skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is good experiment defining loss in translation:)

“Government should not put so much taxes.” -> “ The government should not pay much.”
Have you measured your deliverability?
As explained in the text: the point isn't that these problems aren't solved by blockchain, they're amplified. E.g.: scams existed without blockchain, but now they're forever and permanently engraved into the blockchain. Code was always flawed, but now a bug isn't just a bug, it's a bug in a smart contract with potentially disastrous consequences that can never be properly fixed.
I made a short track that only uses sounds from this Kia instrument. Was fun to play around with it. https://soundcloud.com/ndbroadbent/kia-instrument-demo

I might use this again just for the background sounds (rain, forest, etc.)
> 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.

What if a group of trusted organizations run a blockchain together?
Is this a feeling or did you actually measure your deliverability?
If they argued that Blockchain is not mature, and so (from a personal cost benefit analysis) is inferior to centralized systems, they would be on point. There is a difference between straight up pseudo science and novel developments. Conflating the two is nothing new.
EU Data Protection Supervisor launches pilot phase of two social media platforms
I have used Yacht for a while to manage my server.
I usually used it when i wasn't behind my laptop with SSH access, and wanted to restart a service/check logs/update, and you could do that easily with a browser on phone or other pc.
I like yacht compared to Portainer as it is much simpler, and does not contain as many possibilities and doesn't try to hijack the whole deployment process for which i happily use docker-compose.

Eventually i did turn back to a combination of portainer for checking/restarting services and dozzle for logs. Mainly because of how slow and sluggish Yacht runs, also the limited possibilities to change Yacht's default view.
Once you have data in production it's very possible for the fake data you generate in dev not really matching the sort of data you have in production (either in size or because of assumptions made whilst generating it or even bad app updates/schema migrations in the past causing duff data). It can then be useful for future development or debugging that the data is real(-ish).
Not sure if that fallacy applies, given that we have found ways to combat scams, fraud, etc. with the existing solutions (which are also not perfect, but at least make an attempt to cater to the fallibility of humans). In that regard, blockchain is a step backwards.

Whether "do not require trust in a centralized authority" (with caveats regarding the protocol itself set aside) is more important than "useful for humans conducting human business" (without extra layers that re-introduce centralized authority) is up to everyone to decide themselves.
Using LEOs and GEOs
https://futurecrunch.com/
> Every day, there are stories about how worthless the Russian military are, how hopeless their war is, how they're losing and Putin's in trouble, desperate, and idiotic.

This is highly relative of where you live. In some places, Russia is winning (on the TV) and is on the cusp of taking over Kiev any minute now.

> And maybe that's all true, I dunno. It's actually pretty hard to tell how the war is actually going for any side, given all the propaganda.

I think it's fair to say, given that Putin retreated from Ukraine's North, that the war is not going in his favor.

> But, Russia seems to be doing a lot of damage and holding at least some territory despite basically the entire world (except for Russia's apparent allies in this new Non-Western Axis, mostly China and Iran) providing historic amounts of military might. Sure, no troops (yet), but lots and lots of firepower.

Russia is the world's, supposed, second military. Also, only a handful of countries are helping Ukraine. Most countries are watching on the sidelines.
Couldn't have both pilots fighting each other on the controls (hard nose-up vs. hard nose-down) without knowing about it, since the yokes are physically linked (unlike sidesticks).
This is exactly what I am doing for OneDev: https://github.com/theonedev/onedev
In quite a lot of cases it's because we need someone to take responsibility for the actions of an entity, or the blame when something goes wrong. In cases like that the blockchain won't really change much, and it ends up being another technology/process that is available.

That being said, I'm sure there are other cases where the blockchain can be used. The problem is that it's currently used as the proverbial hammer, making every problem look like a nail.
Then it'll automatically be seen as an attempt to build a cartel and keep competition out of the particular domain they operate in.
I wish these authors would define exactly "which blockchain" they hate.

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

"A blockchain is a growing list of records, called blocks, that are securely linked together using cryptography."

So, yeah, git and mercurial are "dangerous nonsense".

But of course they're really talking about cryptocurrencies and smart contracts, right?

So why not put that in the title?
They could also just run a SQL database together and it'd be much less complicated and more efficient.
US Army to launch light robotic combat vehicle competition in FY23
What a nothing burger of an article.

The author cannot see value in self-sovereign, censorship resistant, permission-less monetary systems, fine, however, to claim "crypto" is dangerous nonsense because "fraud" is ridiculous.

> As code is written by humans, it’s seldom actually infallible.

Absolutely true, it doesn't have to be perfect, it has to be good enough. With over a decade as a high value target, most serious crypto projects have proved their code is the latter.
Terrible is also the enemy of good.
When reading above the experience I have is that I rapidly correlated with apple watch heart data that my heart rate stays high when I drink alcohol in the evening, resulting in poor sleep.

Conversely I can see when I have been likely to have been drinking from my heart rate.

I think the key here is the passive data collection with intuitive data presentation to drive low barrier to entry analytics.
The same thing happens in the US with any jobs requiring security clearance.
In my country (the Netherlands) there is a norm that says "No government employee shall earn more than the prime minister". The idea being to prevent certain heads of departments from setting their own pay to high.

This has had a side-effect of some actually qualified technical people from leaving because of salary.
I earned "passive money" too, only thing i have to do is work.
Ask HN: How do you save data structures on disk?
Structures like linked list, trie, binary trees, stacks, etc.

One approach is to convert them to json and serialize it and save it as a string or binary file. But then if you are dealing with TB of data, or just large amount of data, now your program needs to load the entire thing in ram/memory first.

So Second approach I think could be like regular databases, on-disk. Are there on-disk data structures? Can you make any data structure to exist on disk.

Suppose I have a huge decision tree, terabytes of data. How can I use it without loading the entire thing in memory.
I think he is confusing the usage of entropy in physics and computer science. In computer science entropy is conditional probability and depends on what we know about a system.
NY Times DMCA takedown request for a Wordle archive
If we're trying to figure out the total benefits that come from writing a book, we probably shouldn't dismiss how much writing a book compels one to improve in various ways.
Hello, I believe in writing short books and spending no more than 3 months on a book. In case the book is a failure, I cut my losses.

But yea, i hope to have other products priced more than $9.99 outside Amazon, eg gumroad
Looks a huge product! Great to see that as a frontend developer I can use this product to get information about no-code back-end services. Congrats
Plenty of people trying to sell private blockchain snake-oil for precisely that purpose.
It’s all rubbish, just use a database.
What does turn it into dangerous nonsense is the "solution looking for a problem" phenomenon, fueled by techno-libertarians and more so plain greedy people, looking for a way to justify and entrench the mostly useless technology that makes them rich.
While I don't disagree this tool would be better, if you don't have that tool, I frequently used something like:
ls -lart /vol/.zfs/snapshots/snap-*/file/path

Would list the files sorted by change date so then I could just easily scan through the list for the changed versions.
I would argue that Google Photos, Google Apps, Google Cloud, Google TV, Google Pay, Google Chrome, ChromeOS, Maps, Chromecast, Drive, Keep, etc. are all original products that matter and often dominate their field. Android is an acquisition but Google made it the success that it is today.

Conversely how many original Meta products are successes? Messenger is the only one that I can think of.
There are 3 good replies to this one giving a decent analysis for why I might want to reconsider my position. It's hard to pick which one to answer to.

Would you say that mortgage is probably driven down 8% because just can't afford the down payment anymore, or people like me who seem to have an irrational aversion to it?
At the point that the person already has years of work experience and demonstrable skill in the field, some would say the degree is arguably more "personal feel good" and/or vain attempt to avoid being discriminated against by "snobs". I say "vain attempt", because if you don't check the right boxes, the person is likely to get snubbed anyway.

If you talk to many recruiters, depending on the field, the older person's work, supervisorial/managerial experience, and any references can be much more of the deciding factor. Don't get me wrong, degrees and certifications are very nice decorations, but there is no getting around who you know and doing well on the interview.

That a working adult who has already established themselves professionally gets the degree in their later years, can be more about personal pride and dedication to their field, to make sure there isn't any gaps in their knowledge. And perhaps that's where the emphasis should be, showing personal growth and development. Someone taking the time to become better at what they do.
Germany had laws against hate speech and it did not help to stop the most racist regime in the 20th century. Especially online it is a good idea to let people vent and many arguing for more freedom don't do it because they want to utter racist statements. That is a strawman and a bad excuse to curb freedom of speech.

Furthermore the definition of racism has become quite soft and not because of real racists at all but they will profit from that.
I'm very sceptical of blockchain (though I've been in crypto off and on since 2013) but most of the arguments in this article are non-sensical. For example:

> 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.

> Normally, cases of fraud or mistakes could be rectified or reverted by the bank or similar institutions after a review of the situation by humans. However, in the world of blockchain there is no human supervisory authority.

This is a well-known, probably inevitable effect of what is probably the main point of using blockchains. Clearly people feel it is a price worth paying.

I do agree that 99% of blockchain usage is pointless at best, but that is really a different question. It can be used for storing and (slowly) transferring value in a decentralised way, and that is really the main idea.
How do I make this a HN poll?
If engineering standards had dropped 5 years ago, that would not really be reflected in the current numbers yet.
A commonly heard thesis is that this track record of safety has been used as an excuse for reducing engineering standards. I don't think the historical track record of safety can be used to disprove that thesis.
This is fair, you didn't miss those people. But I think it was worth me highlighting them because they are, as I argued, very important.

I somewhat agree with your argument. Housing costs more than other assets compared to its economic value, exactly because people have an emotional reaction to the idea of owning it - or the idea of not owning it.

However I have seen middle-class people overextend themselves to 'buy the dip', while their equally wealthy peers sit it out, for over 15 years now. Many of the people who did the former now consider themselves to have got a bargain, while many of the latter changed their minds and ended up buying several years later and at much higher prices.

I'm definitely not arguing that this makes buying right and renting wrong! Just that so far, this is how that choice played out.
I'm not sure why smart contracts don't come with signature (or just an address) - this way they can be updated by authorizing party but nobody else. By a transaction involving a contractcoin perhaps.

You surely can't expect to author perfect code and set it in stone.
There is no baby. The technology does not solve technical problems that havent been solved better. The only thing bchains does is give ppl with a lot of money to become stakeholders, the possibility to comodify even more parts of the internet.
Thats the only upside of the technology, scam ppl for their money.

https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/against-crypto.html

https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
This is almost a political argument. Because it's the same argument about free speech.

In the end, you either believe in the individual's choice, and individuals will do really stupid and bad stuff, and they will also fall for scams, but do you give the individual freedom of choice to fall for scams and speak freely?

This is a high risk option, perhaps. But it is also likely to be most effective at delivering progress to humanity, considering the difference between innovation over the last 200 years, has it happened in places with more freedom or less?

On the other hand, you have the crowd obsessed with control, obsessed with how the idiot needs to be protected from their own stupidity, and the crowd needs to be protected from the speech of the idiot. But somehow when you control things, in the end they start being used by those in power to cement their power, and suddenly you have less freedom, less creativity, and more suffering. But it's nice for some, because everything is under control.

Make your choice which side you are on.
> BLM is a big sect of the religion and they are pointing out a legitimate problem. Larry Elder likes to ask 'show me the racism' and it's hard to do but the one I really enjoy.

I can claim only an imperfect familiarity with either figure's views, but my impression is that Adolph L. Reed Jr and Larry Elder take rather different approaches to the issue of racism. Elder is an individualist conservative who says that (by and large) people are victims, not of systematic oppression by others, but rather of their own bad decisions. Unlike Elder, Reed views poor Black Americans as victims of systemic oppression – a point at which his views are much closer to BLM's than to Elder's – but while BLM views that oppression as primarily race-based, Reed argues that it is instead primarily class-based. Many right-wing critics accuse BLM of being "Marxist", but BLM is actually a long way from genuine Marxism; the contrary position which Reed espouses is arguably much more faithful to the classic Marxist tradition.

> Sam Harris is a far left atheist.

Sam Harris has never been "far left". The far left are people such as Marxists (by which I mean real Marxists, not groups such as BLM which some on the right label as "Marxism" but which have only a rather tenuous connection to actual Marxism), Leninists, Trotskyists, Stalinists, Maoists, anarcho-socialists/anarcho-communists/anarcho-syndicalists, etc. For the 2016 Democratic primaries, Sam Harris endorsed Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders – one of the reasons he gave, was that he was confident Clinton would continue established US foreign policy, whereas Sanders was likely to overturn it. Nobody on the "far left" would have ever said such a thing. Sam Harris' fundamental political orientation has always been center-left, with emphasis on the word "center" – like many on the center-left, his positions on certain issues (such as foreign policy or economics) often have a great deal in common with those of the center-right.

I'm also not sure what his being an atheist has to do with anything. You will find atheists at both extremes of the political spectrum, and every possible point in-between – and the same is true of theists too.
The blockchain is relying on the perfect solution fallacy. It tries to solve a problem that is mostly theoretical, does a very incomplete job and creates bigger problems than it is ever able to solve. The 'redeeming' factor is that on the way it makes some people rich.
Yet, they really do, and are not.
I think it is the concept of “trust-less” itself. You replace trust in people and institutions with trust in technology. I think that rubs some people the wrong way.
i am so sick and tired of hackernews upvoting every single "blockchain bad" article to the top that contains non-sensical and wrong information
The post points out several shortcomings of a system that is objectively worse in almost every aspect than the existing alternatives.

Calling this a Nirvana fallacy borders on bad faith.
This is not necessarily a flaw in the technology, it's just one way in which it differs from what we are used to.

I think most coiners, who skew strongly libertarian, would argue that it's up to you to make sure your smart contracts work.
Search for "serialise" + name of structure.
Boulder is in the top 10 which doesn't fit headline.
Like the one for Certificate Transparency: https://certificate.transparency.dev/logs/
Facebook was a catalyst for the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. See https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-...
I think it's fascinating - and horrifying - that he tracks everything except his environmental impact on the planet.

He has to be in the top 1% of polluters, given his obsessive flying and consumption of technology.

Dozens if not hundreds of charts, depicting every single thing except the thing that is destroying our world.

I filed an issue on his github.
Many of the people controlling the narrative have realised recently what a threat decentralisation is. They are pushing extremely hard to make everyone think this is some evil useless force that is only used for scamming people. It's the same way protecting the children is used by people in power to take away your privacy.

Blockchains and cryptos are innovative tools. They can be used for good and bad, but they are an interesting development.

It's really sad how many on HN have fallen for this black and white thinking.
This is super cool. However over the years I have seen super cool things being noticed by powerful organisations and made mandatory for the greater good of the corporation or the society. I would not like to see that happen with this one.
People can say anything or put whatever on a survey, but then there is having to pay rent and buy food, that brings everything back to reality.
I filed this issue: https://github.com/KrauseFx/howisFelix.today/issues/3
If it's immutable, it only needs to be audited once.
First time I've seen anyone call git and mercurial a blockchain.
Because only the crypto scams use blockchain for their marketing.
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. Nobody can do pros/cons on everything, specially giving valid criticism to improve an idea.
Lemme check:

$ uptime

19:14 up 42 days, 6:49, 11 users, load averages: 7.85 8.24 8.07

Zero times this week (or month).
I was writting a long answer but finally, I decided to simply quote:

> In the court's view, royalties are those items which constitute passive income, such as the compensation paid by a licensee to a licensor for the use of a Page 7 patented invention.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/eotopicd89.pdf

Also, as you say, some royaltie are active incomes. But Passive royalties exist.
Wow… 50F is quite high! The record high temp on earth was 56F at dearth valley. Given India/Pakistan are breaking records each year, it looks like they are only decade away from vast regions becoming inhospitable. Given the population density, this could become big disaster.
Nothing new. Waste of time!
Lot of Strawman fallacies
No offense to the author, but I hope that I don't accidentally buy a book written by him or someone like him, when looking for a decent book on a topic I want to learn about.
I think the bbc is still pretty good, their ukraine coverage seems excellent (the brexit cast and ukraine-cast podcasts are my favs).
Yes, same. Probably some bad digestion ongoing.
I’ll bite.

My friends and I were into bitcoin in mid-2009. We mined some coins on our 8800 GT.

At the time, I read the papers and the wiki and understood that the technology will not scale so greatly, in a way it wasn’t even designed to; it felt like an interesting proof of concept, the ability to actually buy things with bitcoins felt largely like a novelty, I remember buying a coffee in Prague a few years later for like 16 bitcoins or something.

I was ambivalent on the technology, but understood that fundamentally it was quite wasteful (computationally).

But something changed, suddenly people were using it to launder money, then once it started earning value (due to it being finite and so many people having already mined the majority of coins and probably losing the wallets) scammers crept in.

Now I see reels on Instagram glorifying “trader” life, so many of the old tired schemes from 100 years ago that used to plague the markets are new again.

Just like how our bodies have no tolerance to thousand year old virus’ that have long since gone extinct; our brains are not easily capable of understanding these schemes anymore: because they’ve been illegal and regulated for more than our lifetimes, we have no “natural immunity” to them.

When alls said and done, the initial promise isn’t even kept, there’s very few “super miners” who if they worked together would be able to control the entire bitcoin economy, which is the situation with central banks.

So what were left with is a scam ridden, fundamentally wasteful technology that doesn’t scale properly and does not solve the problem it was meant to; and the main reason that this is the case is because scammers adopted it so readily.

You can see exactly what I mean when you look at Monero. Objectively Monero solves the problems with bitcoin, but because it’s very difficult to trade with (due to it being privacy focused and no exchange willing to trade it) the price is very stable, since it can’t easily be used for money laundering or scams due to it’s higher barrier to entry.

That said, I’m still fairly ambivalent but leaning towards negative.

I will not work for a “crypto” company or with “NFTs” for example.
Although the summery description would seem to apply to git and mercurial, the detailed description under “structure” lists a number of features not present in those, like a PoW/PoS consensus mechanism.
> I don't think protection against human-factor scams and frauds was ever a goal, you certainly never hear it as an argument.

These features and capabilities are usually implied for financial systems. It's really just common sense.