skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That’s because Brad Pitt is a named celebrity with lots of photos from many angles that has been included by name in the training data. It can get Brad Pitt like content by name. If I say “5 foot 6 inch tall older Italian woman <insert rest of scene description here>” I’m going to get an absolutely randomised person as the focus each time, the mode has no memory and this has been the BIGGEST limitation in all these transformer based architectures. There’s no memory of each output, they are all discrete and as much as you can kinda fudge it with GPT-3 by including part of the previous paragraph or sentences in your prompt to try and keep it on track, it can, does, and inevitably will drift horribly off track unless you manually coach it over and over micromanaging it’s output to keep it useful and sensible.

With GPT it’s each text prompt, with DALL-E it’s each text or image prompt, and with a hypothetical video version it would be the same limit, each prompt has no memory of the previous and so it can’t implicitly reuse anything created by a previous prompt. You have to hack that in sound the core transformer architecture to make a facsimile of memory by things like pasting in extra data or teaching DALL-E 2 to edit a picture you upload and then uploading the picture you just generated using it, video would be no different and consequently this approach will not scale efficiency beyond individual items of content like an arbitrary sized block of text, a single photo or small group of photo edits, or a single “shot” of video content containing a scene or two worth of contiguous narrative flow.
In the cases of those I'm familiar with, most code in the system does not need to be bug-free for safety, and the code that does is kept simple and heavily reviewed at the binary level.

For most contacts, it is not financially feasible to use the techniques developed for safety-critical software.
The trust shift to a lower layer, which is always what you want to unless this adds a huge amount of overhead or complexity that leads to security issues. In our case it looks like blockchains are solving real world problems.
No that's not true. The decisions in the European Parliament were made by people freely elected in 2019 elections. The person who wrote this piece is a member of a minor party in the European Parliament[0] that is not happy with the decision.

[0] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/197431/PATRICK_BREYER...

The expectation that the Pirate Party, which has quite small public support, will steamroll over the politicians with large public support is appalling. Governance by all knowing computer elites who don't have a significant public support is the actual fascism IMHO.

They simply need to convince the public first in orther to change things.
I'm not sure this is convincing.

If there's some actual benefit, then crappy code that can be iterated is fine. Anything you do today with computer code was likely done worse in the past with worse code.

So what is the actual benefit of "peer-to-peer lending and pooled lending" that blockchain technology provides that makes it worth iterating through these early mistakes?

I'd guess the answer usually involves dodging regulations in some way. Which isn't blockchain specific, lots of 'innovations' in tech or business are basically workarounds that let you dodge taxes or regulations or exploit externalities.
Why use bitcoin, the slowest blockchain and most inefficient blockchain, as an example? Blockchains like Sui offer basically unlimited transactions/s
Russia to approve imports of Samsung and Apple products without their consent
Your hardware and software vendors, and the people who secured your OS and your physical premises.
That is largely an issue of nomenclature, but there is a school of thought that distinguishes between public, open, trust-less blockchains (which then need a consensus mechanism), and private, permissioned blockchains (which have a central authority and thus don't need a consensus mechanism).

Whether the latter has many use cases is a good question, but git certainly fits the definition.
You have to trust the people who figured out the math, when they say "this math is secure". Then you have to trust the people who programmed that math, when they say "this code implements this math correctly". And then you have to trust the binary, unless you compiled it yourself, when it says "this binary compiles this code correctly", and finally you have to trust the machines when they say "this computer executes this binary correctly", all the while trusting youself not to have made any mistakes at any step which will quickly cost you everything you put into the system.

If you are an expert mathematician, programmer, electrical engineer, and white hat you might not have to trust anyone else. How many people are all of these though?
I don't know anything about that game in particular, but I have experienced extremely poor performance from old games before. Sometimes it can be fixed by installing an old copy of the DirectX 9 runtime. DX9 to DX10 completely changed architectures and eventually (I don't remember when), the old DX9 stuff was reimplemented as being emulated through the newer architecture. But that emulation is extremely inefficient.
Shouldn't you use something like AWS Codebuild. A cli to abstract some of the config could be useful but don't think we need a whole service..
> No other computational platform before the blockchain has provided all these features at the same time.

What about PGP/GPG?
>For the rich however there are less opportunities to learn from mistakes, because of the lack of consequences.

Citation needed there. Even though it's not as bad as homelessness, I can't imagine it being easy to tell your rich, successful parents that their child is a fuckup.
Nesting was around pretty early on, but yeah.

I think what all of these platforms are discovering is that we figured out some pretty intuitive patterns early on and are on a constant loop of wanting to do something different before eventually realizing this and reverting.

There's a hybrid wherein you keep references to a branch in a thread but you still display a flat discussion. If you choose to follow the branch you can but otherwise all discussion sits on one level. I like this way more than default nesting, which can be impossible to follow.
Your example is implemented in Certificate Transparency to monitor certificate authorities on the web. It does not help you prevent attacks, it merely helps you detect them after the fact.
NetworkX: Network Analysis in Python
It just seems very odd that (2!) people would recommend an "ORM/SOA framework" when all the poster wanted was an HTTP client library. At least you can link to the HTTP client parts?
Nice, faster rust builds are always welcome.

I wonder if in the future some service might even offer prebuilt crates for the various architectures. I think that idea was brought up at some point.
Proof of stake is useless.
It just give all the powers to the current stakeholders.
So it’s not trustless by definition since you need to trust the stakeholders.
Startup Ideas for the Modern Workplace
Threads is the worst feature of Slack, it required 5x mental space to keep track of all hidden conversations, as mentioned before Tabs would've been a much better solution
As someone who has been working with XMPP for a long time, I can safely say that most of the criticisms here simply have no material effects in practice. Yes, an ack packet can be 19 characters long. Is that terrible?

It would be just as easy to write a post like this about JSON, Matrix and so on. Both have many warts.

But I really don't much care. No technology is perfect, and there will always be people who dislike choices that other people have made. What matters is what we do with the technology. XMPP has proven itself able to evolve over more than two decades, during which the internet and the way we use it has shifted dramatically, and yet it continues to be relevant as new people discover and adopt it.

It's unfair to describe things like multi-device sync as "afterthoughts" when XMPP was one of the first real-time messaging protocols to have support for multiple concurrent connections of the same account built in, at a time before the iPhone was released, and most people had a single device with wired access to the internet only.

Support for multi-device sync is part of the suite of protocol features required by modern XMPP implementations, these requirements are updated every year to account for the changing technology landscape: https://xmpp.org/about/compliance-suites/

I personally like the simple delivery model of XMPP compared to the "distributed database" model that Matrix pursues. I think there are use-cases for both approaches. Both XMPP and Matrix have bridges between each other and third-party protocols (proprietary and open ones), which makes any attempt to create false competition between them an unhelpful effort. What's important is that both provide openly-documented protocols with open-source reusable implementations, and (in my opinion) most important of all: decentralized open communication networks.

The problems facing the broader adoption of open networks for modern messaging are not protocol problems.
Expecting concessions or not, it is undeniable that a quick victory wouldn’t have brought this amount of pain and isolation. Foreign reserve confiscation was enacted immediately and definitely unexpected, but other measures are being enacted with every passing day the conflict lingers.
You don't need global regulation, you need regulation in your local market and currency or you can't actually spend any of the theoretical value you may possess. What's the point of being a crypto millionaire in theory if you can't actually cash out? It is already very hard to, eg., secretly cash out BTC to AUD to spend on something you actually want. It will be reported and it will be taxed. It may as well be actual dollars.
I'm blockchain skeptical, but I think you're slightly throwing out the baby with the bathwater here.

> the trusted party isn't eliminated by blockchain, because someone has to code the implementation of the software

I don't think is relevant in practice, and I think the blockchain does solve this problem regarding double-spending. Yes, there's a centralized set of developers, but that does not seem to be a problem in practice, 13 years in

> The trust 'problem' is overrated, because nothing in this world works without trust.

Bingo, this is the real problem. The world has very few problems where a trusted authority / arbitrator isn't a massive benefit.
Original Lode Runner in the Browser
The guidelines cut off the third finger emoji that followed, apparently
I add the Washington Post comment section, which has to be the most mindless thing I have ever read.
No; it was run by a guy called Martyn Sherwood. I found a page about it online[0], which I see includes a reference to my ‘company’, Micro Spec Software!

[0] https://rk.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/jmg7/groups/prismpd.html
You are projecting, the update is not so defeatist. It starts with listing achievements, then says that overall the new document does not deserve the name of 'digital constitution' and an opportunity was wasted.

Not the opportunity. More will come and I got an impression that PP will keep fighting. I would vote for PP if I could.
Yes, it is a slow computer that uses the resources of about a billion modern computers. (Note that you could achieve basically any desired fault tolerance with a minuscule fraction of that with a trusted central authority.)
This is an absurd position to take with regards to new legislation that will in almost no way benefit corporations. Sure, it might be watered down and not as effective as it could have been – as alleged in the article. But it's still legislation that corporations would much rather not have and be able to do what they want.
Your comment goes in all directions so it’s hard to answer. Perhaps it’s useful to point that proof of work is not ubiquitously used in blockchains and much greener alternatives have been preferred in pretty much any crypto that’s been released in the past 5 years
tclsh is included https://tcl.tk/man/tcl8.5/UserCmd/tclsh.htm

If you meant a login shell... https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Is+tclsh+or+wish+suitable+as+...
>2. That recent deterioration is most certainly embedded within a massive improvement over a longer horizon.

The point was that political discussion became more common on this board in the last five years due to this "deterioration." So whether things are better now than 60 years ago isn't relevant to that point.
Strangely one factor stand out very much but not mentioned - the use of timber and wood. If you used brick and cement, would it be slower. Anyway these quality kind of thinking need a regression exercise to make sure it is not just random thinking but real. Any stat ?
> I think that much of the philosophy around blockchain comes from the lack of faith in human governance—which is to say, a certain kind of misanthropy.

So the blockchain gets two things right: avoiding double-spending and an honest assessment on human nature.
Bernie Sanders is an immediate and obvious counterexample to your assertion that people only do this for Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton. There's also Jeb Bush, Pete Buttigieg, Marco Rubio, and many others.

The exclusion of these fairly obvious counterexamples suggests that you are engaging in a form of confirmation bias.

There is reason to believe that people are sexist toward female politicians, but the first-name basis of Kamala and Hillary is not a strong piece of evidence, given that we do that for the aforementioned male politicians (and don't do it for a lot of other female politicians, such as Elizabeth Warren, Sarah Palin and AOC)
Why blockchains are useful, in a nutshell
> It was tried a bunch of times in the past and never worked.

Sorry, EUR and USD and KES (Kenyan shilling, uses a great cheap payment system on mobile phones called M-Pesa) and XRP (Ripple, a "crypto currency" with a central authority) don't work? I hadn't noticed.
How much of a stretch it is to say that YDB is a competitor to NDB Cluster?
My Tesla has 270,000 watts including both motors. 250 watts is less than half of 1 horsepower. My lawnmower is more powerful than that.

Were you thinking 250kW maybe?
When I first heard about Ethereum I figured the value it would bring was incentivising everyone to create a worldwide supercomputer of the sorts we've never even seen before that can do really amazing computational work as opposed to bitcoin which just seems to crunch numbers entirely pointlessly. Any ideas why that never happened?
Well, nuclear reactor use dumb electronics overrides, and each time an operation is done inside, each operation is done with human supervision. Override mechanisms are regularly tested and used. If your override is not dumb/simple enough, and you rely on code, you have the 380 max.

What are the override, who are the supervisors for cryptocurrency?
Turning your hobby into a business can get complicated, to the extent that it could kill your passion for it. It is, in the end, a commitment that requires hard work.
And this is a huge problem we as people, including myself, don't shape the world we could have. We have the power to not support evil and we don't use it (enough).
Any example of those many useful applications?
A Man Who Accidentally Killed the Most People in History
Crypto, the Left and Technofeudalism
"If you’ve ever written code, and if you’ve ever written a bug, then you will understand that code as law is terrible idea, especially when it comes to finance."

If your argument is that there could be bugs in the code, then how is this different from the law today? The legal system is rife with abuses and injustices. It most certainly has bugs as-is.
R 4.2.0 Has Been Released
Even if this is all true what is missing here is self reflection. What exactly has any so called value in the finance or digital industry? Really not much, Finance has literally no value at all.

So what i read here is bitterness that something without value displaces what you do know that has no value.
My 5 cents on HN's civility is that people want to have an impact with their posts.

On large forums (large subreddits, Twitter) you have to be very loud to be heard. Being outrageous, knee-jerk reactions easily get eyeballs, and don't require much effort or time, hence those who spend effort and time on a post that takes effort and time to understand are outcompeted. Finding content like that becomes a discoverability problem. There is also bandwagoning, adding your vote to the tally doesn't require much effort, but can feel like having an impact by identifying with the collective impact. Apes together strong.

On small forums it is relatively easier to have an impact, so because you are guaranteed to be discovered you want to increase the quality of the impact. On a large forum the opportunity to be seen can make you ignore the risk of being judged, and bandwagoning is risk-free, on a small forum the focus is on how you are being seen.

On HN specifically most people want to be seen as an insightful, constructive individual. Taking different stances is an established norm here, so the risk is not being upvoted (not discovered, or insightful), or being too downvoted (not constructive). Normally downvotes would also discourage you from taking too different stances, but HN made some smart decisions (you have to have a certain number of upvotes to downvote, can't downvote people replying to you, upvotes and downvotes are not publicly visible, your comment is only greyed out if it has too many downvotes) to encourage different stances and constructive behavior.
The whole point of the legal system is that whilst it's defined as clearly as possible, there is always going to be some flexibility and interpretation, and a human element, so if someone finds a technical loophole but is clearly defrauding everyone they can still be put in jail. Of course, it isn't perfect, but the idea of law being absolute (as in code is law) is absurd as we lack the capability to consider every eventuality when we release code.
I don't fully understand the use-case for this.

Would one use the async function to import JS code from another team or something?
Yes. I wonder how we know what happened in the 1970s or 1990s, or what the lottery numbers were back then, or what the election result was, or who owned which house. There was no Blockchain back then, so no tamper resistant public log back then, so, I guess we'll never really know.
Ah ah. But 745 hours of free internet is a bit less impressive and catchy.

(edit: changed from 744 to 745 to take long October months with winter hour changes in account, add a second to that if you want to be sure about leap seconds)
The "They hate us for our freedom" line was merely a hamfisted attempt on G. W. Bush's part to pander to disciples of 'American exceptionalism' while his search for WMD had foundered & we faced the disgust of the world. I'm not sure that the phrase is even in opposition to God's Law since Bush surely believed that America was subject to God's Law (albeit a different one), yet surely didn't think that American Freedom would suffer for (being subject to His Law). Indeed, while the American Right now enjoys a resurgence nationally and works to roll back LGBTQ and abortion rights in favor of what they deem God would proscribe, they surely won't think that we are any less 'free'. And that is the largest point -- that freedom needs quotes, since its purely subjective.
I think electronic cash such as Bitcoin indeed has value. A decentralized world computer such as Ethereum imo can also have tremendous value, but NFTs are.. pretty dumb. The ecosystem is still in its infancy. Whenever a new technology appears, it takes a while for people to discover good use cases. This process involves a lot of trial and error. I believe most crypto projects out there today will be dead within a few years. Similar to what happened with the internet around the dot-com bubble.
We’re in Charlbury, 15 minutes out from Oxford by train, and it’s full of knowledge workers (tech included). FTTP broadband, plenty of facilities, population just 3000, beautiful Cotswold countryside. The only downside is that house prices are high as a result.
Why is Twist “worse in probably every dimension”? (Asking honestly, I’d like to know where you find it inferior to slack, which I have used in the past, while I haven’t looked at Twist in depth)
All of that code usually has a human override, and it can be turned off, fixed and upgraded. Also, it isn't (in the main) in the public and under constant probing attack.
>60% of global GDP is not a small fraction. As for countering sanctions, no one doubts the cat and mouse chase, but the Kremlin will be forced to funnel these to its weapons industry undermining economic and social development, akin to North Korea mid/long term.
Wait, you never did a git rebase?

How does a consensus algorithm help when the nodes are not connected to the p2p network?
I really like the press-and-hold to collapse children interaction in the mobile Reddit app, along with the button in the bottom right to jump to the next top level comment.
> Even when I completely disagree with my fellow HN, it's valuable to me to have a forum where I can see those views articulated clearly ...

Yes, this.

"one of the vices of those who would repress the opinions of others is they make themselves prisoners of their own opinions, because they deny themselves the rights and the means of changing them."

- a comment by Christopher Hitchens, referencing a Thomas Paine commentary on a John Milton pamphlet, in a 2006 debate about free expression. Full transcript (v long):

https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/culture/debate-freedom-of-expr...
"Unfortunately there are no official IPC numbers"

Nor can there really be. IPC varies pretty wildly, and depends a LOT on optimization for a particular CPU architecture. The instruction mix should match the CPU model's execution units in addition to not having any dependency stalls.
> Bitcoin works the same way, but in a much more modern way and achieves much better security.

Is this true in practice? Haven't there been multiple massive bitcoin thefts? If these happened to a bank, you'd have a chance to get your money back. With Bitcoin -- it's just gone.
That's why I mentioned git, not just putting it in a text file.

Every git commit contains a hash of all the previous commits, and is itself referred to by a hash. So if you change an old commit, all commits descending from that get a new hash, and so a new identity.

If you publish the latest hash in the newspaper, you've locked down all the previous commits also.
> I'd say that BTC + ETC use up about 1% of world electricity

Where did you get that figure? If you read the researched article I linked, the estimate is around 0.1%.

> would go up dramatically if BTC went up dramatically

Not as dramatically as you think: if BTC goes up to 1 million per coin it will still be using less than 1% of global energy consumption (again relying on the article I previously cited as my source). 1% is no longer a rounding error that we can just dismiss, but a price of 1 million per coin would imply that Bitcoin-based financial systems have become incredibly valuable and are displacing other financial systems.
POKE 35899,0

From memory, 40 years later...
The owner controls it by holding the button. Like a gas pedal.
Sorry offtopic, how is your battery life?
It's a way for job seekers to write better resumes.

What do you understand it to be?
Many people were doing flat design before Apple did. Scott Forstall famously loved skeuomorphic interfaces. When Apple Maps-gate got him fired, Jony Ive took over software UX design and commanded that everything be flat to match the hardware aesthetic. Apple’s switch to flat design was purely about internal politics and was disconnected from the external design world which had been using these idioms for quite some time.