skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well looks like my timing is off.

Despite never touching crypto up until now, I feel it finally has a solid use case.

ETH’s merge along with the existence of L2 networks means it can put western Union out of business for international same party (sending money to yourself) money transfers, The KYC on both sides not withstanding.

Hell even NFTs —- the clearest feverdream tinted scam —- had a use case after all: tokens for securitizing and allowing speculation in membership networks (see Gary V coin).

Sure someone could have just made a much less wasteful self-hostable/SaaS secret club membership app but NFTs seem to have found exactly one use case as a membership mechanism du jour which enables speculation (importantly, giving people a way to profit from their early “investment” in one creator or another).

At the risk of stoking the ire of HN, does anyone still think crypto does not have a use case?

There are a lot of things it is not and has not turned out to be, but IMO the biggest issue was needlessly destroying the earth and that seems to be all but solved now.

Of course, FedNOW may prove to make crypto for money transfers an even worse option relatively but… I think we may be at the start of an actual crypto boom (where there is actually Utility underpinning ETH’s value)

Another thing I find quite exciting is the idea of trading shares via a blockchain.

While obviously becoming a financial exchange is a key choke point for innovation because of the requirements, I can imagine a shadow network based on settlements of contract negotiated with blockchain with small trusted networks of investors.

All you need is to request the stock certificates and you can actually sign them over (let’s consider this an unorthodox “settlement”). Does this mean that we have a substrate for person to person hawala systems (which are normally outlawed by the government?)
But I can't imagine you're dynamically adjusting each shot for these changing factors every time. You'll almost certainly be holding the aim fixed once you've figured it out to be approximately correct, and firing against natural variance in the variable conditions.
I'd add veggie burgers (conventional ones that don't try to be meat) to that list.
Anti-trans hate group Gays Against Groomers banned from PayPal and Venmo
Analogous to Bitcoin, batteries store the value to be used at a later point in time.
I share this frustration, but I think the root cause of the frustration is the difference between what I feel should be important, and what actually is important to people.

Getting great reliable software delivered quickly, which is easy to maintain and change, should be the goal, I feel. But if that’s the case, why do people invent problems to find solutions to, why do people spend multiple days a week in Scrum meetings, etc.?

But looking at everyone involved and their actual incentives:

- For a consultant, the objective is to maximize the billable hours.

- For the employee, to get modern skills on their CV.

- For the junior programmer, there is a more level playing field with the seniors when tech is used that’s new and nobody knows, vs. tech the seniors know well and they don’t.

- For the manager or owner of a product company, they want less stress having to make decisions and as long as the product makes money who cares if the software could be delivered 50% or 70% faster?
Vim. Haven't been able to escape since I started and don't want to ever escape now
I once accidentally ordered a veggie burger. It was called a "garden burger" on the menu and I naively assumed it was a regular burger with vegetables on it. When I got it I immediately recognized my error, but ate it anyway and it was fine. Not what I wanted, but wholly inoffensive.

Years later I tried an impossible whopper, and unlike the veggie burger it was actually vile. The taste and texture were bizarre, not like meat but neither like vegetable. It tasted like something that came out of a chemistry lab, not a kitchen.

Elsewhere in this thread I see people suggesting that real meat be taxed, or subsidies removed, or some other form of government action to twist people's arms into eating a meat substitute. My advise to those commenters is this: Do it with traditional veggie patties and the general public might forgive you. Do it with these new wave of psuedo-meats and it will make people hate vegans with 10x more passion than they already do.
I don’t think it’s accurate to assume that the majority of fast food customers are low income men with blue collar jobs. It’s more of a broad cross-section of society in my experience.
> The unfortunate truth is that the current crypto killer feature is the creation of a global, permissionless, gigantic casino of worthless digital assets. This is quite far from the ideas of decentralization, privacy, and unstoppable digital assets we read in The Sovereign Individual.

This neatly encapsulates the often tragic distinction between ideology and real-world human behaviour.

You want a currency free of state intervention, you got it. That the majority of the market chose to leverage that for building casinos is the purest essence of that freedom.

Ideology-based financial systems that rely on actors 'doing the right thing', with no regulations to incentivize/coerce such behaviour, will usually fail to achieve its own stated objectives.
Thread: Modern history is best viewed through the lens of energy
It's not a big deal either way, but ending in a new line makes consistent the property that each line of text ends in a new line character (as opposed to EOF).
Luckily I worked for the company that made the analytics tools and consumed them!

Bosses actually came to us because our analytics team was trying to figure out who was causing it, because it had been caught by the team doing checks against the data. (a playback period should never have had > 30s of time)
After I found a post here talking about this, I wanted to dive in a little deeper. Here's my take on why email marketers love to exploit your inbox for all it's worth!
An AIX admin told me in the late 90s that there were no kernel tunables (i.e. sysctl.conf). That would be very nice.

The jfs journaling filesystem was much better than ufs until sun got zfs into the formal distribution
Thank you for the wonderfully insightful and detailed response. This is really helpful. Cheers!
On a ten year old reddit thread you'll find the top voted answers and top voted replies to those answers but not a sequential discussion for page after page.
> younger are more maleable and gullible in some aspects

> better capacity (and willingness) to adapt to the tower of babel du jour

this all sounds like you're describing people who can type and do what they are told.

and: we're all apes who can type.

edit: age is irrelevant. my point isn't that older people are better hires. hire for skill.
Oh, totally. Don't take my post as a complete defense of TikTok, I don't use it at all. I just noticed that they're smart enough to go, "Y'all know that just giving the people what they ask to see is gonna make 'em come back, right?". FB and Google used to do that but lost sight of that, and now that someone else came along and started doing it, they're shockedpikachu.jpg.
> I have no idea about how effective pair programming is. My desire to discover it is zero. […] Related: working with people you can learn from is a wonderful source of motivation. […] My desire to discuss technical stuff with people, both to help and be helped, is at all-time highs.

FWIW pair programming is very hard to do well and usually pretty uncomfortable. It needs to be structured well and done in smaller doses with lots of breaks. But when it has worked right (which was a small minority of the time for me), it has been exhilarating for me, unquestionably much faster and more productive than coding by myself, and much more fun.

I do think pair programming is also a fabulous way to share workflow tips and tricks. Watching someone drive you will see things you didn’t know, and when people watch you they’ll discover your secrets. Even if pair programming is hard, I think it’s pretty good for the organization to have team members doing it on occasion to help propagate this kind of knowledge more quickly. But yeah YMMV and it does also require self control and letting people do things their way sometimes even if it seems slow.
I see several contributors commenting about Borges as one of their favorite writers. May I suggest the name of Ted Chiang, whose short stories are very Borges-alike?

His story "Exhalation" for instance could have been written by Borges.

I hope not disturbing this thread by being slightly out of topic, but if I can contribute to make someone discovering this great living author, I would be very happy.
I was thinking a while ago about formatting restrictions that could make sense in a language (programming, markup, whatever) to simplify things (… and which would surely also annoy some users, but what’s life without fun?). Things like requiring tabs (partly because in a vacuum they’re simply better than spaces, and partly to protest against YAML which goes the other way), and banning carriage returns (how much trouble has supporting both ␍␊ and ␊ caused, I wonder? It’s not a little). Requiring EOL at EOF was also one I thought of.
It makes it easier to parse a text file without special cases.

It's an insignificant reason, but that's why it's traditionally recommended.
I don’t “like” any of the half dozen insurances I pay for, but I still pay for them. What do you call that?
Because it’s newer and externalities exist?
If it were truly about software security it wouldn't be limited to open source. Whatever standards make a piece of software secure doesn't change when it's developed by a company or a community, so what's the reason they're making the distinction in law?

For that reason I agree with the conclusion of the person above, things don't happen in capitalist societies without someone getting paid for it.
> Bittorrent and Soulseek have left media corporations quaking in their boots for decades

did they? From my understanding availability of piracy was not really the issue behind the decline in revenue e.g. we still have all p2p infrastructure going on but the media revenue is through the roof - because of streaming.

Also to me it seemed more people used file serving service e.g. megaupload to download movies / music rather than torrents..

> and increasingly relevant in a world where protocol trumps products

does not seem to describe my experience at all. Most things that I and mainstream users tend to use are based on closed products rather than protocols... I hope the trend will disappear but it does not seem like it.
Part 10 has the whole list: https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/financing-offshore-wind-... (or you can just change the number in the URL.)
https://archive.ph/LjZk7
Yeah, unfortunately I couldn't get the elevator number from the callers. I really wanted it to play pranks on coworkers.
the "block" ads.

Not everything needs to be analyzed to death for some sort of symbolism.
100% sure.
>Plenty of people (a billion a day?) enjoy fast food burgers.

Whoa there. "Enjoy" might be a bit generous. I might suggest endure. A lot of people eating fast food burgers are not doing it because they enjoy it, but at their cheap prices it is just something they can afford. Yes, there is a large portion of people that "like" fast food burgers, and that might be a number that reaches "plenty". But I would imagine that enjoyment is similar to when I was a broke ass college age person that could only afford ramen and enjoyed it as being better than nothing.
40. lol
I'm still catching myself doing that sometimes :)
Anyone remember Proxomitron?
It also makes the environment itself uncomfortable in many cases - excessively drying the air, or causing weird moisture/condensation issues (as it won’t fully cycle the air in the house before stopping).

Essentially, you want your HVAC system to run for long enough it’s a gradual transition in temperatures inside and the equipment can run for awhile each time it needs to run to avoid the start/stop problems and let it ‘settle in’.
> If you’re still randomly submitting your resume to an ATS trying to prove yourself to companies by reversing binary trees on whiteboards while juggling bowling balls and riding a unicycle on a tightrope, you’re doing it wrong at 40+ years old.

I did that at 45 and landed an interesting job at FAANG (and I'm not the only one). I think it's a bit contradictory to think old programmers are still as capable and sharp as 25 years old, and at the same time insisting to be judged on different standards.
meat producer subsidies already don't exist.
Zones all run under the same kernel.

I'm guessing these lpars all have separate kernels.
I look back on 40 with fondness: I would have been 40 some time around the Y2K bubble. It sure as heck isn't old and I can;t see how a kid of 40 can write about ageing in the industry.
Agreed. My formulation was too brief. We should have a combination of upfront and annual payments into a distmanteling fund that works like an insurance.
I have a couple openSUSE/KDE installs on spinners. They're quite fine. Slightly longer to load up and after that it's mostly not noticeable depending on what I'm doing.
> claiming that P2P technologies aren't good or don't fix problems is pretty laughable.

Who said that? Are we not allowed to talk about p2p without talking about crypto any more?
Some everday street smarts applied to crypto.

The fact that blockchain is a super interesting accounting method is completely lost on the average consumer who just wants to buy food and pay bills. If crypto can't do this, it's not real currency.

And most of them intuitatively understand that making your own currency out of electrons probably won't work in the long run. Otherwise, work would become obsolete and the economy would grind to a halt.

And the speculation game is a lot like playing the lottery. Everyone can't win and if you aren't a loser yet it's only because you haven't been playing long enough.
The fun of programming begins at the point that stackoverflow/Google begins to cease providing ready-made answers.
I was making an America Goulash recipe once, and thought I'd give the beyond burger or whatever a try; it wasn't patties but was jut a pound of ground "beef." It didn't brown or cook up correctly; it smelled awful and perfumed the whole house. I made the recipe and it was straight up gross. We threw it all away.
These are loud, about as loud as a good stove hood. They are quieter than the hydroponic scrubbers recommended above. This isn't really the kind of device you have on all the time. I use it with an AQI monitor during high-particulate events like cooking, smog, wildfires, etc., to clean my apartment's air. The AQI outside where I live has routinely been around 100-150 PM 2.5, while a few runs for 5-15 minutes every time I leave or enter keeps it around 5-15.

It is hard but possible to have a conversation when it is on full speed. Mine has a knob you can adjust the fan speed, which obviously trades off with CFM, but makes it easier to have a conversation.

But they work really fast at max speed. I cook a lot in a hot oil wok on a gas stove. My "hood" is a fan built into my microwave above the oven that just recirculates air in the room, and I have just one small window in my kitchen. If I forget to turn my scrubber on while cooking, it only takes about 10-15 minutes for my PM2.5 sensor at the other end of my kitchen to go from 500+ to about 10.
Ground heat pumps provide free cooling in the summer for a very limited amount of electricity as the ground will be at 10-15C (depending on where you live) so you don't need to use the compressor and just make the liquid flow to cool down your house.

It also has the extra benefit of heating up your ground for the winter period.
But when your smart oven and smart smoke detector conspire...
> Had no idea this was political at all or I wouldn't have posted it on here.

This might be true, but a lot of people see that and think "yeah right!". The problem when topics become political is any intelligent discussion gets suffocated.

> We store the oil to help buffer oil prices from interruptions in production.

Sort of, but it's a bit more nuanced I think (right or wrong).

From evergy.gov:
----
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), the world's largest supply of emergency crude oil was established primarily to reduce the impact of disruptions in supplies of petroleum products and to carry out obligations of the United States under the international energy program.
----

You could easily argue that what they are currently doing is congruent with this mission by participating strategically in the global market.

I don't know that I agree with it being a good approach from my simpleton perspective, but I doubt it's being done as some sort of pro China move at least.
Many native english speakers confuse humbleness and humility, and it's an admonishment to not be meek. They are taught to affect humbleness that is not the effect of developing the greatness that would justify it.
Idk if it is bad. The way the article headline is worded it sounds like the cars are crashing into puppies and grandmas. In reality they just caused traffic to get backed up for about 20 minutes because a sensor broke or something. This seems like a misleading headline by kron4.
I'm assuming it is because of the lower volume of alternative burgers. Looking at my supermarket, they have probably 150-200 linear feet dedicated to meat and maybe 5-10 for alternatives.
Only reason I do it is because if you're adding onto a file, git will say the (prior) last line is modified because you have added the newline to it. But it's not a really big deal, I don't enforce it with any linter/CI. It's just 0.01% annoying to see a 20 line commit say 21 lines changed.
Weak managers hire weak subordinates.
Why do you write $USD instead of USD?
Russia's actions have shown that it is not a reliable partner, and the "cheap" energy it sells actually comes with a very high political and national security cost. As a result, most European countries now know that they must realign their energy policies and economic relationships.

This kind of re-alignment takes time. By opening up the strategic reserve, Biden has given Europe more time than they otherwise would have had. Hopefully, it will be enough.
Want cleaner code? Use the rule of six
GitHub gives me an angry looking red circle if I don't so I add one
My Ford Mach-E has a bunch of similar timing glitches, including blinkers. Sometimes the touch screen doesn’t detect inputs for a second and then all the touches fires at once.

I tell myself it’s some component busy GCing for a bit :)
Hm, it seems obvious that Guido and Python have more impact on the industry (and I'm aware of Burrows' antipathy toward Python, which was well known at Google. As far as I remember it was due to debugging a syntax error caused by indentation in SWIG/Python)

JPL and Google were early Python users. Google's crawler and the home page started out in Python (trivia: the ancient asyncore stdlib module and its author played some role, as far as I remember)

Pretty much all AI and self driving cars use Python, BitTorrent was written in Python, Python is embedded in GDB, embedded in huge commercial applications like Maya for visual effects, etc. I think Ethereum had an early Python implementation

Python's design achieved Guy Steele's "growing a language" vision in his famous talk, i.e. using operator overloading to allow scientists to create their own lingua franca -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29171519 (i.e. the talk was about adding operator overloading to Java, as well "generics" and value types)

Mike Burrows is a great (even legendary) programmer and computer scientist, but if you're talking about "impact on the industry", there are levels :) I have to say I'm a big Alta Vista fan though
Yes, purely because otherwise diffs get this added:

\ No newline at end of file
I'm not surprised, it is just Gardenburger and Boca Burger with obnoxious new marketing. Wake me up when there's lab grown _meat_.
Generally what I find is that the bean burgers that are vegan, are just if not more tasty. While the fake burgers try this weird meat taste that doesn’t come close to beef texture. Both bean and meat burgers need to be prepared fresh for optimal taste. It’s like fresh burgers are like the 10x of frozen/pre made burgers. While choosing burgers among the pre-made will always be marginal in gains.
I’m in no hurry to ever try these plant-based meat substitutes again since the coconut oil / cocoa butter “marbling” gives me the runs, like Olé Olestra all over again: https://web.archive.org/web/19990203160042/http://www.zug.co...
Fascinating! I would have not expected that maintaining annual thermal balance would be as big of an issue as it is.
A company wants an employee, they plan on treating this person as an employee. However the company doesn’t want to pay the additional costs required by regulation. Payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, dealing with tax withholding, overtime where applicable, family leave requirements etc…

So they hire a contractor instead and pay them as a 1099 contractor, or the contractor sets up an LLC and they pay the LLC, or an S-corp.

Doesn’t matter how they pay them, if they treat them as an employee (there’s a 20 part test) they are a de facto employee and it’s false self-employment.
The psychological aspect of consultants and even employees trying to play a game with billable hours aside, a lot of developers of all ages genuinely feel using frameworks to do the exact same thing one can achieve with far less hubbub is a good thing, and they have trouble defending it. It's a cargo cult by all standards.

Many of us are living this now. If it's not the chasing of new frameworks, it is old frameworks no longer being actively supported, or key features never being developed. Then it turns out something like vanilla HTML + JS can do the job just fine, but you need to update everything to vanilla to make it uniform.
People who can manage and code (architect, etc.) are truly rare. I'm not quite at the same age and only play the guitar. Like the article author and where we differ, I am very skeptical of new technologies, if I can't find a use for it in my personal software projects without having to hold my nose, there's no way I will recommend it for work.
Sure, but is it 100 times better than plant-based alternatives? Because it is 100 times the carbon cost.
There is no group the current elites hate more than the middle class. The middle class pays enough attention and has just enough power to make them uncomfortable when they do nasty things.

The goal of the current elites is to either materially destroy the middle class or to make them poor.
Fantastic article. I love walking, I try and get at least 2-3 miles a day. Usually at night after work, while the street lights put up a feeble fight against the darkness in my relatively small town. A great time for to catch up on podcasts and music and perhaps most pertinent to readers of HN I find my mind is much more nimble on these strolls. Ideas percolate much more readily.
One tool I have found useful since my paths are limited here, WIGLE on my phone. I let it run in the background and gather it's WiFi and BT data as it helps to push me to walk down a different street each night and in the end perhaps the data is actually useful to OpenStreetMap when I upload it.
Source files are text files.

echo “new line” >> textfile
cat <textfiles>

If you and your toolchain don’t see them as text files and never will, and you never use your editor to edit other text files (e.g. /etc/…), you’re probably ok without a newline at eof.
That would be a great, and terrifying at the same time, first contact response message to us.

proof-of-superiority if you will.