skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A major characteristic of the crypto/blockchain trend I noticed is how so much of it is "creative" gibberish - new concepts, words, systems, architectures - but when I dig down to their essence, it's like a castle made of sand, or a pipe dream made of clouds. I keep thinking, there must be some concrete technical innovations that drive this flourishing new field.

Occasionally there's an insight, like distributed computing, decentralized and trustless - and it gives me hope that something real is happening, that there's practical value. But then I see the ecosystem and market full of pseudo-technical BS and outright fraud. It reminds me of modern financial instruments with intellectual-sounding concepts, derivatives, securities, repackaged loans, and so on, enabling a wide range of tricks and scams upon the public.

As far as scams go, it makes sense that most of it is made up of words, like politics and religion. And maybe some parts of the story can be based on reality, to make it sound more believable.

Microsoft Entra seems to be marketed to enterprise customers, big money. But that's the completely wrong audience to try and sell "decentralized". Enterprise-scale companies need centralization of identities.

---

I gotta admit though, even after the disillusionment and breaking the spell, I'm still a little bit curious and hopeful that the crypto/blockchain hype has at least a few nuggets of real, practical value. It's a great con indeed, and one of the biggest mass "nerd sniping" I've witnessed.
Funding for local projects is competitive at the federal level from what I understand.
If it doesn't serve a primary scientific purpose, then why would Puerto Rico be put at the front of the line?

i.e. there's 50 other states and D.C. competing to be the most attractive to big ticket project funding, which also deliver education, youth initiatives, high paying jobs, etc.
If you are curious how they went from $496M in 2021 to already $8.5B in 2022 despite promising to accelerate their profitability even more, $7.3B of those appear to be from "revaluation of Uber’s Aurora, Grab, and Zomato stakes". That's still more losses, though.
Simple hack for one-off (or a few) images. Go to any Github repo and create a new Issue, drag and drop your image into the issue-box. Github uploads it to their server and adds a markdown link for the image, which has a perfectly usable *.githubusercontent.com url that you can pick and use anywhere.

I use this way more often than I should TBH. YMMV

Note: Only do this for images you have backed up elsewhere (heck, in git itself is fine). This is purely to prevent having to spend any $$$ on hosting/CDN whatever
A GitHub Workflow guide for CPAN modules
A colleague of mine once shared his lay sociological theory about dev vs ops, and if taken for what it is -- an essentialization -- it's an interesting perspective.

The idea is that ops people have inherited a blue-collar culture, whereas devs have inherited an office-worker/academic culture.

Ops people conceive of their work as fundamentally operational: progress is measured in terms of actions taken, and while automation is greatly valued, there is nothing inherently "messy" with one-off fixes; the objective is to get things working now. The pathological case for this mindset is that of constantly being on the back-foot, responding to incidents with one-off fixes without recognizing that many of them share a common cause that could be addressed.

Dev people conceive of their work as fundamentally intellectual: progress is attained when the problem is correctly conceived, at which point the solution follows naturally. While writing code is greatly valued, most effort should be spent understanding the problem; the objective is to solve it correctly, once and for all. The pathological case for this mindset is that of over-engineering by an ivory-tower idealist, disconnected from the messiness of real-world praxis.

In nearly all orgs I've seen, the proportion of first-generation college grads is greater in ops teams than in dev teams. So too is the proportion of people who come from blue-collar families, or are mechanically inclined (ex: look around and see who tinkers with cars). Likewise, the proportion of people holding graduate degrees is greater in the dev crowd (ex: look around and see who's into math).

It should hopefully be clear that neither is superior to the other. The point is rather that the divide between dev and ops is partly sociological, which means it is largely based on values. Ops will tend to over-value "honest hard work" and dev will tend to over-value "clear articulate thought". There is also some latent, historical tension between these sociological groups, which has a funny way of masquerading as a technical problem. It is helpful to view arguments about "just ship it" vs "design it the right way" through this lens.

Far from being a cute "just so" story, it's been my experience that this dynamic is very important for two reasons: (1) it's harder than you might expect to foster the sense of common destiny required for real "devops"-style collaboration, and (2) each side of the dev-ops divide has a lot to gain from learning when the other side's mindset is helpful, and how to cultivate it in themselves.
The "without telling who the parties are" is more about non-personal identifiers. Similar to how knowing your IP address doesn't really identify you by itself, you need to go through (often several levels of) other parties to get that info. Which in addition is ephemeral, others will be assigned your IP and tracing which requests were made by you vs. someone else is a lot harder than tracing a credit-card.
Very sad for the Puerto Rican people. My husband has great memories there.
That's because when most people use "blockchain" or "DeFi" they're using AML/KYC entities that post their transaction logs to public servers. Law enforcement eats this up because it saves them the trouble of getting warrants for investigations.

Bad for customers to be sure. Most have no idea what they're doing and have fallen for a scam hook, line, and sinker. They (loudly, incessantly) proclaim to their friends the benefits of a new money paradigm while deriving all sustenance through the umbilical cord of OldFi. ChromaFlair on a Model T.

The article itself is a hot mess of muddled thinking. It starts by talking about the Bitcoin white paper (not a "manifesto"), then asking the absurd question: "Why can't DeFi make good on the promise?" The reason is that "DeFi" is about as far from Bitcoin as "car" is from "carpet."

The Bitcoin white paper describes the application of proof of work to the problem of electronic cash. The vast majority of DeFi projects are just centralized ledgers operating through trusted institutions. They are the very definition of "mint" in the white paper - a single, corruptible player that sets the rules - arbitrarily if need be.
I think this effect has been recognized in science for decades, even if it wasn't talked about much in print.

Recently I thought about trying to combat this effect myself by using multiple different analysis methods. For example, in my case I'm thinking about trying multiple different regression approaches. My research is in the physical sciences, so I don't think in this case the overall conclusions will be that different because the general trend is clear from a scatter plot (often not true in social science...), but it'll still be an interesting exercise.
Who said they are of zero substance?
Not to be confused with the _other_ “Dapper” that .NET folks may be familiar with! [1]

[1]: https://github.com/DapperLib/Dapper
We're not gonna need it!

No, we ain't gonna need it!

We're not gonna need it anymore!
Show HN: Seafowl – CDN-friendly analytical database
Structured logs can still be human readable.

Ex:

[2022-01... INFO] trace=abcd123 <msg>

There is a structure which can be parsed.
The thing is that I don't like "sales people" for the most part, I don't want to listen to their advice.

I'm interested from hearing thought of other programmers / developers that created something small and were able to "sell" it. I think this advice will be much more applicable than from a "sales person".

I might be wrong, but I feel like sales people learn the wrong thing on the job. If you read other comments it seems that small businesses are getting swarmed by soul-less calls from these people that will lead nowhere. That is the exact thing I want to avoid.
That's an assumption. It could be true or not. If true you'd expect steadily increasing IQ stores for people who are slightly above average, which is not what happens. The same effect should be observed in weaker students if it's true. I'm not interested in conjecture. I'm looking for peer-reviewed papers.
I’m pretty sure that the mosquitos that show up almost instantly when things thaw in Alaska and Canada aren’t migrating from warmer climates. That would be pretty impressive, but no way do they move that fast.
It can transmit and it has a larger surface area (collecting area) than other telescopes.

Didymos has been in the news recently... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/65803_Didymos#/media/File:Didy...

Note the "Arecibo" in the file name.

> Fourteen sequential Arecibo radar images of the near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos and its moonlet, taken on 23, 24 and 26 November 2003. NASA’s planetary radar capabilities enable scientists to resolve shape, concavities, and possible large boulders on the surfaces of these small worlds. Photometric lightcurve data indicated that Didymos is a binary system, and radar imagery distinctly shows the secondary body.

That was done with radio pulses sent from Arecibo.

Science will go on, but we've lost a tool. The area of the dish remains unmatched.

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/48666/arecibo-adva...
The free market is a joke and big companies will always win against individuals unless they get protected by law. They have more people, more time and more money.

If you want to be an employer, you're the one taking the risks. Don't want to take risks? Don't become an employer, or better yet, don't do business, because that comes with risks too.

And just in case people haven't thought about externalities or a more basic factor: people can be desperate, that doesn't mean you should therefore exploit them as an employer. We're not living in the 1400's anymore.
The first company to ditch driver incentives is likely to be the first to have folks going "huh, no drivers on service X available... I'll try service Y" and collapse.
In C the NULL macro can be defined as either (void*)0 or 0. It's only mandated as 0 in C++.

The nullptr concept was introduced into C to fix a type ambiguity when NULL is used with generic selection or varargs functions. The ambiguity could have been solved by mandating that NULL be defined as (void*)0. My issue with nullptr is its an overkill solution that unnecessarily duplicates the concept of NULL in the language.
I imagine they are spending to push their numbers pretty hard right now; I regularly get 40% off of $25 coupons on UberEats that bring the delivered price down to below what I'd pay at the counter, not even counting gas and time to get there and back. That can't be sustainable, but I get the coupons faster than I spend them.
Plenty of English writers could do the same. I suspect that it is The Economist's Englishness rather than anything specific to the Economist. We anthropomorphize much more than people from elsewhere; we give names to our cars, we apologize to furniture when we bump into it. Saying that a mosquito had a short and merry life is not something that I would have reacted to at all, or to the use of a diminutive, mozzies, in the next paragraph.
Found the examples of power laws starting on page-5 interesting; all the following follow power law: Word frequency, Citations of scientific papers, Web hits, Copies of books sold, Telephone calls, Magnitude of earthquakes, Diameter of moon craters, Intensity of solar flares, Intensity of wars, Wealth of the richest people, Frequencies of family names, Populations of cities, etc.

Terence Tao also has a post on it here from 2009:

- Benford’s law, Zipf’s law, and the Pareto distribution

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/benfords-law-zipfs...

Vsause has video on it too:

- https://youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE
Wow, this is very cool! I think this applies not only to gui frameworks (react vs htmx), but also to design systems (bootstrap, tailwind ui, etc).
It'll be interesting to see what happens when they end up with a viable business but one that is probably never going to return the crazy returns that were originally priced into the valuation.

There are tons and tons of these across all sectors left over from a prolonged era of incredibly cheap money.
Some of these videos are particularly fascinating in how the head position is not exactly replicated but does look more like the body language I'd expect from those people. Like, try to note the sequence of facial expressions and head angle that Barack Obama goes through, then watch Angela Merkel and Winston Churchill. They're not 1-to-1.
well yes... Its a public Ledger.
Satoshi+in their writings) didn't understand the side channel attack of the Blockchain-meatspace bridge. Bitcoin only meets its design guarantees in a purely virtual world or with anonymous terminals. Bitcoin is already expensive enough to transact in, are you also going to move to a different location every time your transact?
Sounds like you've never used a DeFi application...Yes, the bridging between on-chain/off-chain still happens through centralized entities, but things like uniswap are entirely run on-chain and don't require any central authority or centralized ledger.
Does this also take into account printing shares to give to employees and founders?
Tesla got lifetime cashflow positive after burning $6B in accumulated losses, and has now paid all of those back prompting investors to ask for stock buybacks.

Uber is just a terrible waste of capital to have an app company with an accumulated deficit almost five times as much as Tesla which makes cars.
> If anything, "crypto" is based on the idea that people can't be trusted, and is thus a trustless system, based on an agreed upon protocol with cryptographic controls.

Those controls only address problems created by the distributed nature of crypto (double spend), but don't touch the most common types of financial fraud which is why wash trading and rug pulls are so common. Crypto effectively assumes that people can't be trusted to exchange currency fairly, but can (and indeed must) be trusted to do everything else (pricing, disclosure, governance, etc.) fairly.
Yep, and the presenter is great, and loads of interesting tidbits in there for those interested in 8bit computer architecture.
The back end logistics of grocery stores get complicated, but lager networks are strictly better because they get more leverage with suppliers.

They can also spread the expense for R&D/training materials etc across more stores and wider advertising channels without significant viewers being outside the range of their stores.
deaced: not a word.

Wiktionary isn't the most reliable of sources.

Googling for "deaced" basically yields two things: (1) Wiktionary's, erm, unique entry, and (2) Suggestions for how to rearrange the letters in the scrabble tiles "deaced" to form a real word.
No chance lawmakers would threaten colleges like that. It is their entire business model:

1. Convince employers to require college degrees

2. Expect employees to assume the cost of attaining a degree

3. Employers offset cost only when the employee sticks around

4. Employee eats the cost if they choose to no longer work for said employers
If anything, "crypto" is based on the idea that people can't be trusted, and is thus a trustless system

LOL!

When you buy crypto, how do you determine what price is fair? Most people turn to an unregulated "exchange" that can easily manipulate prices in a multitude of different ways.

This is called "trust" --- blind, misplaced trust --- without any oversight or transparency.

You have reiterated a common crypto fallacy --- that blockchain accounting somehow makes the overall system "trustless". Nothing could be further from the truth.
> You'll never be able to push it to the fringes because there will never be a legal universal agreement even from country to country on where to draw the line.

Huh? "Legal universal agreement" has never been required to push something to the fringes in a particular country.

If (in the US) these models were declared to be copyright infringement, or the users were required to pay license feeds to the creators of the data that was used to build the models, they will vanish from the public sphere. GitHub/Microsoft's legal department will pull Copilot down immediately, and development will effectively cease. No US company will sponsor development, and no company will allow in-house use. It will be dead.

Some dude might still run the model in his bedroom in his spare time on his own hardware, but that's what irrelevance looks like.

> And as computers get more powerful and the models get more efficient it'll become easier and easier to self host and run them on your own dime. There are already one click installers for generative models such as stable diffusion that run on modest hardware from a few years back.

If that's the only way you can run something, because it's illegal, you're describing a fringe technology right there.
This seems to be lost on a lot of folks, which I find strange in a tech-centric forum. Bitcoin is perfectly pseudonymous, as it strives to be, and not anonymous, which it has never attempted to be.
It's a variation on giving part of your salary in rolling bonuses (so that no matter when you leave you lose some part of the bonus) - but it should be required to be backloaded instead of front loaded in the training case (i.e, at the end of the year they give you a bonus equivalent to the training cost (and a commensurately lower salary during the year) - mainly because people are just really bad at saving for known "rainy day issues".

It should also be something highly subject to review by the governmental legal board.
Is a loss presented as -X a gain? (double negative)
> The recent spate of losses suffered by crypto exchanges and digital wallets

... have been on-going for years.

Complex systems introduce a huge amount of attack surface. Verifying systems is expensive and slow. And this was all a scam anyway.

This is mostly an article about the exchanges and gets a few details wrong but the overall gist is that the federal agencies and regulators are cracking down and finding out what the black hats knew all along.
Fraudulent suppliers, of course. But Blockchain can't prevent against that.
>The only relevant factor for predicting chess skill at any level seems to be hours spent on deliberate practice, see for example: https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1106

This is wildly implausible, and indeed the paper makes no such claims.
OpenBSD does not run the X server as root, so it does have a security benefit over more modern systems.

USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND
_x11 71289 0.0 0.6 11164 24992 ?? S 9:06AM 0:00.41 /usr/X11R6/bin/X :0 vt05 ...
root 2878 0.0 0.0 2696 1412 ?? IpU 9:06AM 0:00.04 X: [priv] (Xorg)

I understand that their malloc conversion from sbrk to mmap flushed out some long-standing X bugs as well.

http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=2005082419031...
Especially since he's known as somewhat of a germaphobe.
It must be trivial to use one of these approaches to generate a removable background and render the background with something else, like a static image, video, or 3d software
i appreciate your feedback, but wouldn't consider my response shallow. I took time to read all of his suggestions and referenced them exhaustively in my critique.
That wasn't her tuition being paid AFAIK she personally owed the money they were repaying for her while she worked there I though? Been a while since I watched that season though.
At that point we would be almost going full circle back to terminals and mainframes.

Then someone will figure out most users don't need much processing power (only emails, word, etc.) and back to centralized computing we go!
That's an unscientific conclusion. They say the effect (of high variation) is unattributable, so it's unfair to limit it to soft sciences.

This could infect literally any human endeavor that generates measurements, hard sciences included.

Or, as another poster observes, this result itself is affected by high variation and we end up in a Godel-ian loop of "this study is false" results.
Raster Master v1.4 R67
Did you know that Jerry Seinfeld trained for 17 years to prepare for his role in the omonimous sitcom? Google "Jerry Seinfeld 17 years" to learn more
Sprite/Map editor with sprite sheet import. This editor Targets mostly retro development but also supports newer languages such as raylib and RGB/RGBA formats. All your classic Borland (BGI) /Microsoft graphics libraries. Everything from 2 color to 256 color is supported. if you code in AmigaBasic,GWBASIC,QBasic,QB64,Freebasic,Turbo Pascal,freepascal,Turbo C/Quick C give it a try.
Eh. I visited Arecibo almost 20 years ago, and even back then it was more historical monument pickled in time (I still recall some exhibits celebrating the Space Shuttle as the greatest thing since sliced bread) than anything scientifically inspirational, much less "cool". It very much felt neglected and the subsequent collapse, while sad, was entirely par for course.
Trains are great. They’re safer, more efficient, and often more convenient than cars. But it’s not either-or.

My comment was emphasizing that smart road technologies would be useful to many people also. There are many places where it’s not possible or desirable to build train infrastructure—these are areas that can be served by autonomous vehicles.
Which is why things like this need to have incredible punitive damages attached to doing it, so that lawyers will be trawling to find cases and bring them on contingency.
So far, no known species is known to be solely dependent on them. Seems like they are able to make up the difference with other bugs.

Considering even today somewhere around 700k people a year die from Mosquito born disease, with many more crippled from lifelong malaria infections, and the total number of deaths is though to be somewhere around a billion through history?

[https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/vector-born...]

Nuke ‘em
Haha. How did Tesla lose money?
Views of ordinary Chinese on the country’s ‘dynamic zero-Covid’ policy
Not sure if that's technologically possible or even an option for you access pattern, but for my more modern SATA disks I see about 1W (from the wall) per disk when spun down, lots of W for spin up and 5 to 8W spinning. I guess numbers for old disks are a bit different, but the principle should hold.

Drawback is that you'll likely be doing staggered spin up, which can introduce some latency. But for non-interactive stuff like daily backups that's just irrelevant.
What is the point you are trying to convey?