skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The foundation has built a $30 million endowment to care for City.

The money is in an endowment for a charity to maintain the project, not for the costs of building it. Yes the money will pay for peoples' jobs, and yes it will bring tourism. But honestly, is this what the world really needs?

I know that this is an unpopular view, but such projects do seem hubristic when we are walking into a climate crisis. Particularly when it is built in a desert!

If I were the artist I would not be able to see $30 million go towards a charity for preserving my work, when the money could instead be put towards a charity that worked to ensure there is actually a longterm future for humankind (and therefore people to see and enjoy art for generations to come).

If you are capable of executing something this big, I think you are capable of aiming higher and going for a bigger positive impact on the world. So what I see is a lack of vision, not something awe-inspiring.
My NFT anti-fraud solution has ~195m NFTs indexed and analyzed (everything on Ethereum, Polygon, and Solana). Here's the breakdown of current storage methods across all of them:

curl https://match.tovera.com/api/v0/stats/nft/storageMethods

[
{
"storage": "https",
"ratio": "0.39163250000000000000",
"counted_at": "2022-08-20T05:55:01.164Z"
},
{
"storage": "ipfs",
"ratio": "0.58654950000000000000",
"counted_at": "2022-08-20T05:55:01.164Z"
},
{
"storage": "unknown",
"ratio": "0.00090250000000000000",
"counted_at": "2022-08-20T05:55:01.164Z"
},
{
"storage": "chain",
"ratio": "0.01584000000000000000",
"counted_at": "2022-08-20T05:55:01.164Z"
},
{
"storage": "http",
"ratio": "0.00507550000000000000",
"counted_at": "2022-08-20T05:55:01.164Z"
}
]

2% on chain (almost all SVGs), 60% on IPFS, and 40% on HTTPS (total above 100% because I rounded).
I smoked for ~18 years and I stopped cold turkey by using one simple trick. I associated smoking with an individual that I did not like. This was an individual who had no admirable qualities at all and they smoked.

Whenever I thought of having a smoke, I would instantly think of that individual and asked myself if I wanted to be associated with them by smoking like they do. It did the trick.

I also keep repeating the following to myself:

“Few things say ‘look at me, I’m a complete idiot’ quite like smoking a cigarette.”

I had to be able to respect myself and I absolutely could not respect myself whilst also using tobacco.
The twitter-screed is the social-media equivalent of the amp-hour. This power is generated, transmitted and consumed. It drives our dramatic hamster-wheels.
Pointing out the obvious that doing a 360 would change absolutely nothing since you'd end up facing the same direction you started with.

Did you mean: 180?
Programming and, even more so, software engineering are _trade skills_. There will ALWAYS be “cheaters” but you will know them by the end product of their work. Yes, it’s important to understand the fundamentals. An unwillingness to learn these things is a great indicator that you will be a failure as a professional. As another commenter mentioned, the focus on grades at all makes the problem worse.

More important than even fundamentals, though, is modeling a successful software development mindset and problem solving technique. Too many professors have not _had_ any success in software development, which is sad. I can count dozens of examples of my own personal growth that could have been handled in college, that I instead ended up inflicting on my first employer.
The difference is that PoW pools are made up of individual miners who are free to go elsewhere if their pool misbehaves. Pools do not have their own mining hardware, and so they have an economic incentive to be well-behaved. If they misbehave, everybody leaves and they vaporize their business overnight.

PoS is tyranny of the majority: You cannot take your business elsewhere.
With that logic using a calculator is also cheating.
It's the main reason why I like gay people... they don't reproduce.
I can almost guarantee you that other people in or around your city will likely have the opposite opinion, especially if they live in an area of town that has homeless encampments. I've lived in Texas and that's been my general experience. Even deep blue Austin takes a more conservative approach to dealing with the homeless population and the end result is simply pushing their problem onto other people because said homeless population and their camps move further out of the city core.

The reality is that you see downtown being clean but don't see the other people you've pushed your problems onto. And that's a consistent trend of trying to solve the homeless issue in America through things like bussing initiatives, relocating homeless camps and so forth. No conservative or progressive city has solved this problem because it's a societal issue with the US in general.
Life experiences don't matter when you are in survival mode.
This generation gap is unbelievable.
> The exact problem of California's High-Speed Rail is that individuals (as well as local municipalities) keep suing them.

No, it's funding.

The switch to exclusive focus on environmental clearance outside of a particular area of focus was based on funding, not lawsuits. HSR has always relied on massive additional funding besides it's dedicated bond fund, much of which was expected from the federal government, and which has not materialized.
Ukrainians Speak about Being Taken to Russia
you can't just read a molecule and say "oh it looks like something safe". Digitalin and the cardiac glycosides [1a,1b] may look like completely innocuous compounds (just have to remove a group and they are inactive). Some hormones look like cholesterol. Some steroisomers [2] (think of it as just changing the order atoms are connected in space but not what they are connected to) of molecules kill you while some other forms are safe and that's even harder to grasp on a 2d representation of the structure.

[1a] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiac_glycoside

[1b] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steroid

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enantiopure_drug
My impression is that we're already working with implicit symbols in some fields.

Unsupervised ASR pre-training uses random projection and then trains to classify into discrete acoustic classes. Later, those are then classified into discrete characters.

It's implemented using differentiable convolutions, but since we go from a sequence of discrete classes to another sequence of discrete classes, I would be very surprised if one could NOT represent this as pattern matching and look up tables.

And thanks to dialects, the same characters can stand for many different phoneme sequences, so they are akin to a symbolic abstraction.
Don't project, I did not say that. Everyone is on a learning curve.
It’s the same with staking. If you aren’t solo staking, you are just delegating to a staking pool. And you can withdraw that and deposit it elsewhere if they do not align with your values.
Hi, sometime adjunct here.

Cheating on programming assignments has been rampant forever at every undergrad institution I have experience with and somewhat present among graduate students. My experience spans about 25 years in that space now.

When I taught an introductory class, I gave open-book exams with no laptops or phones allowed. About 1/3 of the class was unable to write a syntactically correct for loop in Python despite our textbook being an introductory Python-based book chock full of examples. It was pretty clear that a subset of students were either working together on project assignments or out-and-out having someone else do the assignments for them. I mainly compensated for this by having a large part of the grade being a 1-1 meeting with me to talk me through the code. That and the exam had the effect of actually making cheating somewhat less worthwhile. But this approach simply doesn't scale these days - my max class was around 32-33 students and the time I spent meeting with students was insane. I haven't taught in a few years and understand that class sizes of 150+ are not uncommon. I could have never used the same approach with that many students. I probably would have doubled-down on exams and made exam length darn near impossible to finish without actually knowing the material well enough to do without referring to the textbook.

I was teaching more from a practice-based viewpoint so mostly I came up with "weird" projects that mirrored problems I spend time on (data cleaning, using existing libraries to do neat little things, and also having students pick a personal project to implement that I helped them scope appropriately).

We bitch and moan about interview whiteboarding but given grade inflation its kind of hard to trust university credentials. Grade inflation was kind of disheartening in that the worst students didn't really get a poor grade. But I also didn't have any problems with the top 1/3 of the class getting a very high grade - these students were motivated, understood the material, and often impressed me with where they got in a single semester.
There is no syntax highlighting on the blackboard.

Math notation is not designed. It has haphazardly evolved over centuries. It is not rigorous even though math itself is (attempts to be) rigorous, it is a language as imperfect as its users. But it does its job well enough.
if you can outline what isn't blitheringly stupid about proof of work crypto mining, then please do tell, else it would be prey to false balance
This is fucking awesome, thanks.
I don't think we'll get to the next teir with out a new type of hardware and also a new rethinking of computing.

I think the limits are thermodynamic and we're not going to get there with current architecture. We need a kind of computer that's much more highly networked and that runs much cooler. My suspicion is that a highly networked system will inherently draw less power for the same compute.

Examples: human brains, plant plasmodesma, microbial networks.
I am quite sure bootstraping as concept, precedes by several decades that website.
I'm a big fan of maps and have seen a lot of different projections but this is my first time seeing authagraph. I think not only does it do a good job of showing relative size, it also looks good - but I'm used to looking at 'unconventional' projections. The only issue with it is that it's a bit hard to gauge what is 'up' and what is 'down'. If you were showing me this projection for Mars then I would probably get lost.

I'm having trouble finding a nice large resolution image. Anyone found one?
I wouldn’t say the book isn’t enjoyable, but I agree the book alluded to a lot more specifics than it delivered. It’s a fun but very surface level read in my opinion. The author certainly piqued my interest on the topic and I refer to it in casual conversation pretty frequently, but I also expected a bit more…technical depth out of it. Thanks for the book recommendation on the topic, I’ve been wondering how to follow the thread Burglar’s Guide started.
This wasn't supposed to be an argument about the relative exploitability of the attack-surfaces presented by implementations of the technologies of PoW and PoS consensus systems, though; but rather about the economics inherent in "cornering the market" in PoW vs PoS.

PoW and PoS both allow a single party to unilaterally control the network when they're working exactly as intended — just under conditions that are impractical in major networks. That impracticality can be measured in economic terms — as a dollars-and-cents cost to acquire the assets necessary to take control.

It's harder to buy out 51% of validation stake of a network of size N, than it is to buy the GPUs and the electricity to power them to do 51% of the mining for a network of size N. GPUs are technically unbounded — you can just build your own fabs, if you really care — and so the marginal cost of acquiring another GPU+electricity is constant. But stake is a pie; the marginal cost of acquiring more of it increases as less of it remains available on the market. (And many people will just never give theirs up, for ideological reasons.) Thus, it's harder to Sybil attack PoS than PoW.
What "hard rules" can compete with actually enforced law? Don't you expect more "whims" (and scams) from private adventurers than from governments?
But then you would have a foundation to figure out the new models. This is the essential problem when teaching any field because the field itself advances faster than one can effectively teach you.

That's why getting an Internship is always a good idea.
FWIW, the author of the study is blind (though not born blind): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18027950
There is nothing colonialist about the fact that less complex societies don't develop as quickly as more complex ones.

It is not even about ethnicity. For example, the Incan empire developed very fast and reached Roman-like levels of complexity and political power in mere decades after its founding, in fact much faster than the Romans themselves once did.

In the meantime, hunters and gatherer's way of life in other parts of the world, including Europe (such as the Sami in Lappland), barely changed over centuries.
Yeah I agree, it's not 'visually' obvious that the combined entries are all the same. But once I started writing it I had to see where it went :p

(Footnotes 2 and 3 at the end explain why the entries all end up the same. And the same argument works for simplices in any number of dimensions—there's always two directions that change the value by +1 and -1, and the rest are all parallel / keep it the same. In higher dimensions there are more ways to be parallel!)
I lived in SF before I lived in Germany. What you're describing is how BART works and it's trash.
> What if the paradigm needed isn’t remotely related to any approach that’s ever been tried?

Kind of analogous to how Alzheimer drug research keeps focusing on the amyloid plaques despite dozens if not more large clinical trials failing to prove any cognitive benefits for stuff targeting those plaques or how they form.

But I guess it's easier to keep pushing for more than re-evaluating decades of work?
Random shallow rant, I really wish they came up with a different abbreviation than zstd. Not only it sounds strange but it’s also too long for abbreviation, imo.
It could have been “zs” or “zd”.
Ugh I had someone ask me to debug a verbally communicated error message in an interview.

Like they picked some random port configuration issue that had stumped them for days in the past and thought cool let’s remove the internet, the command line, and ask people to solve it on the spot.

I offered plenty of plans for how I would go about debugging, but I didn’t know the one simple trick.

I agree with trying to use challenges that are closer to the real work, but it’s really hard to do that without over-testing domain knowledge.

For instance, I ask candidates to do some asynchronous control flow. These are all candidates with js listed as their best language and I offer to let them look things up or to show them the promise apis they need, but a certain percent just refuse to engage with the problem because they don’t have the domain knowledge and seem to feel they’re being tested unfairly.

The problem does a really good job of showing a candidates grasp of all the tricky parts of js, so I keep using it despite the drawbacks.
tl;dr I don't.

Here's some more context.

I use Google Keep as a read later tool, with a note for each article. Once read I usually discard the note except for the most interesting or valuable articles, which I may bookmark in the browser, share to my Mastodon profile, or post about on my blog.
DoorDash and the Myth of Profitable Food Delivery
My experience using channels in Go, was that I replicated state across "actors", similar to microservices (which is one of many problems that microservices have vs a monolith). Worse, this state is not in sync, so you end up worrying a lot about logical race conditions (if you're paranoid like me). I ended up still using channels, but a single message bus with a single threaded dispatch loop.

I am curious about if redundant state and state synchronization tends to be an issue in medium-to-large Elixir apps? If not, how does one design the component/actor hierarchy to avoid such issues?
people are making millions of dollars from NFTs, but sure. You're the determiner for what has value in the world.
Predator or prey.
> we teach in programming languages that don’t even exist

I remember reading about a framework that actually sort of does that - create randomized programming languages. It was meant as a security feature against code injections iirc, but technically it should work as a solution to OP's problem.

Although I guess some of the other suggestions are better and easier to implement - ask students to explain their code (select one person randomly per problem, it's quite common anyway) and give more weight to tests.
Thinking that cryptocurrency doesn't have value at this point is a hopeless perspective.
Copilot still works quite poorly with problems that are not “Stackoverflowable”. Perhaps the best way to fight this is to create assignments that cannot be googled in 5 seconds.
They don't but realistically that is the incentive and motivation for many people - including technologists who ultimately decide to use their understanding of the market to leverage capital rather than code or perform a similar technical function.

In your case one could argue that if you saw so much future value in the Mac/Apple ecosystem you missed out significantly by not purchasing Apple stock. Depending on when you made your observation, even a modest investment would have had a significant return over the past 20 years.

I actually use the Amazon example when people tell me how worried they are about Amazon becoming all almighty and taking over all commerce - that if they actually believe that then they should probably buy Amazon stock and use the profits to do something to counter whatever negative effect they perceive.

As a former software engineer and founder now VC what I personally realized is I could have the greatest impact on the industry from leveraging capital around my own industry thesis rather than continue to build it myself. It's all a layer cake.
> most differential equations can't be solved analytically.

Exactly, so why don't they teach the numerical analysis for actually solving PDEs that matter? These are equations that are very highly relevant to a wide array of real-world science and would be extremely beneficial for many people to know, even if (like calculus or even algebra) most people may not need them later.

I ended up wandering into a career where I work with PDEs nearly every day in some form or other, and would have greatly appreciated some basic training as part of my formal education.
Ask HN: Why is Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant still sending electricity to Ukraine?
Russia has been in control of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant for months, but it still powers the Ukrainian grid.

I can see that as a defense against Ukraine destroying the plant, but I wouldn’t ever expect them to do that, as destroying a nuclear power plant in your own country is not the best of ideas.

So, why is it still sending electricity to Ukraine?

Also, does Ukraine pay Russia for that electricity?
Again, it is not possible for staking pools to differ on "values". If a validator does not vote with the majority, their funds will be slashed by the protocol.
As a semi-educated guess, I wonder if he might just be referring to the compression of log files via standard Amazon-internal mechanisms, which use S3 as the backing storage, for many services.
If it doesn't now, it will quickly if that solution is adopted.
Suitable, yes. I don't doubt that cultures can develop extremely quickly when the conditions are ripe. The Japanese dismantled their feudal structure and transformed into a major industrial and military power within a single generation.

But that happened under a strong, merciless pressure from other industrialized nations. Nature acts way more slowly that Commodore Perry did and the adaptations are much slower, too.
As I moved as well, I experienced three different Canadian universities' Computer Science Program.

There was only one professor and course that I still remember 20 years later: CS408, Software Engineering, Professor Wortman, UofToronto.

Class project was in four phases, cumulative (basic functionality for the application in phase 1, progressively additional functionality in other phases, frequently strongly interacting with previous phase code).

Here's the kicker: After each phase, you had to swap your code with another team. So you had to pick up somebody else's code, figure it out, and then build up on it.

Few of us that had real-world working experience loved the course and flourished in it. This is what we are training for! This is what programming is like! You are taking real code and building a real thing with it!

About 250 other students signed a petition to the Dean on how this is unfair and awful and they will not put up with it. They were just too used to / spoiled by 16 years of 5 assignments per semester with abstract, entirely separate questions of 1.a), 1.b), 1.c), etc.

All I could think of - if you did not like this course, you are about to not enjoy next 4-5 decades of your life :D

Other than this one course, I can say that I'm a prolific, enthusiastic, life-long learner, and my university experience was the absolute dumps - it was far less about learning, and far more about bureaucratic hoops and artificial constraints and restrictions. I was top of the class in some hard courses (generative compilers etc), mid-pack in the some of meh courses, but in retrospective, my life opened up when I was done with academia and could work and learn in the 'real world'.
Depending on your definition of malware...AOL?
He's implying that a wolf would sacrifice his fellow workers job to advance for themselves, while a sheep would stay with his flock of fellow coworkers and not release the project.
Sounds like Bellevue WA. They don’t have much of a homeless problem because Seattle is right across the lake where the police aren’t as strict.
The world's rivers are drying up. See how 6 look from space
He's also cut the homicide down to below some major US cities. The homicide rate fell from 38 per 100,000 to 18 per 100,000. Most people have only heard of him because of Bitcoin and so their own biases of Bitcoin cloud their judgment of Bukele. Locally he's a legend. He objectively handled Covid better than many countries around him(bested only by Costa Rica and Panama, which are already considered comparatively more developed than El Salvador). His foray into Bitcoin is considered a mistake of ambition not one of corruption. To put that into context the previous administration of El Salvador is accused of embezzling $300,000,000 USD. I wish more schadenfreude articles about El Salvador would include that fact.
"admit"? What am I admitting?
Google says it has blocked another huge DDoS attack
Do you also believe that we should move away from evaluation entirely? Genuinely asking.
Copilot is limited to short snippets. You can't just ask it to write a HTTP server. Also I don't see how having copilot generate the code for listening on a server socket is any better than when I copied how to do it out of a man page. Copilot doesn't add anything new, you've always been able to look up the documentation or look up how other people approach the problem.

The fibonacci example doesn't make much sense either due to how trivial it is. Without copilot you are just copying from the definition of the function and with it copilot copies it for you. The other algorithms that follow are both online and probably in their textbook.
51% attacks aren't just a single actor dictating blocks, but the threat of a cartel of large stakeholders cooperating to attain 51% of vote power