skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The sole purpose of blockchain is to prevent double spending without a trusted party"

I agree with this. I would add that by removing the need for a trusted party, it can increase speed.

For example, stock trades are currently T+2 to handle settlement through the various institutions. There is a push to start using blockchain to speed it up to T+1 or faster.
> code as law is terrible idea

I don't know exactly what you mean by 'code as law', and I'm sure there are extremists that think smart contracts make law obsolete, but they are just wrong. Fraud via smart contract is still fraud. Theft via smart contract is still theft.

There's nothing about having automatic processing of transactions that means you get to just ignore the legal system in your country.

And that's fine, proper and good. Automatic processing of complex transactions is phenomenally useful, even if it doesn't make legal systems obsolete.

Simplest example - with smart contracts transacting assets where the canonical record of ownership is on the blockchain, you can have a smart contract act as escrow for you, making sure that the transaction happens atomically without having to pay someone to hold the assets for you and release them once they have both. It is a better, more efficient solution than any that the traditional financial system has been able to come up with.

In fact, it is exactly linking the legal world and the blockchain world that means that you can apply some of the same benefits of immediacy and atomicity to more assets in the real world. All that is needed is for the legal system to recognise blockchains as the canonical record of ownership of real assets. The real world legal system makes blockchain technology more useful, not less.
SCCS was originally developed on System/370. And it was the first true version control system specifically for source code. There were some earlier programs with rudimentary similar functionality, but they're more comparable to diff/patch.
I don’t believe the OP was asking if people are doing things or if there are useful applications, but rather if there are useful applications that can only be done, or done better, in crypto.
The best proposal I’ve seen for it is accounting for shares on the stock market, there are some talks by the DTCC about this years ago before the GME fiasco.
> * More than Grafana, I think you need something like Metabase integrated OOTB. That might be a killer feature.

Nowadays you can directly connect to CH from many BI tools, and this could be different choice depending on report types / personal preferences. For example, our SeekTable has built-in connector for ClickHouse, and support 2 different drivers - one for binary TCP interface, another one for HTTP(S) interface.
immutable storage must come with an incentive layer or no one would serve the files.

for piracy, it was private tracker seed ratio. for web3, it's either on a blockchain or ipfs/arweave.

it's not a good fit for most applications, but when you want a file to probabilistically last forever, now there are options.
The UK has some right-wing polemecists (a group into which I'd place Peter Hitchens, author of the above) who are truly excellent writers and highly enjoyable to read. If you like this kind of thing, I'd recommend The Spectator, where you'll be able to enjoy the writings of Andrew Neil, Rod Liddle, and indeed Boris Johnson (the former editor). The views expressed are -- in my opinion -- generally excerable -- but the writing is usually witty, urbane, and well-crafted.
This is not a debate that has to be had in the abstract anymore.

It's been more than 10 years. Where's the cool stuff that those supposed technology breakthroughs enabled?

I think we all know what the proponents would point to. Are we really impressed by any of that?
Which book by Sutton do you recommend beginning, in order to understand the context behind the end of Bretton Woods and beginnings of neoliberal finance capitalism? One part of history many leftists seem to have trouble explaining is the continuity between the two “eras” of wartime Keynesianism and neoliberalism (many essentially describing it as a sudden change in powers but this sounds ridiculous). Some of his books seem to bring light to the processes behind this political change, but where should I start?
Once everyone gets over the cryptocurrency feature of blockchain tech we may start to have actual interesting technology. Right now - and ever since it started - the scene is filled with financial types who heard they could make a buck or fuck over some neophytes. Just go to a blockchain/crypto conference and you will see exactly what I mean. Once that phase goes away we may get actual technical folks with actual decent ideas.
I've monetised my hobbies three times so far.

All three times it has become lucrative, but none of them are hobbies any more.

One of the important things along the way I've learned is that what makes hobbies relaxing and fun isn't about the specific task you're doing but the fact that it's about enjoying the process of making/doing rather than feeling pressure to deliver the end result.

That's not to say I have any regrets about what I did - it's turned into a pair of businesses that are interesting and challenging in their own way while bringing in some serious coin - but the whole adage about "do what you love and you'll never work another day in your life" doesn't apply to running a small business.
(I'm hoping you wouldn't be downvoted/flagged into oblivion by the time I'm done with drafting and sending this).

> Good to announce your cheerful complicity in mass murder on here so we know not to take you seriously.

I attended a critical-thinking and logical reasoning class in University back in the day, and I'm trying to see what all logical fallacies you have committed (I'm not very good at this):

1. Non sequitur [1]? Because I don't really see how buying a Russian product supports mass murder.

And I think you have committed it again, because your conclusion that if somebody supports mass murder, then they shouldn't be taken seriously, is questionable.

I mean, for example, should the leader of Russia (think about their stand on mass murder) be taken seriously?

(I might also argue you committed the hasty generalization [3] fallacy here).

2. Cherry picking [2], because in the clause you quoted, you conveniently chose to omit the earlier clause of that same sentence.

3. Sweeping generalization [4], because you implicitly assume all Russians support mass murder.

4. Straw man fallacy [5]. You're not even addressing anything the parent commenter actually said.

5. False dilemma? [6]. I'm not too sure about this one, but I feel you're implicitly saying that because the parent commenter buys Russian products they must be supporting mass murder.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_fallacy

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secundum_quid

[5] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

[6] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
AI Is Already Learning from Russia’s War in Ukraine
Even though you shouldn't post/comment for karma, I really enjoy how easy it is to get up voted comments on HN. Makes it feel like people are actually reading your stuff and that it's a community. Reddit lost that ages ago, unless you join niche subreddit. You can comment on the top voted front page post on HN and still get replies.
A journalist that went to El Salvador and tried to use BTC to pay begs to differ:

> By Friday the final tally looks grim for crypto fans. Only 10 of almost 50 businesses had taken Bitcoin, amounting to $485 out of $1,700 I’ve spent. And only four crypto transactions—at the pool hall, the peanut vendor, a Starbucks, and a Caterpillar-brand T-shirt store—had been entirely seamless. My experience isn’t a fluke. In a recent Chamber of Commerce survey of 337 businesses, only 14% said they’d transacted in Bitcoin since September.

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2022-bitcoin-travel-probl...
For one, the computational work for checking everyone's transactions on everyone's computer (i.e. blockchain) is consuming the computing power of the people interested.

Until sharding provides a tunable level of security, we will see this waste of computing power.

Then, that might enable more payments for cheaper, which might let you pay by the minute and such.

But the second main brake in adoption is legal. Many countries' jurisdictions require lots of bureaucracy to earn money from various places of the world. For example, EU has VAT, which requires bureaucracy for EU country-to-country payments even if you are exempt (Register of Intra-Community Operators). This negates pretty much all the advantage of trustless/decentralized businesses (ease of payments).
Under land ownership, a lawyer might decide someone else owned land for the past 2 years, and history must be re-written. Also, that patch must be applied regardless of what the current land-owner wants.

At this point, it feels like you just have a git repository with a single controller. That's probably useful, but feels a long way from a blockchain.
Would you like to explore this and other ideas related to the field and contemplate some kind of potential collaboration?
We use HelpScout
That's a very limited pool with high competition though :D
I understand the appeal of a currency not controlled by a bad government, but could we honestly expect third world residents to be able to understand and use the technology required for crypto? I have been writing software for a decade and I still can barely keep up with what is going on.
Ask HN: How do you create a digital embargo?
Hi, just had this random thought.
If one were to hypothetically create a "digital embargo" i.e. stop all digital products from a certain nation from being accessed in another nation, how would they do it? Is such a thing even possible?
I fondly remember the almost bazaar-like experience of perusing the tape racks in local Spanish supermarkets, trying to work out which (if any) of the offerings were worth my couple of hundred peseta investment. Sometimes lucky with a great game, othertimes.. not so much :)
They might also do the status signalling differently than through a website design (for example, endorsement by a famous person), and we might actually see more functional websites as a result. Like the Berkshire-Hathaway example.
No, you aren't going insane. Cryptocurrency (block Chain ledger+distributed consensus) so far has no use case that is not covered by better technology. The one thing it facilitates (an online, permissionless, trustless, decentralised,ledger) has no real use case in human society, because in order to run the infrastructure to go online you already need to solve a lot of not-on-chain problems, and we have solved them with the technology of trust facilitation: the rule of law, legitimate authority, checks and balances etc. are all social technologies which are not perfect but have been honed over centuries and when combined with the internet to augment human discussion and decision making are incredibly efficient and low cost. It is pure insanity to try and replace this with cryptocurrency.

What makes sense is for governments and other societal trust anchors to run federated ledgers with cheap APIs, that everyone involved take local backups of and can verify, but go through specialised adapted write APIs (i.e. consensus through regulations, governance, checks and balances etc). Because that is useful and can automate notaries for example.

Everything else so far is either a decentralised Ponzi scheme (no clear owner/central figure, everyone can profit by luring in more suckers, but unlike the trust based economy no actual value is produced and the system would collapse if the trust based economy shut down the inflow of new capital - while even Venezuela and north Korea still produce things under heavy sanctions and could maybe be fine if they got rid of their cleptocrats and went back to an agrarian society, albeit with a lower QOL than the rest of the world) and/or derives it's value from using the Ponzi driven price of the currencies to launder money or provide tools to speculate/keep the game going. It's all recursive and contingent on going to the moon, with no there there. The epitome of default dead.

The market can stay irrational longer than we can bet against it. It is fully possible (and I'm afraid of it happening) that crypto bros get enough lobbying power to regulatory capture and insert themselves as "decentralised middlemen" into governmental processes. If this happens, they might point to the "value added" by Cryptos in the same way TurboTax in the US currently claims its usefulness. Bug we should not believe these lies, cryptocurrency is pure rent seeking.

That's why you're not going insane, nor missing something. There is simply no there there, just a bubble big enough to capture the very state it claims to dislike while it uses energy and IT infrastructure only that state and its society enabled
This seems like a rather old-school way of thinking about ambient computing. How about AR glasses that let you hallucinate interfaces on both smart and dumb objects? Interfacing with smart objects would change their physical state, while interfacing with dumb objects would change their digital state.
Yeah, but it's the absolutism that's the issue, not the buggy code.

When designing automated replacments for any business process you have to deal with the same 'exceptions'. You could just accept "computer says no" as the desired outcome in exchange for the efficiency, and let hackers take your money because "hey, they beat the system! It's theirs now" but that's a choice, not a limitation of the tech itself. Unless the tech's only benefit is that "computer says no" or "hacker took your money" is final, which doesn't actually sound like a benefit.
As someone with a somewhat successful side project, I highly recommend monetizing it. However, you should choose a small enough price that you don’t feel like you owe customers fast support or every feature they ask for. (In some cases a donation button may be better)

Also, when you start expecting your project to meet income requirements, it can take the fun out extremely fast. Part of the fun is being able to work on it as much or as little as I want.

Benefits of monetizing (from my experience):

Extremely validating, what you enjoy doing has value to others.

Offsets costs, even if your only cost is time, a few bucks really helps.
Brooklyn Public Library offers access to banned ebooks to teens across the U.S
Awesome!beats that old heathkit SW
I participate in 8 or 10 like that. They aren't especially rare, in my experience.
I agree with this sentiment. I started taking sponsorships for my blog and it very quickly sucked the fun away from it. I now felt like I couldn't do whatever I wanted because I needed to optimize the sponsor's time and post content to make them feel like it was worth it. In other words, it became a boring job.
PGP/GPG provides primitives for managing some sort of PKI but beyond that, I don't follow your argument.

For the sake of concreteness, here's for example how an auction can run on the blockchain:

At time T an asset A owned by an anonymous seller is locked into a smart contract for H hours at minimum price M. Participants are free to enter their bids until time T+H. At the end of the period, the smart contracts examines all bids - if all bids are less than M, no-one gets asset A and ONLY then is asset A released back to original seller. If at least one bid is above M, the highest bid is picked and the asset is automatically transferred to the bidder's address. Everyone else is re-funded automatically. The seller is the only one able to extract the cash from the contract.

Anyone can check the contract code and ascertain:

- the seller can't withdraw their asset and run away with it before auction ends

- the seller cannot reject a valid bid (>M) if the auction is already started

- everyone but the winner will be re-funded their money back

- winner (if any) is the only one who can retrieve the asset after auction is over

... and any other interesting properties. Regardless of whether Alice is from Argentina or from Zimbabwe.

How would you do this on top of PGP/GPG?

Note that source code bugs and hacks happen and are part of the process of working out how to do this stuff safely. There's a recent example of someone messing up a contract and $36M is stuck* forever because the refund functionality had a bug.
Card payments solve a different issue (for starters the transaction is not irreversible), and no they don't cost that much in properly regulated markets.

If I want to send money from Europe to the US, many traditional banks and fintechs are cheaper than cryptocurrency exchanges, and if that's still too expensive, for large amounts forex brokers will be under 0.1%.

The fact stablecoins exist and have become so prevalent is really telling. People speculating with cryptocurrencies want to onboard and offboard USD... So now we have these coins, some are even replicating fractional banking, only illegally.
A few things that come to mind from having worked in many coffees in a few countries where those were implemented would be to institute an off-peak/peak time policy where people are asked not to work during peak time (e.g. lunch), have some sort of subscription model which comes with a faster wifi and X drinks a month.
Same at FB as far as I could tell while I was there. "The algorithm" is a misnomer, popularized by the press but really kind of silly. There are really thousands of pipelines and models developed by different people running on different slices of the data available. Some are reasonably transparent. Others, based on training, are utterly opaque to humans. Then the weights are all combined to yield what users see. And it all changes every day if not every hour. Even if it could all be explained in a useful way, that explanation would be out of date as soon as it was received.

I'm not saying that to defend anyone BTW. This complexity and opacity (which is transitive in the sense that a combined result including even one opaque part itself becomes opaque) is very much the problem. What I'm saying is that it's likely impossible for the companies to comply without making fundamental changes ... which might well be the intent, but if that's the case it should be more explicit.
I hope you find these two resources useful to address your question. I'm also pretty integrated about the possible answers, but I definitely bet on doing it using graphs. I'm preparing a detailed and concrete explanation on why I guess this conclusion but that one will need to wait for now!

For now as I have already told you, check out these ones.

https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/manifold

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvmjbXZyoP0
Latin "He holds"; imported to English, if refers to a belief (which is something you hold), e.g. tenets of the Catholic Church.
This looks pretty awesome. We use a ton of html to pdf reporting. Not sure if I'd want to redo all our templates in this, but its always good to have other options in the space.

Right now, our biggest struggle is taking a given PDF and turning it into a high DPI raster suitable for printing. There are a few options, none truly free or 100% effective.
You're comparing the 8700K TDP to the 12900K maximum turbo power (which you can only "achieve" when using all cores fully). In "normal" usage 12th gen is very energy efficient and perform (unsurprisingly) much better than AMD Zen 2/3 SKUs.
I think git has:

1. A chain of blocks referencing its parents by hash, thus verifying their validity and immutability

2. A rules for consensus on choosing what blocks can be appended (both technically and organizationally through each company’s PR review process)

That makes git a blockchain.
Nice theory. In practice intellectual property goes to someone and that’s it.

See many real world examples such as the recently discontinued F1 game.
> You have to trust the people who figured out the math, when they say "this math is secure".

Not really. I'm convinced the math is secure given the current knowledge, because there's a massive financial incentive to break it. I don't have to trust anyone.
They haven't talked much detail since Matt Cutts left, but over time they did sort of outline the basics. That the core ranking is still some evolution of PageRank, weighting scoring of page attributes/metadata and flowing it down/through inbound links as well. But then altered via various waves of ML, like Vince (authority/brand power), Panda (inbound link quality), Penguin (content quality), and many others that targeted other attributes (page layout, ad placement, etc).

Even if some of that is off, the premise of a chain of some ML, and some not ML, processors means they probably can't really tell you exactly why anything ranks where it does.
The holy grail is to generate content for you!

The future will combine these tool with data about you—aesthetic preferences, story arches you respond to well, your current mood—-and generate content on the fly. I assume there will still be people working on the skeleton or basic structure of such content, but the rest will be filled in by these tools.
It seems there are a lot of parameters and customization options in the Snap sandboxing system: https://snapcraft.io/docs/snap-confinement#interfaces & https://snapcraft.io/docs/interface-management
What differentiates a non-crypto hash from a crypto hash. Is there a fundamental difference between the two which prevents one from being used for cryptographic purposes?
> The decisions in the European Parliament were made by people freely elected in 2019 elections.

Freely electing representatives does not mean those representatives will faithfully execute the will of their voters. The people of the US freely elect their representatives, and yet:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. - https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746

That is not to say the same is true in the EU, but it shows that free elections alone are no guarantee that voter preferences influence policy.
Credit cards are ridiculously overpriced. It is a joke that the credit card oligopoly can siphon of an entire percent or more of a large majority of retail purchases in some jurisdictions (other jurisdictions prudently cap those fees).

But most other methods of transferring money are cheap and fast.

If we compare with worst cases, I had a BTC transaction in 2019, IIRC, with a transaction fee of USD 50 that sat in the mempool for half a day before it was picked up.
> Berlin emergency services show a 30% increase for heart attack and stroke codes in 2021. No explanation. Many other such signs from around the world.

Sadly ,due to the pandemic a lot of preventive check-ups haven't been made. This could be just one reason.

You can't criticise someone for doing "propaganda" while not providing any sources and pulling stuff out of the air yourself.

If you want to actually read up on what the problems are and aren't. I recommend this podcast (which includes all sources): https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/