skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Removing lighting before object recognition may be a separate step, yes.
But in this case it's just that their goal is to scan objects, shapes as such, and not intrinsic properties of their constituent materials (such as specularity).
It's nuts. Canada has a lot of good things going for it, but housing affordability is at a crisis point.
Yes, it is, in the traditional financial system. Crypto is an attempt at building an alternative, with different trade-offs. You might not agree with the trade-offs, most people don't - I mostly don't, but it's definitely a choice, it's not inevitable.
Without reading the article the first thought that comes to my mind is "I hope he has backups".
https://nitter.net/OrinKerr/status/1519364096818249728
I like this but after a cursory glance at the source I have a few concerns:

- There's a transformer which appears to retain the first char on string fields. That's not safe if you're dealing with customer data.

- Remove telemetry. That it's claimed to be anonymized and togglable is meaningless where sensitive data is concerned.
A real estate investment newsletter suggests that for a successful real estate investment, as a rule of thumb you should be able to charge almost one percent of the cost of the house as rent because a rational investor shouldn't count on the value of the house going up.

I am curious what you guys think of this statement. I think the idea is if the potential rent you get out of your investment is too much under one percent, you might be better off investing in something else?

Now imagine a smallish 4 bed, 2 bath, 1,638 sqft built home on a 5,861 sqft lot in Longmont, Colorado (so not exactly a city but my preference because municipal fiber) that has a sticker price of USD 499,900. I can't imagine paying USD 4,999 every month in rent for this house at the moment. What gives? Is rent too low? My instinct is home prices are way too high but it can't just be "dumb money" keeping prices high, right? Eventually, there should be more supply causing prices to drop? Is something preventing this correction? If so, how do we fix it?
Did anyone already mention that app stores come with a lot of negatives?

I mean there are positive sides to this perhaps so that users don't get abandonware that might refuse to work at some point. But the negatives are just as obvious and more significant in my opinion.
I'm not in Germany but an acquaintance has a 20 year fixed rate mortgage in Germany from one of the Sparkassen (Flat in Berlin).
> > But even if all code was without mistakes, blockchains can’t do anything against threats like scams, fraud, hacking of devices with keys for the blochain or just plain old typos in a coin transfer.

> I don't think protection against human-factor scams and frauds was ever a goal, you certainly never hear it as an argument.

The problem is any payment system DOES need that. And the competition has it.

Abstract goals without connection to real life needs are nice. Not useful.
Pilots pulled in opposite directions in Air France landing scare
For most people it isn't. Maybe at some point it will, if governments let the money printer brr even more, or if we see more of what Canada did. If that is amplified by say 10x, I think a lot of people would start to reconsider.
Bitcoin is a block-tree as well, you can have diverging branches. It's just that branches are usually very short-lived due to the incentives designed into the system.
A few years ago I changed the domain of a customers website from .eu to .nl because it refused to show up in Google. Anecdotal evidence suggests .eu is not a good domain name for your business.
Naturally a heat pump is more complex and thus more maintenance intensive, but it's worth the investment/cost in energy savings in any calculation I've seen (they do tend to require more maintenance).
What impact is it having on your life? If it's making you miserable, definitely consider a therapist or reading up on CBT.
I'm in Taiwan and was here for a whole pandemic.
Article is spot on but this response efficiency, visible now, was acquired over last 2 years of improvements.

Taiwan had a luxury of foresight due to earlier experience with SARS, back channel information on virus developments in China thanks to proximity and countless business contacts and a favorable geographical location.
Being an island it was very easy to isolate itself from the rest of the world.
This may not have been possible for other countries.

Zero COVID was a goal when efficiency of vaccines was still believed to be able to prevent transmission.
Omicron appearance put an end to that.

Taiwan's response was competent but there were several hickups:
Taiwan was late to acquire vaccines due to their reliance on border closures.
Delta variant sneaked through border controls due to lax airline stuff quarantine rules and some rule breaches (pilot going AWOL).
There was cross resident infection in quarantine hotels due airborne transmission (red elevator)
There were many overreactions: closed off outdoor parks, beaches and hiking routes despite evidence that outdoor transmission is very unlikely.

Overall, solid B+ performance.

Regarding more deadly variants: we can hope that evolutionary pressure we put on virus by isolating serious cases will not allow it.

I hope Taiwan and rest of the world will learn from this experience so we are ready for a next outbreak (bird flu likely)
>Also, let me quote Hal Finney why alt coins don't work: "Any successful replacement of the Bitcoin block chain will forever undermine the credibility of any successor. How is an investor to know that it won't happen again?

Under this logic, Geocities must be the predominant social media service today. Because if MySpace were able to replace it, how would investors know the same could not later happen to MySpace with Facebook, etc.?
Of course it should be part of the discussion, but the article seems to think that crypto people are unaware of it. They're not, they just think it's worth it.
I mean I can paint a picture but it's not going to be any good, and I don't think I'd want to put it on my wall.

My kids won't want it when I die either.

That's with <$100 of materials...would you spend thousands on precious metals when you have no idea how to run a watchmaking lathe? a truly handmade watch takes around 5,000 hours and that's if you know what you're doing.
Every innovation has had this pattern of behaviour. Steam railways, dotcom bubble etc.

Part of new technology is many scammers entering it and exploiting the situation. Of course in many cases this isn't actually planned scamming, just taking risks in a new market and losing money.

What most here in this thread are basically arguing is blockchain is evil and shouldn't exist. Well, then neither should the internet or steam railways. It's shows a complete lack of understanding of human behaviour and history.

Really sad to see from the HN crowd. They are falling for the narrative built by people threatened by crypto, which is basically the people in power currently. Of course these are also the people against free speech. It's not an accident this is happening.
It is the people, not the technology.

It is about money and getting rich.

Whichever problem a certain blockchain is supposed the solve, the main reason for its existence is that the people who create it want to get rich, fabulously rich and fast.

Besides getting rich, majority of these projects are solutions to non-existent or solved problems, which use a very complicated distributed immutable database that very few investors actually understand.

If it's complicated and convoluted, then it must be the future.

Fabulously rich is hypnotising and it can easily become the most important thing in someone's life.

They're betting a lot on being right.

Others, who see the side effects of these people's mission in life, try to wake them up from this hypnosis, but that's impossible.

And so far, they have been right and many got rich.

But I have yet to see a project that solved a real problem (besides dark markets and the ones that enable crypto)

The side effects are not negligible though, they really affect others - scams, ransomware, energy use, etc ..

So it's going to stay polarized.
Nuclear waterwaste != nuclear waste. Water cannot be radioactive, and in fact water is a fantastic insulator for radiation. The water had contaminates in it and the argument is whether or not the current level of contaminates is safe.

The article's title makes it sound like they're just going to dump the Elephant Foot directly into the pacific. It's clearly a sensationalistic anti-nuclear title edit.
I am a huge proponent of decentralization. You could distill my philosophy down to this: the concentration of power into a single person is always dangerous. This is why I support democracies and breaking up monopolistic companies, among other things.

I have also spent years trying to figure out a use-case for blockchain that is not solved by some other technology with less risk, and I can't figure one out.
yellow pages did not have network effect.
>The Japanese have lots of credits on environmental issues

I wouldn't rely on that alone. I'd say they are more clean than concerned about ecology. You don't see thrash in streets or in forests, that's true. But their recycling is almost non-existant, they burn almost all the waste. They use (thick) packaging in absurdly high amounts (to an european eye). They have fishery and whaling issues…
Millions of people work at banks… lots of middlemen that maybe don’t need to be there anymore…
Entropy implies that these states are indistinguishable from each other.
I gave an example here[1].

The typical answer is "just trust a third-party service" which side-steps the constraints in the question.

FWIW there is a variety of reasons you may not want to use a service like escrow.com — they take a cut of the exchange, operate as a for-profit business in a particular US-based jurisdictions, only operate on a limited set of currencies, request personal/private data sharing, and tend to settle the transaction in days, not seconds or minutes.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31190423
It means that binaries are in one place, not spread out across /sbin, /bin and /usr. The author is specifically referring to the variant where all binaries are in /usr, but i've seen distros were it was done in other ways.
And why is he still your friend? Seriously, I have little respect for developers in such ventures and employers leveraging this kind of "bossware".

It is the minimum requirement of management to set goals that workers need to achieve. Either these goals are met or they are not.
Why is there 1.6x more Facebook users in Europe than people?
to be clear about the semantics here: cash doesn't count as a "financial system", right?

Blockchain currencies are basically counterfeit-proof, digital cash with an audit trail. comparing them to credit cards is an apples:oranges comparison.
Have you read the whole article? The author claims that "Neither I or anybody I know has ever heard of any usage of blockchain that’s in any way useful".

Well, I'm just trying to say that Bitcoin is actually useful, but the other applications are not :)
Only if your savings are not robust enough to bridge you to replacing that income stream or you think home prices will be in a secular decline
> if they decide to give it to scammers

"Decide" is an interesting choice of word.
This distinction only really comes up in the case of large idea distribution platforms like Twitter, where to have a marketplace of ideas you need an actual place for them to compete.

This isn't a new debate or problem of course, just our generations version of it. For most of written history censorship was a giant fight over who got to have printing presses. The "free press" is an important concept that came out of this era, and is respected even in countries that don't have a First Amendment.

With respect to lacking consequences for speech, what people actually want is a lack of consequences for exploring and taking part in the marketplace of ideas. That in turn only really comes up when one side or another decides that competing over ideas is too much like hard work, and it's easier to just punish people for not agreeing. The consequences aren't connected to actually losing any debate but simply taking part in the first place. That's a social issue that is only resolved ultimately through debates like these.
Well, it's a mixture of water and radioactive isotopes. The million tons of water isn't a danger to the Pacific Ocean, but the stuff it's mixed with may or may not be.

If the title had said "a million tons of tritium" it would be wrong, but it didn't.
> That's the world we live in. Nobody can stay in the middle, people either hate it or love it, it's either black or white.

This is an illusion created by spending time online. The loudest people are polarized, but the majority of people are still in the middle somewhere, sometimes in a very ambivalent state.

A great example of this is Elon Musk. Online (Twitter, reddit, etc.) people worship him or loathe him. But the average person rarely thinks about him at all and doesn't care that much about him. They certainly don't have a strong opinion.

If you look at research (I read a lot of Pew surveys), this is true for most topics. There are 5-25% of people on the extremes, and everyone else can be said to be "not extreme" about the topic in some way (either ambivalent or just not knowledgeable enough to give a response).
Certificate transparency is a permissioned blockchain (a merkle hash tree), ran by a group of trusted organizations and observed by third party monitors ("validators"). Your browser probably queried that blockchain when you opened hackernews.
Of all the characterizations in the headline, the "eight-months-pregnant" is unnecessary.
>The idea to get rid of having to trust centralized organizations might sound tempting, but it doesn’t work: Blockchains don’t get rid of “trust”, they just change, who has to be trusted.

More people need to read this. Developers can betray trust too, and I'm a little tired of reading "In a shocking turn of events, new cryptocurrency previously supported by Seemingly Trustworthy Source is actually a pump-and-dump. More news at 11."

(A nonexhaustive list of examples: Save The Kids, Tether, Safemoon)
As it does in physics!

"which parameters [thermodynamic variables] you know" ~ "which parameters [thermodynamic variables] you hold fixed"

(or know in average, like the energy for a system in a heat bath where the temperature is fixed)

https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/theory.1.pdf

http://nicf.net/articles/thermodynamics-statistical-mechanic...
Well, and passive income from the stock market can't be achieved without the labor of picking the stocks...
> Blockchain doesn’t solve anything

Blockchains solve state-machine replication in a distributed, permissionless, partially synchronous setting with Byzantine fault tolerance. This is a fundamental breakthrough in distributed systems. It's up to us to figure out what to do with it.
> I don't think protection against human-factor scams and frauds was ever a goal, you certainly never hear it as an argument.

I don't think this argument is nonsensical. It's true that these things were not goals.

The author's point, I think, is that obviously they should have been. Because this is how people lose money. You can't just call all the most important aspects of monetary transfers "out of scope" if you're trying to create a system for monetary transfers.

> Clearly people feel [the loss of reversal] is a price worth paying.

I don't think so. I think the vast majority of even pro-bitcoin people are actually either in the camp of not realizing the full meaning of this, or they don't truly understand that there's no recourse, until it actually happens to them.

Certainly people in general expect "the bank" or "the police" or "courts" to "just fix it". If cryptocurrency people were honest about this in their MLM pitches then people would tell them to piss off.

> It can be used for storing and (slowly) transferring value in a decentralised way, and that is really the main idea.

Well, "store of value" is the idea now, now that the initial plan proved a massive failure.
I guess it differs by geography, but here in Sweden, when I accidentally transferred €10k to an old account that didn't exist anymore I wasn't the least bit concerned that the money would get lost. I would have been extremely surprised if they hadn't given me the money back.

That's the advantage of a high trust society. Heck, once an ATM retracted my cash because I wasn't quick enough, I called the bank and they just credited my account with the €300 or whatever it was. No questions asked.
US rates tend to rise more quickly, because the standard US mortgage quoted is fixed for the life of the loan (often 30 years). Whereas a lot of European loans are variable rate, where the interest is only fixed for the first 5 or so years of the loan and then floats based on central bank rates.

So, obviously, US banks have to price more risk into their rates.
I don't think you can compare a deflationary currency with an actual service.

Look, a social media service has way more features and works in a completely different way than transferring wealth from Alice to Bob.
What topic has a CPM this high? I never saw anything like this when I played around with AdSense on some small websites I had in the past.

Or maybe things have changed in the past few years?
Blockchains are cool. Very, very cool. Merkle trees on their own are pretty cool, and blockchains are just a Merkle tree hashed into a chain-like structure to create work for decentralized verification. This is a very clever concept, and it is the only known solution to the Byzantine Generals problem that doesn't involve a centralized authority (that I'm aware of).

What about this is intrinsically "dangerous nonsense"? Honestly, the "bitcoin bad" crowd so often loses me by conflating cryptocurrency - a ledger built on blockchain - with blockchain itself. Personally, I can see all the challenges faced by cryptocurrency and understand the skepticism, but these takes that write off blockchain due to cryptocurrencies' problems exhibit a sort of surface-level perspective that I can't take very seriously. And the fact that such shallow takes keep climbing to the top of HN is shameful, to say the least.
A guide for new users: https://blog.edworking.com/business/beginners-guide-to-worki...
Legally, the government can force compliance by large technical companies. In practice, there's no current chance of that happening. Believing that Facebook, Google, Twitter et. al. are beholden to the government given the past several years is somewhat laughable. Government is slow, and tech business is fast. Our politicians cannot keep up, even when they try.
Certificate transparency logs are essentially a blockchain. Would you prefer Google and the other stakeholders to run an SQL database instead, containing these logs?
> I really don't ever remember a technology that has created such a visceral reaction from people.

I don't remember a technology that has attracted such an incredibly irritating fanbase. Twitter is unusable because of crypto shills. Even someone genuinely curious about crypto is probably going to assume that it's all a dumpster fire because of the absolute scum on Twitter that spam every thread with crypto nonsense.

If it weren't for those people, I can guarantee the technology itself would not have broken through to mainstream consciousness. In and of itself, it's not a particularly polarizing thing.

Of course, the outrage of the original cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) essentially being "proof of burning fossil fuels" isn't helping either.
>The death toll will eventually be the same regardless.

A quick Google show me Taiwan has 800 deaths so far. Massive 1M deaths does not seems very "inevitable" to me.
Two-inch diamond wafers could store a billion Blu-ray's worth of data
If we had truly open mobile devices it would be much harder for a country like NK to control devices.

Still possible of course. Makes sense to fork that what is available.
I'm fairly sure that there's some T's and C's these days when you go to a university, just to cover this legally. And they cover it legally to prevent cheating and copying answers, because that would seriously reduce the worth of a degree from that university.
>Going into debt at the lowest interest rate you'll ever be offered to buy a leveraged asset that's likely to increase in price and reduce the overhead you pay on your largest expense, housing, and hedge against the risk of rent increases and security against the whims of landlords?

Look, if I had enough money around, I'd maybe consider the gamble. But I don't want to buy property to sell it later, I just want to live somewhere. I'm not interested in placing bets on my salary, and I'm not interested in financial longterm-obligations. Maybe in 10 years I want a year off? What then? Maybe I want to change careers to something less intellectually demanding. Maybe I want to spend 50 hours a week with my kids. None of those are feasible if I need the salary. "No debt" is synonymous to freedom on so many levels in life design. The choice is not even close to me.

I make enough money not to worry about rent, even if it should substantially increase, which I don't see happening anyway, simply because then most people wouldn't be able to afford it and political change would become opportune in election-based systems.

>If you owned a house in London

Whats the point of even thinking about owning a house in London? Seriously. I come from uneducated parents that left me €0 and completely unprepared for life, so in my 20s, I first had to dig myself out of that crap. Now I make a good living, but I'm not rich, or filthy rich, or even wealthy. I have to actually make the money to pay that thing. Look at the development of real estate prices in the last 20 years and tell me that's a reasonable choice if I don't even intend to sell the property later (just to be stuck in the same situation again, with more cash, but in the same dilemma). It's pointless. I don't treat my lifetime-expenses as a game of assets, I opt for quality of life, which I don't achieve by giving it all to some property-owning entity who sells it to me at 3 times the price they paid a couple decades ago. I mean, you can justify doing so, but I don't see me being able to justify it.
Interesting. So the one useful application of blockchain technology is the one application that's not commonly called blockchain.
I am not talking about tragedies like the war in Ukraine. I'm talking about tragedies like leaded gasoline, PFAS, global warming, air pollution in cities. Things that affect everyone, but slowly enough that we barely notice.
There's still a need for them though. Societies still want to do AML/KYC stuff, and tax audits.

In fact bitcoin makes it harder[1], so we probably need MORE people doing these investigations.

So we actually maybe need millions MORE people to work these things.

[1] mostly. In some ways also easier. But probably on net harder.
We’re ultimately arguing semantics, but I think this is a pretty clear case where both conventional and academic usage of “blockchain” implies a consensus mechanism in addition to an append-only data structure. Certificate chains and Merkle trees existed long before the term blockchain was popularized.
Although they provide a unfortunately necessary function I wouldn’t say an internet where all traffic is routed through one party is a ‘better internet’.
Also see search: >news:'Disinformation Board'< @DDG : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=news:'Disinformation Boar...>
For me, bitcoin solves very real problems that I wouldn't be able to solve without it: getting paid circumventing Putin's banking system.
Denmark is first country to pause Covid-19 vaccinations