but there's a ton on Twitter in reply to that tweet.
Banks were closed during the early days of the pandemic.

Can't have a bank run with closed banks! (Taps forehead).

So, crypto is a bank always open. It's better money than actual money.
I think it's actually a big leap from "I never read notes again" to "I shouldn't write notes at all". Writing things down causes you to think more clearly about something, and aids in memory by itself.
I know that this used to be common knowledge, but evidence points to "no". Or at least to "either not anymore or not strongly enough".

Clear examples of websites that block content from me: Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, newspapers.
My government is sadly too incompetent to get out of panic mode and now has evasion ideas like a central vaccination registers...
The solution is easy though (it was adopted long time ago by Everything2 project): count the actual clicks on backlinks, and sort them by their usage frequency. Maybe even automatically forget the links that were never used for some time, just like human brain does.
> I refuse to believe actual people will go out of their way to defend/promote/etc their $favorite_brand. Only on reddit/hn.

You might, but people have been getting in stupid arguments defending largely irrelevant preferences for as long as human history has been recorded. Now, various brand-PR agents certainly do fan these flames, but there are really people who think your cheap beer preferences says important things about you and will happily spend shockingly large amounts of time telling how that is wrong. A lot of people.

If their in-group likes brand A, and the out-group likes product B or C, staggeringly wasteful displays of such preference basically define fashion.
Having the genetic code without being able to recreate epigenetic conditions is like having source code but no compiler or reference system architecture.

So, not really.
The ability to rip off naive investors since the traditional financial markets have a lot of cumbersome regulation wrapped around it
That article doesn't really support your statement.

You can have anonymous BTC address. You can tumble it and you can exchange it at anonyy location.

It is the most anonymous digital currency after cash cards.
So, it's useful for breaking the law?
Thank you, taking Caltrain is great advice. I'm from NYC so seeing how public transit is, is definitely important.

I'm adding the other places you mentioned to my list!
> - I do not trust the counterparty that I am dealing with on the internet. Using cryptocurrency means that my maximum loss is the vavlu of the transaction (I don't have to give credit card or banking info)

This is worse than if you use a credit (or debit in some places) card. With a credit card you have a legal protection and the card issuer has to refund you if the product or service isn’t delivered, it’s called a chargeback. Crypto has no consumer protections, traditional payments do.

Crypto is irreversible (in most cases) by design, that will always be worse for the consumer and “better” for the vendor. Essentially making it easier to defraud people trying to make purchases.

The only time this works is if the vendor is unable to take credit card payments because they are selling something illegally, but that’s not the example you used.
Wouldn't you type your wallet seed phrase onto a random BTC ATM on the street ?
> In societies so broken and unsolidaric that individuals have to fall back on such matters,

The current divorce laws in most western societies pretty much match my description, especially the US.

If in your world, those count as "broken and unsolidaric (sic)", then: sure dude.
Probably yes, but we haven't had a decent product like that. Now if it can decently run a linux distro (with external display, etc) I might ditch my iPhone....
Why do you think that? I know people at the protests, they say its nothing but
peaceful people, dancing, getting drunk.

What is unreasonable about ending mandates and rejecting the idea of the passport? I'm all for it!
> The housing market also needs more row houses. Those have fewer of the disadvantages of condos but unfortunately they're illegal to build in most (almost all?) parts of the US.

Row houses? You mean townhouses? That's the same thing as condos (shared structure, HOAs), with all the drawbacks.

Nothing illegal about them, tons and tons of those are being built in the bay area.
We already had that, e.g. maru OS, ubuntu touch, Linux on Dex, whatever windows called their version, ... . It pretty much flopped.

So it is "the future" in the same way 3D TVs were: Much hype and then kinda neat, but not great.
Education is its own privilege