skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Trying to pursue my own vision, how to deal with all the challenges?
I'm embarking on a very ambitious project led by a particular vision of mine [0], something I've worked hard to flesh out over the past 2+ years (the entire process probably going back 10+ years).

Despite being quite confident about my vision, it's becoming increasingly clear to me that the very act of pursuing one's own unique vision comes with its own set of challenges, namely:

- general lack of guidance and trying to figure out everything myself

- self-doubt and dealing with criticisms, failures, disappointment

- struggle staying motivated and maintaining progress over a long time frame

- staying true to my vision, while making sure to be open-minded to feedback

- navigating big shifts in direction, re-evaluating the vision itself

- feeling isolated/alone because no one else really understands what I'm trying to do

I understand this is a big cloud of questions to tackle, but if anyone has anything at all to contribute to these (or other) aspects of pursuing one's own vision, I would really appreciate it!

Thanks so much in advance!

[0]: a detailed description of my project/vision from a previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30976504
Site is very sparse, I "think" I know what this is for, but I'm probably wrong, can anyone explain?
Adaption benefits those who adapted earlier.

It’s always funny to see early adopters’ criticisms of inflation politics and power to the 99% rhetoric when all they want to do is flip the curve around and apply the same “upward distribution” to their monetary system, but in reverse (timewise) and worse (distribution wise).
> Uh, you’re not actually required to watch something just because it exists

believe it or not, if the money goes all in one direction, you're at one point between a rock and a hard place when it's about choice.

> The job of a literature professor is not to protect Literature by ensuring that inadequate students are never allowed to write.

But the job of a film production company is not to produce as much content as possible, but taking the financial risk to produce something that will make an impression.
You would theoretically get something akin to the latest Intel processor running at over 10 GHz.

I fully expect that once Apple releases their server class CPUs at the end of this year we’ll get something that’s equivalent to the latest Intel processor running at 7 GHz.
It was shiny.
In practice, I'm not sure this is entirely true. Banks largely don't care who they're dealing with and are glad to sponsor transactions among terrorists and Nazis and what not, just like a blockchain. Governments lean on them by spot checking records and punishing when they can identify transgressions of law. Even with a blockchain, the same governments can tell anyone within the reach of its gun or goons that it is going to punish you if you transact with some forbidden party. Not having a single narrow waist at which they can stop it doesn't mean they can't stop it, just that it got harder. Further, the transaction that is censorship resistant, not censorship proof, is the public mapping of wallet id to coin id. Usually, supplier and purchaser are really interested in the movement of physical goods at some point, not just the transfer of digital coin. Whether that be drugs, slaves, or just food, governments can still find ways to stop delivery of those goods even if an immutable ledger somewhere says the party that currently possesses them is supposed to give them to you.
Type in some syntax in the C programming language, it will translate it into English to help you get a better mental picture of what is going on.
Of it not being suffix-free? Just stick a full block on the front of the message.

Length padding isn't just for MACs, its used in the first place to prove Merkle-Damgard works at all, ie. is collision-preserving. If you have a hash collision with two messages with the same length, you can run through the Merkle-Damgard loop in parallel and find a collision in the compression function. For different lengths that doesn't work but if you just insert the length into the last block, you know you'll always have a collision in the final block in that case.

There's a proof here that being suffix-free is necessary and sufficient for a padding rule to make Merkle-Damgard collision-preserving: https://eprint.iacr.org/2009/325.pdf
Isn't that a rather narrow case? What happens on the following, is that protected?

if (weakref.deref()) {
/* garbage collection here */
use(heavyComputations(), weakref.deref());
}
Regarding the last paragraph: I wonder whether anyone has done any game-theoretic studies about self-moderated online discussions and which voting mechanisms work most effectively.
Original standard pascal was shitty. Strings had a strongly typed length, so you couldnt write a function which accepts strings of different length. Also (what I personally really dislike) the syntax doesnt allow you to write your own 'write' function (since lets call it variadic parameters were not allowed).

Turbo Pascal was better and Delphi pascal was great.
A good start. However let's go further, simply ban personal tracking and personalized algorithmic feeds. This would combat the echo chamber effect and social media can become a broad community experience, like TV and newspapers. It would also cripple tech advertising revenues, thus redressing the balance with traditional media.
>Partition_sort isn't an analogy to the Partition of India

And "slave" isn't an analogy to transatlantic slavery.

And anyways, who decides which words are associated with bannable tragedies?
>> The first project needs to be user research: when there is no Internet available...

Drop the map app that's just a skin over google maps. At least base it on OSM and download maps of interest locally. Apply this "local first" philosophy to all GNOME apps.
A tour de france stage winning cyclist might only average 219 watts over a 5-hour stage [1] although with bursts where they use more power - 20 minutes at 330w, 15 seconds at 1025 watts.

250w is quite a bit of power for something on the sidewalk or bike lane :)

(Of course, who knows how trustworthy these numbers are? I suspect scooter manufacturers know bigger numbers mean bigger sales, and choose their testing methods accordingly)

[1] https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/racing/tour-de-france/rig...
Non-paywall link: https://web.archive.org/web/20210118154123/https://www.theat...

Shorter The Atlantic: Why we hate big homes for middle-class folks.
Hold on, wasn't there a similar paper last year wrt non-intersecting shape/mesh optimization? (edit: I think it was a topology paper actually)

I found this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.06256.pdf but I don't think it's what I'm thinking of.
That's neat how different people see things from different perspectives because that statement is meaningless sophistry in my world.
Does anyone love this as music, rather than as an idea? Of composers, there are two schools: those who try to express something interesting musically, and those who produce interesting concepts. Some of Cage's work, especially, takes the second approach to extremes, where it cannot even be experienced as music. I don't think any of that sort of music will survive long, because the concept is no longer clever after it loses its novelty.
There's zero value. Trust your instincts.
Maybe the key is network effect and enough marketing to bootstrap it?
You see them here and there in the eastern US. But many cities don't allow the rentals. Even in those that do, it seems they were a fad for a while and now they're pretty occasional. Once the novelty wore off, there isn't great infrastructure for them in a lot of places and the cases where they're genuinely useful as a transportation option is pretty limited. When they first came out, they were scattered all over the place in Raleigh for example but last time I was there, they were few and far between.
I have friends who work in media archiving. Properly stored physical media can last a LONG time, like hundreds of years.

And, there was no concept of temporary when physical media were produced. A completed sale of physical items is legally a permanent condition. That’s why physical items can be resold. Also, physical media did not come with a time-limited license. Again: both sides considered the sale permanent. It was in fact forever.

The point of view in your comment might make logical sense to you today, but it does not reflect the actual history or legal status of physical media. People “don’t realize” these things because they are not actually real.
Both fastmail and protonmail offer 'masked emails' which will generate a random email address for you and link it to your email account automatically. If the address gets compromised you can block it easily.
You can write an implementation according to what specification? Bitcoin? Where is the specification for Bitcoin? There isn't one.
I think there are theoretically some benefits. If music, movies, or games were sold as nfts then you could resell an album if you didn't want it any more like you can with physical media. But the major labels won't do it since that could eat into their profits.

So right now we are stuck with the scammy nfts of jpgs we have now.
I’m surprised I haven’t seen the right answers here yet, so I will chime in.

1. Russia produces 12% of the world's oil and has a similar share of global oil exports. [0] Those purchases are now being made in Rubels.[1] This was a direct retaliation to the USA and European sanction efforts. Before this oil was universally exchanged in USD or EUR. This has helped prop up the Rubel.

2. Russia moving back to a gold standard. [2] This is the single most interesting economic move in my opinion. Russia is continuing to buy more of the worlds gold supply. The Rubel is going to be pinned to the Gold standard. This makes the Rubel incredibly attractive as it can be a stable currency and easier to purchase than Gold itself.
My personal feeling (contrary to most comments here) is that the sanctions have a terrible effect on the USA and Europe and have contributed to a world where China, India and Russia will be working to destabilize the USD and its allies. Moving away from the petrodollar, SWIFT and other USD centric methods is a very negative proposition for those of us who live in the west.

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_industry_in_Russia

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/business/putin-russian-oi...

2. https://seekingalpha.com/amp/article/4498704-russias-3-step-...

Edit: Spelling
Perfect soundtrack for the pitch drop experiment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment
> You may or may not agree with his ideas or not but I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone with more nuanced takes on politics, tech, and crypto.

His very short and tumultuous tenure as the finance minister of Greece's Coalition of the Radical Left government (SYRIZA) was also between less-than-stellar and totally catastrophic, which culminated with being fired from his position.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Cabinet_of_Alexis_Tsipra...

Appeals to authority aside, in this case "nuanced" doesn't exactly refer to insightfulness.

It doesn't surprise me that he's pivoting to crypto, as his short-lived political career was saturated with self-promotion schemes.
Machine 2 machine payments are a massive problem you can solve with a blockchain. Which can solve a whole lot of other problems, like automation. Which can solve another set of problems.
I learned to program without having an actual computer, from a wonderful full-page magazine advert of a ZX Spectrum, just a photograph of it in glorious full colour.

I didn't have access to a computer, just lots of old magazines and books. The Spectrum photo's colourful keyboard with all those interesting keywords was really inspiring to 10 year old me. Somehow, between gazing at that for hours and reading, I would dreamily imagine typing on it, and started to guess what many of the keywords meant. Being colourful, interesting, and decorated with all the keywords was super helpful.

There were type-in listings in magazines in those days, as well as schematics showing how basic computers worked, so there was plenty to learn from even though they didn't specifically explain programming.

Eventually I got a BBC Micro, rather than a Spectrum like most of the other boys at school. The BBC was great and is where I learned to program properly, but socially I'd go round to friends houses where we'd play Spectrum games and write little programs there.

(Yes I do mean boys: I had the strong impression parents bought computers for boys but not girls in those days, and the girls didn't have any access to computers to learn from.)
The poster is probably objecting to the part where it replaces what you actually did with autogenerated boilerplate.
WhatsApp has traction, discord is gaining it. Matrix isn’t really anywhere.
I may have written the first ZX Spectrum emulator, for some definition of emulator.

In the 80s I had a BBC Micro with a Z80 second processor attached to its "tube" bus. Usually the Z80 ran CPN, a business operating system similar to CP/M with its own flavour of BBC Basic, including a built-in Z80 assembler. But it could be asked to do anything.

Some Spectrum software ran ok on the Z80 if you could get the memory image loaded, which I eventually did. The 6502 wasn't fast enough to provide good emulation, but it could poll the Z80 memory and convert the video image to something the BBC side could display. With some clever tricks the BBC's ULA could even be persuaded to simulate Spectrum square pixel resolution with most of the colours, and I used rapidly flashing colours to get more.

It wasn't good enough to run games, though it could show some of the screens.

But I remember it successfully playing one of the best Spectrum music demos of the time, because the 6502 was fast enough to poll and relay the 1-bit audio signal being generated by the Z80 music software.
The thing with the Nokia 5800 (I also have one) and other phones not designed in the US is that outside of the US, most people paid for SMS per message. So it made sense to present the messages in that UI, you're paying for the whole thing anyway, could as well use all 160 (or 70 around here) characters. No one in their right mind would split into several messages something that fit into one. For this style of instant messaging, we used ICQ. There were unofficial ICQ clients for just about everything.

On XMPP itself — I'm looking into it as the protocol for messaging for my federated social network. I first contemplated using Matrix, but then I looked at the spec, saw the mathematical notation for the room state synchronization algorithm, and noped outta there really fast.
Recreating early daguerreotype photographs gave us a window to the past
I thought that the blockchain (itself) afforded some anonymity, while still preserving trust, through cryptographic signing.

Which sounded beautiful, until I realized that there must needs still be some other market around the blockchain, in order to interface with reality and older currency systems. There, all privacy bets are off.

Thus, even if one wanted to conduct and election, and put all votes on a block chain, maintaining a secret ballot seems impossible, as far as I can tell.

Sometimes, a primitive solution like a paper ballot has crucial superior aspects.
GNOME Maps uses OSM, you can see that in the attribution on the bottom right.
Or with https://fleetdm.com
Delta Airlines has their DASH service. Under 16 ounces, anyone can ship with them. Under 100 pounds, you will need to be a known shipper with the TSA. It's available on basically any regularly scheduled flight of theirs.

We used it on a contract job in Tennessee once, to get a replacement UPS sent. Expensive, but worth it.
The graph layout example is really compelling.
Music for the thousanders from Anathem.
Where I live, mechanics billing rate is $90-120/hr. Usually the shade tree mechanics are like $30-40, and usually work off books.
Blockchain (or more correctly "hashchain"[1] data structure) doesn't solve the double spend problem, because anyone can create a new entry with a hashpointer pointing to the last entry (aka "block") with transactions.

This problem is inherent in all Nakamoto Consensus style implementations (basically Leader Election algorithms), not just Bitcoin's PoW.

Simpler: anyone can fork the blockchain and over-write the ledger with the new transactions. So in reality the double spend solved by the social consensus on the right fork, not by technological solutions.

EDIT: Leaving aside the question of transaction finality and probabilistic nature of the Nakamoto Consensus, which making it even worse.

--

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_chain
wtf did you write here ???

ad hominem ad nauseum.
I've heard a landlord justify rent increases because the tenants were just going to spend the money on tattoos anyway. Seems like the present.
> Mozart also produced a lot of rubbish low brow humor, Shakespeare is full of cheap dirty jokes.

I want to stop you right here, this is a terrible argument with a false premise.

Those two men produced works of contemporary genius that have lasted the test of time.

They are not well known now or in their day because they were lowbrow or made the (occasional!) childish joke. They are well known now and in their day for their transcendence of their respective art form.

They were never viewed as "entertainment for children" like comic books, Pokemon, Lego, etc.

Nobody would look at a 40 year old man in 1820, 1920, or 2020 collecting Mozart sheet music or Shakespeare playbills as being an infantilized man-child.

They are qualitatively different.
Seems to me you have a Data Structure problem. What type of data is this suppose to represent and why can a Class not fix it.
When I was in college at the turn of the century, the rooms full of computers at university were called "labs". During the same timeframe, folks paying for a networking course+certification (eg Cisco's CCNA) would get access to a "lab" full of networking gear to play with.

These days, the nomenclature survives, but the facilities are often virtualized or remote eg https://learningnetworkstore.cisco.com/cisco-learning-labs
Sure it is a tamper resistant log. But what is the use of that? what problems is it solving? Please give me a concrete example!!
It's built on a bunch of education and theory that's not at all covered in the article. The man is sufficiently credentialed to suggest that this is at least a well considered position of his based on his experiences as an economist and finance minister.
mental note to link https://matrix.org/docs/guides/implementing-stateres from the matrix spec :p
Can u share some (final, retail) prices of e-bikes or e-scooter.

In my (mediterranean) country, prices have been creeping UP over the last 3 years, mostly due to lack of competition and importers somehow cornering the market ;/

Prices are now more expensive than when i bought my first ebike 5 years ago.
Moxie wrote a blog post about a similar topic ("web3") earlier this year which I liked a lot. He echos your sentiment, albeit for different reasons:

https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
It doesn't look like Matrix has reached the point where there is any significant network effect. What I'm saying is that they are building a product, and the protocol is just one component of that product.
Zammad (open source and self-hosted) for email tickets.
I think you have mixed up the real idea behind "think of the children." It can be used as a fig leaf for things the politically powerful wish to do but are specifically unpopular. It can be used to do things that certain politicians want to do that the politically powerful are, as a class, indifferent to.

Where it doesn't work is to do things that are popular among the electorate but that the politically powerful are opposed to. No catchphrase will help you with that, unfortunately.
Here in LA the fad seems to have ended around the start of covid in 2020. I used to see dozens of people a day riding them and now I rarely see any, and if I do it's usually a personal scooter not rented from Bird, Lime, etc. I still see scooters from those companies clogging up the sidewalk, I just never see anyone actually ridings them.
oh yeah!!

" loading sounds with your own mouth " I feel thats a video or it didn't happen moment.
I hear what you're saying, and I agree given your framework of constraints its true. I'd argue the constraints are wrong on chain. If you're engineering a "system" you're thinking like a corporation.

The magic of crypto are the various protocols are like legos. I think a DAO should be a simple single capability like a unix process. It should strive to do one thing well.
We do ticketing, no need for blockchain. Ownership of the tickets is in a regular mysql db.
You might argue this as a theoretical possibility, but it's never going to happen in practice. In practice the trusted entity is always going to selectively allow certain double-spends, and even though it will get caught doing that, people will accept its current revision of the ledger and the world goes on.

For example, the trusted entity might reverse a donation to Canadian truckers due to political reasons (allowing the donator to "double spend" by doing something else with the money later).
I am amazed at how much time some devs will waste on trying to figure out type annotations, at the expense of actual work time.
There are many smaller scale things happening. Most are financial use cases but I'm trying to stick to non-financial ones here.

There's a platform called royal (https://royal.io/) which lets you fund artists and their albums. You can essentially co-own their song rights and collect a share of the royalties when their music is played. It's getting really interesting once composability comes into play. E.g. you can make indexes of song rights for country, rock, pop, electronic etc. pp. And once you have that you might put other financial derivatives on top and can go 2x long on country music and 2x short on pop music. There interesting aspect is that big music labels always were able to go short on some genre and long on another because they effectively decide which artists to fund. It's just that with these open protocols we the regular people get to do the same directly. And as a fan we get directly rewarded for helping our favorite artist to spread there music.

There are many interesting use cases and platforms emerging in the blockchain world. It just takes time for things to go mainstream.
That would be some pretty impressive trivia if it wasn't at the beginning of the article.