skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What is the current state of blockchain as actual functional tech?
Non industry person here, basically curious about the question in the title.

With all the hype about coins, defi, and NFTs, I've been having trouble finding information about projects using blockchain technology for an actual functional purpose.

For example - I've always imagined there would be a lot of value in the intersection of blockchain/mesh networks/content-centric networking to create a sort of "co-op" decentralized mesh network. The distributed ledger would serve as the map of content, and allow some financial benefit to accrue for providing/supporting an access node to the mesh network. But it doesn't seem like we're yet at the point where non-blockchain people can use the technology for other purposes.

Am I wrong in this regard? Is there a better way to sift through all the hype/noise? And does anyone have any interesting examples of blockchain being used in functional, or at least in not-purely-financial, ways?
They should probably pay them the going wage for software engineers too. I used to work in science, the salary's are often half of what entry level swe positions are, and require an PhDs/post docs...

People wonder why r&d in the us is in a slump... Well it's mostly because choosing a natural science for a profession is punishment compared to software.
2010.

About a decade before that one, my local, rural TN Volunteer Fire Dept was headed by a fellow who thought it wise to go around "collecting" donations with his 3 biggest friends: They'd hang out and remark how quick your place could burn down and what a shame that'd be and how only a few hundred dollars could help them make sure that didn't happen.

The his house burned down. Apparently his major indoor grow operation wasn't wired well, the shed caught fire and lit the house.

That person doesn't run the Dept. anymore. Now its someone who has a nice house with horse and moved the fire engine to their property and it hasn't left for over a decade as far as a I know. They used to park it out in front for fundraiser days and chilli dinners but i haven't seen it in a couple years now.
This isn't an a priori property of peach demand -- for all you know, peaches go "out of fashion" next season.
Didn’t see this response while the thread was active, but the degree in question is the Ph.D. — in my department you needed a B average to stay in the program, and we were explicitly encouraged not to optimize for straight As in grad classes.
I found this so hard to get working. Actually I didn't even get it working, I think I had some dependencies in my build that weren't in ACT or something.
> Freedom and power come from realizing that you already have it.

Reposted to emphasize. Improving a worker's condition is often cheaper than replacing him.
In the US, one would often put up a stone outbuilding around a spring in a hillside, to be a refrigerator. These were "spring houses."
but why write the german word for it in the english article if it isn't somewhat relevant?
Just because a job is advertised doesn't mean the company is looking for that position to be filled.
For context, you have 7 weeks holiday, you can't get fired, your working hours are quite flexible. In France, medical expense, education is free. And outside of Paris and a few other big cities, rents are rather affordable. So all things considered, it's not a bad deal (which is why they do attract good candidates). And a typical SWE position in private sector in France would be $50-60K (of course there's variance there, but in academia, there are also ways to make extra money)
Very recently there was a struggle over $15 minimum wage for fast food workers. In my state they did change the minimum wage, now fast food workers make $15.

I've noticed lately all the fast food shops are consistently understaffed.

Are wages really the issue?
Passionate about what? If they're more passionate about their side projects than about the work you're paying them to do, that seems like trouble.
if you want convert inches to pixel
then used this simple calculator
view:- https://www.calculatorway.com/pixel/inches-to-pixels-convert...
This reminds me when I first started getting into FPGA's... a looong time ago. I to code verilog by using this cool feature in Quartus, which was the design software for then Altera FPGA's (now Intel). It had this feature where you could draw a schematic using 7400 logic and it would turn that into the rbf file to config the FPGA. I just thought that was so cool at the time and it was a nice entre into that world.

Later, I got curious, and it had feature to output the 7400 schematics to verilog HDL code. I became very interested in that and eventually learned verilog from the schematic capture and some online tutorials. It wasn't long and I left schematic capture behind. But I thought it was a great way to get into HDL coding.
But there's no work they can do that would pay them enough to meaningfully change their situation. That's the problem, it's not like their lives are comfortable and they don't want to work (although there probably are some like this.) The majority are stuck. None of these labor jobs pay enough to let them rent shelter so they're stuck with whoever gives it to them. If they went to work they could buy more cheap toys or nicer food but that's about it.

This is why the CPI is a really stupid way to measure inflation. Humans are biological and suffer from the consequences of Liebig's law of minimums. Just because you have a great surplus of something doesn't in any way counteract a shortage of something else.

EDIT: If you have a counter argument then post it, don't just downvote.
So my question, to what degree does it have to match?

I went to university because I had an interest specifically in games, media and HCI. I could talk about my interest in those things fairly easily. Yet the far majority of jobs in my area are oriented around web development in its most basic, CRUD form. More often than not, I can almost detect a hint of snobbism from the other party's side whenever I lightly hint at the fact I don't really care for web development in my free time, but recognize overlap between various fields.

In extreme cases, I see the above on stack level as well, which is even worse. As if preference in stack defines who should work where, when a few stack combinations heavily dominate the market.
Thanks for sharing, but almost all "alternatives to Evernote" lack some of the most important (to me) features like web clipping, OCR and related notes.

The only real alternative to Evernote I've found is DEVONthink.
I wonder if this can also be used for weight loss. I guess it would have to be a much larger device but would it be possible?

Is this the same thing as your body burning calories?
Uhuh... and if the state, with its monopoly on violence, wishes to ban these currencies?

They can try, but it's very difficult to do. I hear we'll win the war on drugs any day now.

All the problems are social, not technological

No solution is 100% social or technological, you need both. The existence of cryptocurrencies doesn't remove the need for social coordination.
> But you can't just hand wave concerns regarding money laundering and other criminality away. If you want to, you should just say "these things don't matter that much", but don't just avoid them entirely.

Actually you can. The war on "money laundering" is a total failure. Those laws costs billions of dollars in compliance, stifle competition, harm innocent people by excluding them from the financial system (estimated 1.7 billion worldwide) and don't actually stop criminals. There's a serious case to be made for putting an end to that war and diverting those resources to old school crime fighting.

https://www.cato.org/blog/money-laundering-laws-ineffective-...
In that case, get legal advise to try to get your money back.
Liberia’s effective way to reduce shootings and other crimes
Don't you routinely backup your laptop?

In case you don't, you can write down the seeds of the OTPs on a piece of paper. Which you leave at home or at a friend's house or similar. The principle being that you won't lose both your laptop and piece of paper at the same time.

edit: for a "good enough" approach you can probably store your 2FA codes in your password manager, for which you have, presumably, some kind of backup.
Right! I didn't mean to imply that there weren't market solutions, only that they have somewhat absurd consequences on their tail ends (pure supply economics creates an "infinite" price for "none" peaches, futures can make markets less stable if you treat them as the speculative instruments that they fundamentally are.)

Futures are probably the right choice. But they're fundamentally derivatives that paper over underlying supply and demand; their chief function is to shift who gets to raise prices and when, not to conjure more peaches.
Which propaganda videos would you prefer I watch?

The Federal Reserve (by far the most important one) is privately owned, as are Belgium, Greece, Japan, South Africa, Switzerland, Turkey and the Bank of Italy.

The ECB is owned by central banks of member states, some of which are privately owned.

Private ownership is any case one issue, the other is the fact the CBs are structured in such a way to be resistant to political pressure and (meaningful) oversight.
For speaking up and negotiation to work you need a reasonable person on the other side of the conversation, and not having that kind of person is one of the most common problems to begin with.
But it's extremely little additional work, though.

The application is already able to find articles around a given address. The only thing that would be changed, is that you enter the address by hand instead of letting the browser locate you. This can be easily done in a day
The university doesn't operate in a vacuum, and the rest of the economy doesn't really care about the fairness of internal pay structures at the universities. The engineers aren't telling you it's fair that they get paid more than a professor, they're just relaying the reality of the market, and the university still gets it's labor from the market.

This does play well into my argument that if software salaries in general came down then the rest of the world could utilize software development more broadly across industries, rather than concentrating so much talent into one inflated industry niche (the tech industry is that niche).
If a business is having trouble hiring people at $15/hr ($30,000 a year before taxes and wage theft), then they’re still not paying enough.

A $15 minimum wage hasn’t kept up with inflation and isn’t a living wage.
The best proof of that is to read some threads of 2,5,10,12 years ago and see how ridiculously wrong most of the predictions by the commenters were.
I love the optimism and in a lot of jobs (especially the jobs filled by folks who read HN), it's mostly true.

> Their value, their ability to work out and improve a workplace situation, and often also the ability of their superiors to change perspective and collaborate on moving forward.

This just is not true for so many jobs. Middle management in many industries (hospitality, personal care, child care, etc.) are not empowered to have these sorts of conversations and the only option is to quit, or be fired.
Software Engineers need to be paid.
DI water can prevent damage to a product that has gotten wet but not yet short circuited, but once something has shorted out, it's most likely too late.
>> We have several 24 hour and 1 or 2 48 hour long outages every winter.

That makes the US seem like a third world country. In my apartment in central Europe I experienced only one, few hours long, power outage in over 10 years (not counting the few times when electricity was temporarily cut off because of unpaid bills :)
Thanks for pointing the web clipping. I've noted it. I can add this feature to GitNoter. Hopefully soon
Not yet but now that there's so much overlap between the two, it's possible one will try to undercut the other. When you're producing tens of million of devices, a small pricing advantage of one over the other can move the needle. The biggest strength of HDMI now is going to be how many other existing AV devices there are that only support HDMI.
On the first three points yes absolutely. The argument that you can always pay more to get what you need fails when you literally can't pay any more. Somebody will lose out. That's what shortage means, there literally isn't enough to go around to everyone.

Now for some things that might be ok. If there's a shortage of Superyachts and not every oligarch can get one or afford one, I'm not going to loose sleep over that. But if it's housing or health care as you say yes, shortages and inflation absolutely mean some go without.

The exact same argument applies to employers hiring workers, the question is are workers like Superyachts where a shortage or inflating prices are not a problem in the grand scheme of things, or are they like houses and health care where a shortage is a serious problem.

I think it very much varies depending on the sector of the economy affected. On your fourth point, not every business is run by a billionaire getting ever wealthier. Half of employees work for small businesses, and 60% of new businesses fail in the first 3 years. The world isn't composed only of oligarchs and minimum wage workers.

Is a shortage of butlers and chauffeurs a problem? No. Their employers can pay them more or go without. Does a shortage of nurses matter? Absolutely, but most jobs are somewhere in between in importance and value to society.

Some goods and services that the poorest in society depend on are labour intensive and wages compose a high proportion of the costs. Shortages of workers in those sectors and inflating wage costs translate into higher prices that can disproportionately hurt those least able to pay more.
What a great foot-gun

So, you did your job well WFH for the past 2 years but now you're being mandated to be "40h at the office minimum"? Cool, cool

Sounds like there will be plenty of CVs around
Looks really cool, congrats on the launch! How would multiplayer notes work? Assuming everyone has access to the repo.
Thank you, you just described me. After spending about 7 years doing deep learning gigs with very high pay, lots of responsibility and pressure, and more hours in my work week than I liked, I recently took a job as an advisor and some Common Lisp development responsibilities and with very reduced working hours. I work 15 hours a week. I have written a few Common Lisp books and my new company is all-in using Common Lisp.
I think many of us relate to this. I know I do. I recently read the psychological condition of “hypomania” (simply put, a more rational and less harmful version of a manic episode) and got me thinking - am I intentionally trying to induce a hypomanic state; the proverbial “dance floor”?
I took that approach with a high traffic site about 10 years ago. The property was mostly write once content from official staff writers with social engagement, comments, follows and light user generated content, etc. It was built originally with Ruby on Rails and over time had lots of layers of caching. Eventually I moved to a system of partial caching which was stored on the file system and nginx would use SSI to reassemble the partials into complete pages. All dynamic content would be loaded secondarily via javascript with mustache templates and lots of in memory json caches. It would even rsync the file system across a handful of hosts which turned out to be a pain in the butt - then distributed file systems were probably less mature than they are now so I never ended up implementing but did much research.

Funny, I think probably all of the above would be trivial now on AWS or Cloudflare.
Fidelity Slashes Reddit, Stripe Valuations After Tech Rout
It's because 'unemployed' doesn't mean 'not working', despite what you'd think.

It's a specific subcategory of people who are in the labor market (trying to find employment) and not succeeding.

Higher wages can and do persuade some of them to enter the market, for instance a mom might need a few hours of childcare a week in order to work full shifts, and if the weekly salary raises enough that this pencils out, she'll start applying.
The second paragraph on Wikipedia:

Central banks in most developed nations are institutionally independent from political interference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank
We're living off family.
https://archive.is/dPACJ
Next Level Brain Challenge: Pig Latin in a Foreign Tongue
Next Level Brain Challenge:

Try to form Pig Latin in a foreign language.
> Lastly, we reserve the right to manipulate the money supply.

You may dislike the way central banks control and manipulate the money supply, but the reality is that an unmanaged currency is generally a disaster for everyone. To fulfill its role as a stable store of value, a currency has to be managed. The notion that an inherently deflationary unit of accounting (such as Bitcoin), or a completely unmanaged one, or one subject to "management" only through crowd action (as in true Defi) can achieve this is delusional.
Missed Payments, Rising Interest Rates Put ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ to the Test
At a minimum, the author should demand the return of the funds that Facebook colluded with the 3rd party to steal - even after FB was notified. She doesn't need to listen to nonsense FB policies. Those do not override law.
Also in case 1, of a sale, you can issue additional warrants to “friends” and key “investors” as an incentive. Which further dilutes the actual post merger equity pool that everyone is buying in to. SPACs are free money for early investors at the cost of everyone else whos too small to get sweetheart terms or actually sticks with the equities.
A lot of businesses simply don't make a profit under reasonable conditions. So managers at those businesses need to be unreasonable by definition.
Kinda wild that MDMA is on the list with those other three (opioids, meth, and coke). Seems firmly in a less harmful tier to me.
With all due respect, this is a quite naive viewpoint. I've been fired from multiple jobs from trying exactly the items you are suggesting. Sometimes, management just wants you to shut up and do the job, and not try to change anything.
Hopper during the pandemic cut down 70% in multiple layoffs. Later that year they hit $3.5B valuation https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/17/hopper-raises-170m-on-3-5b...
Are you implying that all past and current Microsoft employees are bad coders?
The Murena One shows how hard it is to de-Google your smartphone
I wonder whether this just creates another "underclass" of scientific laborers... I think we need tool-builders as academics. The only thing that academics recognize intellectually are peers. The rise of RSEs is a kind of intellectual outsourcing... implementation of your science should be part-in-parcel to its creation, not deferred to second-class non-academic "technicians." The friends and former students I've talked to who've entered RSE careers have largely been treated as second-class citizens in a research environment that they are integral to!

I think, like many things, the buck stops with academia itself, its metrics, demands, and incentives. We need more research engineering/science about science academics within compute-intensive science departments themselves. Things like JoSS [1] or Scientific Data [2] are awesome first steps at addressing this.

[1]: https://joss.theoj.org/

[2]: https://www.nature.com/sdata/
Give Joplin a try
Even for B2C I'd assume.
In addition to agreeing with your points in general, hiring processes are also sufficiently random that it's not like the big SV companies are capable of actually skimming the cream of prospective employees--even if everyone who could get a job there actually wanted to.
Data science is exposing the limits of the paradigm of individuation, on which mathematics is based. It is a flawed simulacrum of a fluxing universe which never stops changing, never solidifies into a value, a digit, an individual thing.

Mathematics as a reflection of reality presumes that there is a pause button on the universe. This also explains why philosophy has made no substantial progress in the past few thousand years - it makes the same assumption in the idea of 'being', which is an impossibility for the same reason.
Screens will probably get new ports, but I seriously doubt HDMI ports on new screens will be removed before the VGA ports are. New TV's still have SCART connectors.
The DNA injected is a plasmid with a myosin promoter supposedly introduced via electroporation through the call membrane and then presumably into the nucleus.

Successful electroporation of large DNA fragments is difficult (31aa here = 93bp). Widespread DNA uptake, nuclear localization, and subsequent integration is a low probability event.

Another barrier from what I understood working with transgenics is that Plasmid DNA is a foreign DNA morphology outside of our mitochondria. It is the shape of bacterial DNA and initiates a host response to destroy it. That could be old/incorrect understanding from myself though.

Another thing which bothered me was there was no discernible increase in growth hormone. Activation of GHRH should lead to increase in growth hormone? Perhaps Somatostatin activity is regulating away the increase.

Anyways, I’m skeptical of successful DNA integration and therefore the beneficial claims. The subject isn’t living in a bubble, there will be cofounders and lifestyle changes over 5+ years.
> what is the question?

Is the simulation hypotheses more or less plausible?

> what is the answer?

Supren supren, suben suben, maldekstra dekstra, maldekstra dekstra, bee aye komenco. ;)
I found this to be true. I was totally blow away by just how different of a world academia was, and how differently it operated. Software as a cost centre was a very unique experience on it's own, and software practices melded with institutional processes was genuinely shocking to me. Being able to take that stuff on the chin and still want to work there is probably not something you'll get from people who've been enjoying a cruisey experience in industry.
Beware.

Your speculation #7 notwithstanding, this kind of scheme is being targeted at retail investors [1] (instead of just accredited investors, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and the like) because it is more of a feel-good investment than something that makes financial sense. Firms with similar business models include Rally Road (equity shares in collectible cars). Similarities include the establish-an-emotional-connection tactic of identifying a specific panel or specific car.

This is a step up from Rally Road in my book — there's real earnings, it's not purely speculative — but from an investment perspective, you're only really involved because you're not as demanding as a serious investor (I expect rising interest rates have something to do with the shift away from accredited investors) and you are more vulnerable to this kind of feelgood pitch. Heck, you're competing with funding sources like a commercial loan, and for some reason you're winning?? That's a red flag.

You may see depressingly low returns. Read the prospectus end to end, understand the risks, and figure out how to do the math and properly discount a future income stream in a rising-interest-rate environment.

[1] (Elsewhere in this discussion: "We are currently working with accredited investors, but we are working to launch a product for retail investors.")
"Extra" work? Accepting manually entered locations is utterly trivial compared to using the browser's location feature.
I think it was, yes!
Could he mean "docker push"? I never heard of any publish command.
I don’t like the “minimum income” phrase because it’s an ambiguous lower bound.

Should people with zero income be able to afford housing?

Should people without a job be able to afford housing?

Yes, people should have shelter. Starting here leads to more concrete proposals than conflated arguments about the meaning of “minimum income”. MI presumes you have a job. Is having a job the criteria we want to set for having shelter?