skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some of what you have said is confusing to me.

1. On chain transactions are fairly cheap and have been for a long time. What do you mean by expensive?

2. How can payment processors censor transactions? I don’t think you understand Lightning. It’s onion routed, similar to TOR. Routing nodes only know previous hop and the next hop, which they already have open channels with. They don’t even know if the previous hop was the first, or if the next hop is the last. Why/how could they censor it?

3. An open channel does not lock anything. When you commit funds to a channel, you can use those funds in the Lightning network. It’s not like they’re useless until you close the channel. That’s like saying that putting dollars on a pre-paid card is “committing capital” that you can’t use elsewhere. No, you’re just using an alternative payment method.

4. It doesn’t completely fail. It is somewhat more centralized than the layer 1, but that is to be expected. It’s good enough and private enough to be useful for most things. The blockchain doesn’t go away. You can still use layer 1. You can still use coinjoins or mixers or atomic Monero swaps if you want.
The article is about the accessibility of digital money, particularly for the elderly. Not the privacy and sovereignty aspects that are most important to crypto enthusiasts. Crypto would be a humongous step back in accessibility.
Your view seems to ignore the temporal aspect, for one the original userbase of FB was students, they certainly weren't parents. FB hasn't been around that long, so to suggest anything has 'always' been the case ignores how this has been a very rapidly evolving ecosystem of software, from a generational point of view.
I don't think I've ever seen a good recommendation system in practice (that is, having the properties of not accidentally hiding content I'd like to see AND maintaining the same level of reliability over time as my interests change), and I would imagine at least some segment of Mastodon's users would be escaping from platforms like Facebook that use them in part due to "curation exhaustion" - I would think that no recommendations is actually a very strong selling point.
> I immediately became fiercely loyal to that manager and the organization, and I wanted to work harder for them.

Did you improve? Did you provide the results needed by the organization? Did you work better (not simply harder)?

Forgive me if this seems like an overly familiar set of questions, I'm not quite sure how else to frame them.

It's great to be loyal; it helps both parties make long term investments, engenders trust, and ensures stability.

But loyalty to a bad manager is no good. Similarly, loyalty to a report who is over their head and continues to be unable to improve at the speed needed is not good.

Source: I have both been over my head and had reports in over their head.
Yes that's all fine and good, but finance is at the heart of structured civilization, and we're note quite there yet with respect to open, transparent systems, that have privacy and resiliency.

The INTERAC network in Canada is owned by the banks and it's yet another 99% margin rake on small businesses. It's a game of leverage - the big chains can negotiate a deal, the smaller vendors are out.

The Canadian government just invoked a kind of 'Marshall Law' because protestors were honking horns and not moving. While I'm glad the Police moved them (and should have sooner), the fact is, personal financial bank accounts of individuals not very related to the transactions were shut down by the federal government.

A politicized situation should not allow for the cancellation of the flow of money, that should be strictly an issue of the justice system, and then, proportionately.

The thought that the gov, or a bank, or Amazon could stop me from giving someone $40 for almost whatever reason, is Orwellian.

All of our leaders relish, at least on some level, the opportunity for control - and I'm not being conspiratorial here, I do think that for now things are benign, but it takes the smallest 'problem' for things to go south.

I think we need a system that has privacy, that has no fees, and whereupon individuals cannot be 'de-banked' from the system in any way, i.e where it would take some act of interdictive oversight for the justice system, with a warrant, to get access to, or control some transactions (i.e. major drug bust, bribery, organized crime).

In effect: we need a 'digital cash' that's 'just like cash', meaning that it's open, anonymous, secure, maybe not very useful to transport large quantities, there's no arbitrary means of interdiction etc..
Agreeing with mitchellh's sibling comment. This post doesn't seem to discuss a scaling problem really (there's an aside about an issue with n squared messaging, but it was fixed, so no big deal). The point of the discussion seems to be that consensus isn't really needed for their use case, and it makes things complicated, so maybe get rid of it.

Really, a node doesn't want a consensus on what services are available, it wants to know what services are available to it. Hopefully that's the same globally, but waiting for global consensus means sending more traffic to the wrong place than if you had full mesh announcements (probably not great at scale) or announcements sent to a designated node(s) in each datacenter (possibly gossiped from there to each node, if desired, could be looked up on demand from the monitor node). Of course, that works only if you're ok assuming that a service reachable by one node in a datacenter is reachable by all nodes in a datacenter.

Anyway, you still may want to deal with requests that were sent to the right place, but are received by the wrong place, because the right place changed beyond the observation window for the routing decision. (This is also touched on in the article).

Distributed systems are fun and exciting! And, there was another post today noticing that even a single computer is really a distributed system (and they have been for quite a while)
It's precisely when the stakes are highest, when passions are the most inflamed, and when the divide seems unbridgeable that we need to consider the other side's perspective. Not publishing the Russian point of view won't stop Russians from having that point of view, it will just play into the propaganda that the Russian state is a victim and everyone is out to get them. Reaching out and engaging with individuals on the other side is the only way to stop the madness of war.
Different denaturants for different purposes.

Choose your poison:

27 CFR § 21.151 - List of denaturants authorized for denatured spirits.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/21.151
Venmo also allows using QR codes quite easily (tap "Scan" on the home screen and then scan a code or tap "Venmo me" to show your code), but for some reason many users don't seem to know that and end up trying to look people up by their username instead. I think it's because QR codes really never caught on in the US.
I think that's an unfair characterization.

I was replying to someone who said Krebs was "exactly right" - that's what I was pushing back on. My first comment was also more nuanced. The evidence exists for those who care to look and I think what I wrote is inline with it.
If you are self-hosting for yourself, you can make-do without an e-mail server. You'd have to create an account from the command-line (`tootctl accounts create aquova --email=you-login-with@this --confirmed`) and turn on TOTP 2FA once you login for the first time to avoid e-mail based security challenges. For personal use, you won't need any other e-mails.
> We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior

This is so true! If only we were consistent and picked one or the other all the time! The world would be a better place.
Crypto can be legislated too.
Cash sucks. I pretty much stopped using it in the late 2000s. Then, I moved to NYC in 2010, and at that time, it was common for places to be cash only or add surcharges to card payments. I had to re-adapt to cash-based living, and I was not a fan. Finding a bank that did ATM fee refunds helped a lot, but it was still much more of a pain than simply using plastic.
Introduction to Coding / JavaScript Course
OK, wait, let me call at my pharmaceutical buddies and have them do a study that shows that the New drug they wanna make billions of dollars from works just like Prozac but faster. I’ll get back to you in a minute.

The fact that people are even slightly amazed at an amphetamine will make people happier is amazing to me. Don’t you’ll realize you’re substituting Street dealers for dealers in suits?
Sometimes too much time is spent trying to avoid figuring it all out.
>You don't write README.md, ARCHITECTURE.md, JavaDocs, etc, at all?

Maybe? Not sure - haven't worked on enough big projects to declare answer

>A new developer is supposed to go through all the codebases and figure out for himself?

Yes to this bit - code should have very clear structure to it with appropriate comments attached, whether that's literate style as JonesForth<https://github.com/phf/forth/blob/master/x86/jonesforth.S> shows, small section header comment or whatever.

It should be very clear what section exploring does - tiny example but cat<http://9p.io/sources/plan9/sys/src/cmd/cat.c> from plan 9 very simple segmented code - deals with file opening in main loop and cat function just reads and prints text
Aren't there some hard problems on leetcode?

I can see this analogy as:

"Don't do your math homework. Instead, find hard math problems in real life to solve."
They should add enterprise ready audit logs, with unlimited retention and streaming export to SIEMs/datalakes, happy to help ;)
Not my field, but how can this be so? We had MVC in 1990 written in C or C++.
Not to mention a gigantic military budget including all the alphabet agencies... all funded by that inefficiency.
$30 / 12 = $2.5

I had the same idea when I first learned of them (and price was even lower) but after doing the same math it occured to me what:

a) they DO have clients who are happy to use their domains (and they have a lot of them)

b) ~$4/m is absurdingly cheap for the service they provide.

c) it is the casual "we prefer what you pay us $N, but if you insist there is a cheaper alternative (with some restrictions) for $M"

And finally, I checked my plan and I'm still on Business Lite, $20/y ($1.66/m) and 750MB of storage. Sure, each couple of years I go in and cull the old irrelevant messages, but even with a bunch of messages from providers up from 2014 I still use only 372MB, 50% of my message box.

Sure, I'm not using it a lot for a correspondence with an actual people, but I'm pretty fine with it, particulary because I like what I don't have 9999+ notifications from social networks about someone's birthdays etc.
Google has been implementing "fairness" models for a probably going on a decade in their self driving cars. the first example I can remember is them talking about intentionally nosing into a 4 way stop to signal to other drivers that the vehicle understood that it was it's turn to go. Not to say its perfect but the car is "thinking" along those terms.
Chronological home feed is our selling point. You can also opt-in to notifications when specific accounts post if you don't want to miss them (bell button on profiles). Finally, you can also split your home feed into lists. However, nothing precludes someone from developing a client that reorganizes your home feed somehow.
Ey, I made Fritter. The “fr” shamelessly came from my last name. Actually the cooler thing was Rotonde, which Devine of 100 rabbits fame made. Beaker has the ability to duplicate somebody else’s website, which we called forking. So Devine made a social website where the whole application was the website software itself.

Bear in mind that beaker sites are like mutable torrents. They’re just collections of files. The fun is that you can read and write those files by an API. The js in Rotonde would detect if you owned the site, and then present a text input which would write a new text file in the posts folder. The site would then use js to read all its own post texts and the post texts of followed users to produce a feed. To create a new “account” you would fork an existing site, copying all the application software. This meant the software itself was literally viral. It was really cool.

If you think a bit about it, you can probably guess the problems we ran into (both with rotonde and fritter). Most of it had to do with scaling - as all this occurred in the frontend of these p2p sites - and multi device coordination. There was, however, a pretty intense zen simplicity in the pattern of websites that wrote their own files with JS, and I wouldn’t write the idea off entirely.
Fascinating. So I guess I date myself there. But - it makes sense having read a bit. There’s remarkable complexity. “Strong statistical bounds” is again a reason for me to say “it is amazing anything works, anywhere.” I say this typing on a capacitive piece of glass that happens to be a multitouch display, glued to a battery, a quad core processor, and a very precisely arranged lump of sand and gold that’s able to literally shout into the microwave aether to a thingie on a pole in the middle of the air, which then is relaying (encrypted btw) data to some box somewhere that results in an interrupt occurring, a cpu servicing that, and many other things happening many times to result in random people somewhere eventually reading this message.

We’ve come pretty far from the telegraph, haven’t we?
Regardless of the outcome, I believe this trust is a necessary precondition for someone to turn it around. So this relationship doesn’t guarantee success, but lacking it does guarantee failure.
> good luck with trying to get what you're after without being at least indirectly dependent on the decisions of yet another Twitter clone

Not what I meant. The correct way to read what I wrote is with emphasis on "another Twitter-but-reinvented".

We already have have a Twitter-but-reinvented (Mastodon, and Mastodon-interoperable ActivityPub clients/servers). And people actually use it—which is the hard part of working on any kind of "social" gewgaw.

To think that we should throw that out and use twtxt or something like it would be to screw up bad. ActivityPub is better at being RSS-/Atom-like in its ability to convey structure than twtxt is, anyway. What's left is slicing it up, fusing the gaps and some now-necessary pieces with epoxy, and saying, "Here's the 'static' profile; you can look forward to support for this in Mastodon 4.0 [and everything else that tries to be interoperable]."
Stereograms never really worked for me, but this seems like a good place to share a related story.

Tool released an album with a bunch of stereo optic album art back in 2005 or so, with built-in glasses to go with them. I was home, sick, with time to spare, and tried to make these work. People online said they could see the images in 3D immediately, but it would take me 5-10 minutes of staring to make each page pop with depth. After I put the album down, I looked around, and - holy shit - the room around me was in 3D, like the stereo optic photos and art.

The effect faded after a few minutes. That's when it occurred to me that I'm some kind of stereoblind. I have depth perception, but it's almost like my brain uses an inefficient algorithm. The only time I naturally see depth that pops like that is when I'm looking out at vast, vast spaces - driving around the American southwest, for example.

I'm the only one in my immediate family who doesn't need glasses. My vision is sharp, it's good at night, and I often joked about how the 80s/90s idea that TV ruins your eye sight was a myth.

I think the joke is on me. Because I didn't spend enough time focusing on far away things, I never learned to relax my eyes that way, and Magic Eye never really worked for me. I like to think that explains why I sucked at sportsball (although did okay with soccer)

Back to when that Tool album came out - weeks later, I heard a story on NPR about a doctor who was challenging the accepted theory that if you don't develop depth perception by age 8, the synaptic paths are set, and you can never develop depth perception. By setting up a string, with beads placed a couple of inches apart, attach it to the wall, and then every morning, and stare at each bead... And people were able to learn depth perception!

I didn't ever set that up. Sometimes, through an old mirror, I can see depth. It's wild. But, for no good reason, I can't be bothered to practice on a string of beads, or whatever.

Don't spend too much time in front of screens, boys and girls. Go outside and play.
Ah, but two every 6 hours is 4000 mg/day, and my bottle claims that's safe. When I'm anywhere near that dose, I have a > 102F fever, which means I'm in peak form to compute dosages and timings.

Of course that's over the counter. Prescription strength also exists.

I'm a fan of switching between two pain killers / fever reducers (and only one liver killer), overlapping the effective time window by a few hours, but keeping both at ~50% the recommended max daily dose (a doctor recommended this to me a few years ago).

Of course, that makes the dose schedule more complicated, getting back to the problem it is trying to solve.
Except for HN, which has dang's excellent moderation.

But HN is more of a meta-blog.
Ask HN: What are some of the best mathematics books?
Looking at the amount of lawsuits Billy Mitchell is still throwing around to this day Ill say the movie was right on the money.

https://www.thegamer.com/billy-mitchell-lawsuit-twin-galaxie...
Well that was a great read; thanks for sharing!
QR codes are clumsy and inconvenient, moving to NFC was the right move for the states and most of the developed world. However, Starbucks uses QR codes for its app if you pay in store (but you can mobile order and not pay in store at all, so I rarely bother).

China built its cashless system using QR codes, since it doesn't require any additional hardware beyond a smartphone and the clumsiness is just another thing you get used to over there.
> I would hear from people that they wanted CI and dev to be 100% the same and wanted a simple "run all CI locally" command to pre-check before posting.

This is exactly what developers should want. It's the most efficient workflow for a dev, because we then don't have to think at all. This is a huge dev efficiency anti-pattern: thinking your code is good to merge, pushing the change, and then finding out 10-20mins later that CI isn't happy for some reason that wasn't natural to check locally.

The thesis in the following is the way: https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2021/04/07/modern-ci-is-too-co...
The vast majority of comments in this post, including the one I replied to, are about privacy and control rather than accessibility.
How do you buy your guns and ammo?
I highly recommend talking to a psychiatrist or psychologist that can see if you fit the criteria. However, if you’re willing to do your own research, you may be able to find a family doctor willing to let you try a few mediations before referring you to a specialist. (I did.)

ADHD medication is excellent from a patient’s perspective. The first-line ones are almost immediately effective. If you don’t like what they do, you can just stop taking them and try another one. In less than a year, you can try most of the known-working medications.

Even if nothing comes of it, at least you know. Knowing is half the battle. :)
> For a single transaction, is it even possible to make a transaction with a credit card when: - The chip/card reader fails? - The network connection is down? - There's a power outage?

I use cards for 99% of my payments. For me, this simply hasn't been an issue in actual reality. In fact, I've had far more issues getting cash into and out of the handful of ATMs in my area that work with my credit union.

I keep about $100 in each car and $1000 in my house in case I find I desperately need cash. The car money comes in handy sometimes if there's a cash discount for gas or I drive someplace and realize I've forgotten my wallet.
Makes sense. I stand corrected. I was under the assumption you could use a passport.
If you like this, you might also enjoy this (mobile)web friendly text game I made a while back: Dungeon Memalign[0]

[0] https://memalign.github.io/m/dungeon/index.html
For sure. If you’re into metal, you might have heard of Deathspell Omega - majority of their post 2004 material is pure studio magic. In fact it is not even clear whether the drumming is real or whether it is a cleverly disguised drum machine.
Then, not too long afterward, they forget everything.
> Mathematics is by far the biggest and longest running open source project on this planet and we are absolutely able to traverse it by centuries or millenia. This works across languages and cultures.

This goes against what I understand about mathematics. I've tried to break it into a few sections.

Open source:

Things in mathematics once defined, tend not to change, even when changing would be beneficial.

Open source software tends to be a bit more malleable, but even long running things that can't change for fear of breaking things like POSIX or the X Window System end up getting alternatives that the industry slowly turns towards.

But mathematics just stays stuck. Multiple subfields will end up using the same glyph to mean two different things and when those subfields intersect it gets very bad very fast.

Even small quality-of-life fixes never end up getting accepted into use.

Here's a great example by 3Blue1Brown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sULa9Lc4pck

Another example (if you're interested in going down a bit of a rabbit hole) is the history of vector algebra vs quarternions. We ended up going with vector algebra, then learned that quarternions were actually better, but we continued to teach / and be taught vector algebra.

> we are absolutely able to traverse it by centuries or millenia

Well, this seems easy to disprove since knowledge does get lost and things keep getting rediscovered.

For example, Calculus was rediscovered multiple times:
- Archimedes (at least part of it with his method of exhaustion)
- Leibnitz / Newton (separately)
- and recently: medical doctors rediscovering integration and publishing papers on it in the 90s.

Other famouse examples would be Fast Fourier Transform, and perhaps Fermat's Last Theorem
"... demand, rightly, that the government put a stop to it."
Why "rightly?" This isn't the right way to fight crime.
You start with "if crime is easier..." That is the problem, not the payment.
Ride the Lightning too - though mainly to beef up James’ voice.
You're missing the forest for the tree. It doesn't matter what software platforms or communications methods are involved - children (or rather descendants, since they may be adults) generally do not wish to share the same social platform as their parents / older relatives.
This comes to mind:

"Chicago undergraduate mathematics bibliography"

-> https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~abhishek/chicmath.htm

Prior discussion of the above link are as follows:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ocf.berkeley.edu...
People say Bytedance (Tiktok) has an excellent recommendation system, better at adjusting to interest changes than the other platforms.

Personally I always go out of my way to get the chronological view on twitter, but I have to say I am curious what an open algorithm could mean in practice...
That’s the feeling which pushes me.
If a doctor estimates that this particular patient+disease+procedure combination has a lower chance of success than the average patient who needs a similar category of procedure, then unless they're severely mistaken, every other doctor will also estimate the same way and refuse that difficult case.
Moderating Content Does More to Support The Principles of Free Speech