skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> They are functionally useless as currencies outside the realms of criminal activity

I think this kind of misses the point.

Cryptocurrency has already accomplished incredible things. For example, it's never been easier to buy LSD. DAOs make it simple to work remotely without needing to reside in a specific location.

All the benefits of crypto come from their ability to circumvent regulations. It lets people do business peer-to-peer over the internet, out of sight from national governments and their laws. That's the point.
You might be entirely correct but my experience tells me that being logically right and the way the world works are two different things. Under a few of these points credit cards should not exist, yet here we are with our overlords.
Or if you want to download an offline version of wikipedia.
Try taking 2-3 young children on crowded public transport. What works for you can be pretty exclusive.
In my mentoring/tutoring experiences, the comprehension is also resisted when a copy is available.
Trying to provide some context without explicit spoilers:

> The demarchists were only several 100 people if I understood correctly

Demarchist society at/around Yellowstone was supposed to involve many millions of people, but the catch was the Glitter Band of federated space stations allowed a high degree of local control: different stations could vote themselves into being hippie communes or dictatorships or whatever, and one of the main roles of the overarching Demarchist organization (heh) was to make sure these little fiefs didn't violate the fundamental principles of the whole thing by preventing their inhabitants from voting in the broader hivemind or from leaving the station. That broader hivemind held together by largely staying out of hyperlocal concerns, focusing on the advancement of the overall system.

> they definitely ran into some problems

Yeah, though The Bad Thing that happens roughly halfway through the universe's chronology (some books set before The Event, some after) affects all the different polities and one of the more interesting aspects of the novels, at least personally, is how the different systems deal with this external shock; it's not quite that the Demarchist political system caused the event, although it did get itself into a variety of lesser scrapes.

It is a fun concept: representative democracy is indeed kind of a workaround for laggy, low-bandwidth communications. What's possible when that stops being a constraint?
Wrong or lying?
Remarkable nature. Whenever my daily problems get on top of me, I like to spend a moment to think about the absurd but beautiful reality that we creatures exist and that we're hurtling through space. And now... that worms can hear... in a way similar enough to humans.
A little empathy goes a long way.
Are you referring to the fact that 120km/h means 2KM per minute?
Simple, Fast, and Scalable Reverse Image Search
Largely because we have a long inversion of how government should act. It should have never needed "approval" in the first place, government should have to seek to ban a product, innovation, etc based on their own creditable evidence the thing is dangerous.

Instead of we adopted a position of everything being illegal until it is blessed by a regulator, it is in effect guilty until proven innocent.

Until we put government back into the proper context innovation will continue to be inhibited
But I remember back in the Napster days when P2P was going to revolutionise the world and forever alter the media landscape.

And yet despite all the technology having been built and stable the trend in media has been overwhelmingly towards centralisation e.g. Spotify, Netflix and an all you can eat model.

It's because ultimately users care about the experience above all else.
Russia and China fought - not a full war, but they fought. Iraq-Iran, very very bloody. And the list goes on and on. The cold war was an exceptionally bloody period with casualties not out of line with the WWII period, there were a **ton of proxy wars.
The "scandal" that prompted this article is referenced with sources under the heading "Why XCheck is in the news". Neither the article nor the comment you're replying to says anything about data breaches.
Tunnels might now be cheaper to build than roads just because of land rights. It's very difficult/impossible to acquire the property rights to build a new roads/rail lines nowadays.
(Parent comment did mention the grain of salt, so my response below is to the spirit of the comment itself and not directed at the person).

> And if they start with, "well, I'd build a react app," you can go straight into the trash can with their resume, because you can have that whole discussion without deciding on so much as a language, much less a framework, so you can see who jumps too hastily to wrong assumptions.

So you would reject someone based on the first thing they say? That’s called prejudice - maybe they don’t have the systems programming lingo in place to describe the ideas you are looking for, but might actually have some ideas trending in the right direction given some nudging. Also, that sounds like you gave a systems programming problem to someone who may have specialised in react the last two years - did you read their resume?

Seeing how complex this discussion gets every time on what is the “right” way to interview and how biased people can get (things haven’t changed in a generation - it used to be about picking the wrong Java library I heard) - no wonder Leetcode has emerged as a “fair” standard-bar that everyone in computing has an actual shot at clearing.

That said, Leetcode-style does bias towards people who have time, resources, and not many responsibilities, especially with problems trending to ever more esoteric algorithms. I don’t know the solution.
> 1% pure gold

Exactly which part of Web3 are you referring to here? I've not seen anything that matches your assessment.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's all a gigantic fraud, as there are some small worthwhile innovations in distributed cryptographic verification.
However, almost every single addition to that point is riddled with corruption and scams for what is essentially a gigantic linked list.

We have lit a metaphorical forest on fire with proof-of-work mining and been told that it's good for the environment.
We have charged a weeks wages in transaction fees for a loaf of bread and been told that it's good for the poor.
We have seen people lose their life savings over typos and been told that it's a good store of value.
We have allowed blockchain founders to walk away with billions of stolen savings and been told that it's decentralized.

As a generalization, blockchains and cryptocurrencies cause more far more damage than good.
> Aren't you being a sort of "preference fatalist"? Do you think it's impossible to change preferences?

I've changed my mind on a lot of things. Big things too. I've always enjoyed debating subjects too because I think there is often value in changing minds and having your own mind changed. There are also things which are provably true and preferences. It's really the latter that I see no point in changing people's minds about.

I think you basically have two end states to civilisation, the first being a single world government which sets laws to maximise the happiness and wellbeing for the average individual in a society.

Or the second option is that you accept the diversity of human opinion and have lots of smaller states where those states can adopt their own unique laws that maximise the happiness and wellbeing of that unique community.

I'd argue neither is stable because you either have competing states with different laws or a single government with lots of unhappy subjects.

But just as an example here, you're not going to make the world a more peaceful or happy place by forcing the middle-east to be pro-LGBTQ even if it's the "right" thing. Here in the UK we see this all the time. We import people with different ideas form our own then create conflict by telling them they're wrong for thinking the way they do. And for what? Perhaps some times something can be so clearly wrong that it warrants intervention, but in this case if someone who's LGBTQ wants to leave that community for somewhere more LGBTQ friendly they can do that and everyone is happy. I'm not going to get into a fight with a Muslim about why their beliefs are wrong.

I guess my position is just that the majority of violence and unhappiness in this world comes from people either believing their view is the correct view and that others should share it, or that someone else view is wrong and that they need to be stopped. All the insults on Twitter. All the people the state locks in cages. All the bombs drop for not following democratic values. I don't want any part of it. For the most part so long as they do so peacefully I'm happy for people to live however like, believing whatever they like.
While I personally wouldn’t care about it, I can understand someone taking offense at copilot for spitting out their code verbatim and claiming it isn’t theirs.

Neither GPT nor Dall-e produces content that anyone can point to and say “they are laundering MY work”.

The closest we’ve been to that point is the image generators spitting out copyright watermarks, but they are not clearly attributable to any one single image (afaik).
Uhh, I'm gonna have to disagree hard on this take:

> So obviously the source of the error is one or more third parties, not Microsoft, and it's obviously impossible for Microsoft to be responsible in advance for what other people claim to license.

Copilot is Github's product, and Microsoft owns Github. They are responsible for how that product functions. In this case, they should be held responsible for the training data they used for the ML model. Giving them the benefit of the doubt here, at minimum they chose which random third parties to believe were honest and correct. Without giving them the benefit of the doubt, they lied about what data sets they used to train it.

To try and put it simpler, let's say a company comes along and tells the world "we're selling this cool book-writing robot, don't worry it won't ever spit out anyone else's books" and then the robot regurgitates an entire chapter from Stephen King's Pet Sematary, is that the fault of Stephen King or the person selling the robot?
Raised by wolves season 2 also has a government led by an AI.
Users don't care how much the server costs are though. They care about their experience.

Which is why torrents has really fallen away in favour of fast CDNs.
I always wonder how crypto doomsayers are going to pay the power bills keeping their network alive once the financial doomsday finally arrives. If everything goes tits up as badly as they say, I wouldn't rely on digital currencies to still be viable, especially with the incredible energy and hardware costs associated with proof of work blockchains.

Blockchain may be a good way to hide money (i.e. in a country with runaway inflation where the government has constrained access to banking and foreign currencies) but if the crash is global then nobody is safe.
Really? Personally, I would say that a "great" con is one that makes lots of money, putting Web 3.0 pretty far up the list when it comes to grassroots level scams.
In my opinion, the hardest part about finding a cofounder is getting people to be committed. I’ve tried working with friends but they just didn’t take it as seriously as I did. Plus, getting people to be interested in the same problems is tough. I’d love to see this being solved.
You are probably thinking of the Conjoiners (an actual hive mind although members did retain some individuality) which at some point were probably no more than a few thousand.

The Demarchists were probably the most successful offshoot of Earth and are billions across multiple solar systems. They are not an hive mind and their societies are not exactly an utopia (but not dystopian either).
> DAOs make it simple to work remotely without needing to reside in a specific location.

What unique properties of a DAO accomplishes this?
What it would likely mean is that animations would get stuck in their starting state so you'd see no content. And no one would bother fixing it for the 0.001% of users who turned this setting on so customer support would advise you to turn animations back on.
I'm confused...

> All the benefits of crypto come from their ability to circumvent regulations.

is for all intents and purposes a rephrasing of

> They are functionally useless as currencies outside the realms of criminal activity
Possibly, it's been a while since I've used it.

Companies make weird decisions all the time, like MS killing Skype's p2p system which destroyed the whole app. Quoting mobile as the reason when there was no reason the PC/Mac clients couldn't continue on.
I think you're saying the same thing. The things you list are "criminal activities" because they "circumvent regulations".
Any compressor should have at least free access to source code, and also be 'restore' tested against a specific version artifact (binary) of that codebase.

Depending on the source data, I'm personally comfortable with Zstandard, 7zip / xz, or even gzip depending on a mix of how conservative the use case and how effectively each compresses that data structure.
Nope they don't. It's based on http and CDNs now.

https://github.com/HearthSim/keg#what-is-ngdp
>> f we believe reality is non-local, then why would we also believe it’s non-determinate?

I wonder if physicists are so impressed (rightly so) with their precision measurement capabilities that they can't accept nonlocality because it throws a monkey wrench into their whole way of observing things.

To any physicists reading, what's wrong with accepting nonlocality?
In the east coast, tried several browsers and I cannot get Street View to work.
If so, then it's even more stunning that the communication channel to the auditory cortex is quiet enough to carry a massive disturbance + a tiny signal, and still preserve that signal after subtracting out the disturbance.

That would be very difficult to accomplish electronically.
I’m still a little bit grumpy that crypto hijacker the Web 3.0 designation that originally referred to semantic web technologies
That, and some of these things got sued into oblivion.
This doesn't seem to cover any new ground or engage with anything interesting outside of finance. Is the author telling all of these researchers (Stanford, MIT, Columbia, etc) that there is nothing interesting or new in blockchain?

https://adacrunch.medium.com/cryptocurrency-and-blockchain-r...

Disclaimer: I have a small grant from the Ethereum Foundation to research methods of voting and governance/decisionmaking in groups.
> Under a few of these points credit cards should not exist, yet here we are with our overlords.

Such as? Credit cards provide huge UX improvements most notably convenience and security. I don't have to carry around lots of cash, and if I have an issue with a transaction, the payment processor can arbitrate the dispute.
Anecdotally, the only “Web 3” that has improved my life is Monero.

It’s the best way I’ve found to send money to strangers on the internet. I’ve opened unofficial bounties and paid open source developers to implement them, as one example.

It really “just works” in a way where other crypto currency doesn’t.

I still support many other projects in this space, but Monero was the only one I felt comfortable actually using.
> DAOs make it simple to work remotely without needing to reside in a specific location.

This doesn’t make sense to me. I’ve managed globally distributed remote teams for the better part of a decade and haven’t had any issues.
Track where you've been like a StarCraft map – Fog of World
In practice, 401k's have turned out to be significantly less risky for the employee than the pension plans they replaced. I suspect your argument would be better targetted if it was framed around how large social security and other safety net programs should be.

But if you do allow that personal retirement savings should be encouraged and subsidized, the existing 401k program is turning out to be nearly optimal.
Does dalle-2 verbatim reproduce artwork? I have never used it.
I’m not saying they’re perfect, but target date funds are meant to solve exactly that. They give you exposure to market upside over a long duration (so you can collect risk premia when you have the longest horizon) and then gradually expose you less to the market as the fund approaches its target date.
Couldn't agree more. Here is Marc Andreessen describing web 3.0 with Sam Harris, sigh.. https://youtu.be/ppgKMz-pqLM?t=1388
Copyright makes no such distinction
> programmed on the policies of Danish fringe parties since 1970

Not sure what that means in terms of architecture they used, but the thought that someone might do something similar with a general language AI is creepy. We're treating something that isn't an AGI as if it was, even Google engineers can fall for that illusion, scary.
That's very much not how things work.
Expert Networks can do this.
Same thing here. Can't get street view from the Earth application either.
My argument is that keeping it in savings, uninvested, or even in a mason jar in the back yard will also show diminishing returns. It will, of course, shrink slower, but the path is downhill along most axes.
You can get black to keep the indentation of the dictionary by adding a comma to the end of the last key/value pair.
Guys, I think they are being sarcastic. They just forgot /s. At least I hope so since they literally just rephrased the “criminal activity” bit.
Why can't your bank provide all these services direct to your checking account?
Clearly, you need a bank of magnetic core memory.
Middlemen are not always bad. Would you like to have to deal with 50 different suppliers for the basic foodstuffs you might keep in your home? No, you'd much rather go to a disgusting middleman (i.e. grocery store) and buy all 50 of those items from one vendor.

Where middlemen exist in travel these days, it's mostly this. I personally don't want to have to search dozens are individual airline websites for fares.
So.. say Microsoft retrained Copilot on code only explicitly marked as open-source. As an activist or vandal you could start publishing proprietary code with fraudulent license files to pollute Copilot again.

This could be terribly fun.
No, that's not true in any sense.
They're orthogonal in the space of pixels on the page, and maybe not even, if the font includes some gradients or dithering, but they fit into different wholes, with some dependence.

Denim has a design style to it that goes beyond the material, as does comic sans. Like, you could put "comic sans" as part of a dalle prompt, and it would do more than pick a font
> I see the hypocrisy in HN when it comes to how it treats Meta vs how it treats Twitter

Man HN is the most Twitter hating group I've ever interacted with. I don't think I've ever seen a thread mentioning Twitter where people _don't_ complain about Twitter's moderation
Doesn't seem like a problem to me. GitHub Copilot is a tool like a search engine. If I Google for some code snippet and copy it into my codebase, I can't blame Google, Github, and Stack Overflow. Instead I can only blame myself.

In this way, making sure I'm not writing proprietary code is important.

Fortunately it looks like Copilot only uses open repositories so that's good.
It is working fine for me. (browsing from London/UK)
Mike, you seem to have a sore-on for Canada. I am sorry.
Denying access? Well, they quit allowing them into presidential press conferences. That's a very very minor "denying access".

They didn't deport them all. They didn't arrest them all. They didn't prohibit those outlets operating in the US. They restricted their access to official government sources (executive branch only, so far as I have seen).

Well, if you want the truth about what's going on, a presidential press conference might not be the most trustworthy source anyway...
I think iOS does an extremely good job at animations. They help convey movement/what changed/where did I just go, but they are usually so fast and subtle you don't realize there was an animation unless you try hard to spot them.
DID is for global-object-identity not identification of individual natural human persons.
If I were designing a system like this, I'd likely implement a reputation system for reporters (users who report, not journalists).

When you report content for the first time your reputation score is 0.5, if the content is of a celebrity or public figure, your reputation will invisibly drop, enough of these and your score will be so low as to not be a useful flag when evaluating whether content is objectionable.

On the other side, if the content is reviewed as violating ToS, your rep will increase.

With a system like this the fake reports and brigading will quickly lose its power, eventually all users who abuse reports will be ranked so low as to not matter.

A threshold of rep score can be set before the content is auto removed. Maybe something like 25pts in order for it to be removed, and that's after adding together all the rep of the reporting users.
Why would a real product named "self driving" not be relevant to a discussion on the concept?
Looks like this got moved off the front page which is too bad, I would love to see it plastered everywhere for a few days

I watched the discussion unfold a bit and it was instructive. Obviously there were a lot of upvotes on the story because I think the thesis is basically commonsense for most people that pay attention. Except for the actual active scammers (or chumps that have somehow been had) who are quickly voting down any comments supportive of the fact that crypto is a scam. It's the contrast between the upvotes of the story and the downvoted common sense comments that is interesting. It happens with political stories sometimes too
That’s just wildly incorrect. The early internet was spectacularly useful.

You could suddenly order rare books, book plane flights, find song lyrics, and all sorts of stuff you had wanted to do but couldn’t.

I was there at the time. Every year like 11 new great use cases came along. It’s absolutely nothing like crypto.
> I'm not really sure what I think about this. How responsible should Microsoft be for someone's badly licensed code on their platform?

That's a really hard undersell of responsibility on the part of Microsoft/Github.

It seems as though they did approximately zero work to verify any of the code wasn't infringing. Things they could have tried but apparently didn't:

1) Ask developers to opt-in to copilot scanning of their repositories, and alongside that have them certify that they hold copyright over all lines of code included in the repository.

2) Use a training dataset of only public repositories listed under applicable pre-identified licensing schemes, from established groups. e.g.: *bsd licensed code from the various BSD OSes.

3) Sought out examples from standard libraries in other programming languages with suitable licenses.

It seems like they did nothing and just hoped. I can't see how anyone would try to rely on this thing in a commercial context after its proven to do this over and over. The well has been poisoned.
Treating cryptocurrency as being "for the lulz" is probably one of the healthier ways to engage with it.
For those downvoting this, what is wrong with the logic here?