skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I definitely get the whole “web3” is useless argument for a lot of the cases it’s been proposed but like any new technology I think it may find valid use cases somewhere down the line.

One of the few uses for which I am interested is “web3” identity - being able to keep ownership of my identity/credentials. Using, for example, a wallet to sign a message proving I own an address, I can build apps that don’t require me to store any passwords (and not rely on a “trusted” 3rd party to do so either). My app can just store the wallet address (like a username).

To build on this, if that wallet has data associated with it (“assets” it holds) for example, an ENS name, my app can pull that data directly from the contract onchain - instead of showing a public key I can show the users chosen display name, avatar, etc

I’m an old school dev and I wrote off “crypto” for many of the same reasons a lot of you have stated but I have realized there are some interesting cases that could emerge from its usage. Zk (zero knowledge proofs) as a means of reducing the amount of PII data that needs to be exposed to random parties also seems to have some good use cases.

Alas “value” aka money being associated with the usage/tokens makes the landscape much harder to navigate and much more prone to exploitation.
If they store on IPFS (someone else said they did), then the answer is yes. Grab a subset of the content and mirror it to your device. Keep said device online.
Why does a decentralized protocol need to be amenable to these disputes? Saying “we will have a jury of appointed authorities to manage disputes” defeats the point, and is what ENS tries to avoid.

If apple.eth is held by a squatter, should courts be able to override the protocol to send it to trademark holder Apple? In the end this can get resolved by regular dispute mechanisms but without compromising decentralization and integrity of the protocol.
Right, but I think (a combination of) certain abstractions invite abstractionitis. OCaml and Erlang avoid that to some extend by being more restrained about what they add to the type system. On the other hand, these languages allow side-effects, removing the need to rely on monads, monad transformers, monad transformer stacks, etc.

I agree that algebraic data types and pattern matching lead to better code. But even though they were introduced (?) by ML, there is nothing holding imperative languages from adopting them (see e.g. Rust).
No, for two reasons. 1) I have almost 30TB of data so the monthly cost would be more than I want to pay. 2) I don't trust them to keep my data secure.
>But, you are ignoring the fact that Crimea did not decide to secede

It absolutely did. The 90% vote matched our subsequent polling taken a year later - almost exactly and the western pollsters certainly didn't use little green men.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/03/20/one-year-a...

Much like in Kosovo the presence of the superpower's troops simply allowed the vote to happen.

Ukraine makes no secret of the fact that it doesn't want a free and fair vote to be run (it's "unconstitutional" to have a vote, they argue North Korearly) and neither do we.

That, along with the public bitchslap Elon Musk got for suggesting a vote, highlights the dim view the west takes on allowing democracy in the south and east of Ukraine.
I understand your feelings, but this rocket has way too many issues (and I'm not talking technical ones) with it for me to feel happy about it's launch. Also, at least to me, this continues to be a distraction for NASA preventing it from moving into the future. SLS is a roadblock to be overcome, not the future.

It's a re-living of the past rather than a look to the future.
Why do people still work at Tesla, or does this toxic behavior attract toxic employees? I guess that seems to be the case, if you read about Uber under Kalanick, or employees crying in bathrooms at Amazon.

Before that tweet the thread is talking about an email Musk sent:

> Scoop: Elon Musk just sent an email to all staff outlining "Twitter 2.0", writing it will"need to be extremely hardcore". Long hours, high intensity.

> People need to click "yes" to confirm being part of this by 5pm ET tomorrow, else they get 3 months severance. [...]

Hah, "Click here to agree to a toxic workplace, or be fired"...
I have this exact problem. I think there is some sort of memory consumption problem and the Android version of the oomkiller jumps in

Only see this on the guardian and only on mobile
You should read this

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
What is the sweet spot in terms of bandwidth and packet size?
I am a fan of mixing functional and object oriented (and also some other paradigms).

Functional is great in cutting amount of repeatable code. It is great for writing tools to process things regardless of their exact type and for writing infrastructure code.

Object orientation is great when you want to model the domain of the problem. Things that actually make sense when you are talking to non-developers at your company. Clients, contracts, appointments, employees, teams, invoices, things like that. But when you start making objects that do not represent anything meaningful you probably went a bit too far.

I think knowing various paradigms, knowing when to use which and how to marry them together is critical for maintainable implementations.
>The best known, achieved result around this particular star (out of ~100,000,000,000,000 of them) after hundreds of millions of years with, ostensibly, hundreds of millions of years yet to come.

Still, this formulation heavily beats the "hairless apes" one doesn't it?

Also, I'm not sure about the relevance of pointing out that it's the "best known". Or the number of stars. Are we aware of any "not known"? Or have seen any signs in any of those stars? Because decades of trying (with SETI, etc.) and so on, has mostly shown the opposite (consider e.g. the Fermi paradox).

So, I think we better stick with the knowns (of which it's the best results among millions of competing organisms anyway), than handwave about what possible magic intelligence remote aliens we haven't seen and don't even know exist have... Sure, we can do it for fun and speculation, but we shouldn't use it as an argument for limitless intelligence.
I mean, "Intelligence is limitless, because if E.T. exists, he could have 1000x our IQ" is not exactly an argument.

>Edit: No one is worried about your fridge.

No, but they're worried about the imminent danger of AGI conquering the world and killing us all when the practical examples attaibable are not far from the level of my fridge.

Have a good week yourself. See you around!
Yeah getting the sense of scale from SpaceX rockets is really hard. The various Starbase streams usually have a "woah" moment for me when you finally see people standing next to our working on some of the features of the various hulls as a point if comparison.
A11yphant
Pijul: https://pijul.org/model/#implicit-branching
LoRa is not a panacea, and of course any technology is best to what it is intended. With its ultra low power and data constraints LoRa is not aimed at high-bandwidth applications.

The perfect application is IoT, where a lot of use cases like telemetry, agriculture, etc. require only small data packets transmitted with longer (tens of minutes / hours) intervals.
Do you know of a tutorial for getting a small LoRa device up on the Helium network?
https://www.etymonline.com/word/type

it’s correctly attributed, just one hypertext layer deeper
The main substantive point I made is: "No one has any idea how to create AGI now"

Correct, no?

The rest follows by basic logic. You can't craft solutions to problems you don't know anything about. You can't assign probabilities to outcomes without any information on the inputs or mechanisms of the system.
Mass prosperity -> too many entitled folks -> mass destruction of environment -> meta vr as alternative environment in post apocalyptic hellscape
This is probably the best summary in this entire thread.

The argument is basically effective altruism, taken to its conclusion, leads to some pretty morally questionable actions.

It's not arguing being altruistic is bad. It's just that effective altruism has a bunch of pretty big holes in it.

Another good example is the framework used to determine cost-effectiveness of drugs. At first glance it makes sense - just calculate [benefit]/[cost].

But then you realize that for some diseases, the cost baseline is really low because, well, people die when they are babies. So the model falls apart for some real life situations where the model says the ideal outcome is to just let people die because it's "cost effective"
The Life Changing Magic of Refactoring
Thanks for the support.

I used to live all the best practices, but over time learned that the number one enemy in a codebase is complexity. 90% of software development is maintenance. People doing maintenance are lowly productive because the vast majority of time is spent on trying to understand how things even work, debugging, and making changes in a way that is safe.

The reason code is complex are abstractions and dependencies. Many of which are of a questionable or negative value and never deliver their imagined benefits. Hence, instead of "abstract by default" and seeing DRY as some religion, I abstract when value is real, proven and outweighs the massive downsides of doing so.

Imagine that we'd need to write a recipe. Sane and pragmatic people would write it as a sequential step of instructions. If a software engineer were to write one, just to follow the recipe you'd need to have 23 additional papers each describing a sub step referred to from the main instructions. Next, we would abstract each substep into "Motion" and "Activity" generalizations. This way, you can reuse "Motion" when you walk your dog later that day. Quite obviously, motions can fail so we extend it with a MotionError, which is a sub class of Error. MotionError has a Logger interface. These 3 super abstractions are useful, instead of just directly saying that you failed a recipe step, we can now apply failure wherever we want, even onto life itself. Since recipes are written in a language, we should abstract Language, itself a composition of sentences, words, characters and glyphs with a Dictionary interface, which itself is an array of Name and Value objects, that we might as well generalize as Thing.

Anyway, those were recipe steps. Next, let's do ingredients, also known as immutable multivariant singletons. But not really, because as we follow the instructions, the ingredients morph into something else, which we'll solve with a Morp object, which holds an interface StateChange, consisting of two State objects, which are Things. A ThingsIterator takes care of handling multiple things but not in a way you'd expect, we'd override map() because I really feel my Thing is special. Thinking of recipes, they can potentially come from any source so we'll implement Verbal (an abstraction of Language), Database and the jungle that comes with it, all neatly wrapped into MoreThings.

Next we redo all of his by writing unit tests, so that our software that by now implements most of the universe is qualitative. It's math.

Or...we can just write the damn recipe.
It's called a barium meal test, or canary trap.
Only 8500 coal power plants in the world producing 20% of emissions. No miracles needed to replace them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-fired_power_station

Replacing a billion gasoline cars is going to take decades
If people that want to stick to 2.7 can find a vendor that supplies them security patches, then there is no problem.
Surely the very point he is making is that it is the Effective Altruists who are ignoring the real complexity? I don't really understand your critique of what he's saying - it seems to me you're agreeing.
Personally I'd see some use in regional and low bandwidth sensor data, like broadcasting weather station data.
I agree. I think git is fine, but also would like improvements. I started with CVS and VSS (well really started with copying files to dir_bak heh), then SVN and git. Yelling across the office to tell someone to checkin a file so I could make an edit seems so quaint. VSS had a fun bug that if you ran out of disk space, it would destroy the entire repository - yup.

Is git sometimes obtuse? Sure, but it's fast and incredibly powerful. My everyday commands are easy to use, and if I need something special I go to the documentation - just like any other SCM.
"Why Rosyna Can't Take A Movie Screenshot" :

https://web.archive.org/web/20170617174641/https://www.alexr...

And that's why it's important to boycott devices and software that allow DRM : Intel and Ryzen AMD CPUs, Windows 11 (requires a DRM chip), maybe Chrome/ium if it doesn't allow to easily disable DRM support, Steam...
There are thin spaces, hair spaces etc. in unicode.
Multiple of those will just look like a normal space.

Only if you tried to select them one by one would you become aware. But that's not what people usually do when they C&P a block of text

That said: not sure how they will look in a text-only (no WYSIWYG) editor or a mail client set to display raw text.
Slash athletes salary 10x and you’ll still have same talented athletes putting in great effort.

Most sportsmen are in it because they love competing and given activity. And lower salaries with less focus on advertising may make the activity itself better.

E.g. cycling where many pro races are shaped to be advertising-friendly first. The rest be damned.
it's an actual plight on the industry. There's now even universities who teach these nonsensical web3 courses that look more like influencer training than computer science. Just out of interest I attended a "web3" conference months ago and that's literally all it was. Hucksters, grifters, social media personalities, bizarre companies where you can't tell what they do even if you talk to them for an hour, and so on.

It makes one embarrassed to work in the field and you really have to ponder how much damage this does in the long term when vital talent is drawn away from engineering and the sciences to this grift.
It won't be for long.

Remember, TSMC do chip lithography with a light source that is generated by firing a laser at in flight drips of molten tin metal. The metal releases a wavelength of light that is then able to etc ultra precise lines on wafers for chips.
That technology really didn't exist anywhere 40 years ago.

In many ways the plumbing problems of hydrogen are lower bars to get over. And worrying about a lack of infrastructure is also not a big issue. There's lots of engineer's who'll easily transition out of the LNG industry into great jobs working on these problems.
I'm with the other poster who expressed incredulity at being "dragged
down." If anything, I fear the opposite -- being paled in comparison to
an overachiever.
Reminds me of the strategy of map companies, that planted tiny errors or fictional streets in their maps, so that they can identify other map companies, that copied their work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
Hello from corporate America where WSL is most certainly not standard and will require a virgin sacrifice if you want to get it approved by IT.

Which is to say, no pyenv is not an option for everyone.
What you call strawmen are just example of where the philosophy falls apart. i mean, how else do you test a philosophy other than throwing all possibly scenarios at it and see what comes out?
It’s called whitespace watermarking and seems to be one of those ideas that keeps getting re-invented. It’s used a lot, particularly in HTML where the rendering hides the identifying spaces. It can help you figure out if someone is scrapping your content.
Last year I read the following post regarding the application of hydrogen on ground transportation, simple and insightful. It basically explains why it doesn't make sense to use it for that particular application.

https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2021/11/hyd...
Yesterday HN had 14 posts in 2 hours about Russia attacking Poland
https://files.catbox.moe/w4aax3.png

Today there are 0 posts that it was not intentional and very likely caused by Ukrainian air defence

https://nitter.net/BBCBreaking/status/1592842861535526913

https://nitter.net/cnnbrk/status/1592831547228524544

HN is manipulated at its finest
Please remind us of a successful web3 project that is “community-owned”.

All the high profile ones so far, end up centralizing power and wealth under a handful of people.
There's also principled reasons to be against this. Namely, that government tends to be woefully bad at optimizing for moral good (cf. the American prison industry or California's attempts to end homelessness) and is just as likely to put that money towards things the majority of the population disagree with. The same logic would say that Russia is right to strip its billionaires of wealth to pursue foreign wars.
A variant of the barium meal test, common in espionnage.
I have been programming for more than 20 years and I think an old school traditional pen and paper system is the best.

The introduction of digital systems and code will never increase trust and security, it will decrease it.

The code being open is irrelevant. There's no guarantee that the system as a whole is doing what the code says. And even if there was, it still adds to the complexity.

Digital systems will create 1,000 new ways to cheat and deceive and interfere.

Elections are special and I think the society needs to abstain from the temptation of 'efficiency' and 'speed' as promised by digital systems.

Entities that push for the introduction of digital systems are not interested in increasing the power of people or increasing trust and transparency.

What they like to do is to reduce the obstacles in their way and concentrate the power. They will control the supply chain and a handful of vendors that make the machines and the software and control the network.

After a while the elections will gradually move more and more towards a "the super computers said ..... won, just trust us it's all totally secure and verified by our super state of the art AI and machine learning models, are you saying you are smarter than those?!" system.
The November 16th Program Agenda - 'State of the Onion' for the 'Tor Community'

Organizations presenting at 'SOTO' Community this Wednesday, Nov 16th:

* @OpenObservatory

* @guardianproject

* @calyxinstitute

* @Tails_live

* @RuBlackListNET

Current UTC : https://time.is/UTC

#StateOfTheOnion2022
Anecdote:

Many moons ago in college, our neighbors kept a chicken coop and had roughly 10 chickens. Chickens are opportunistic feeders, and will eat nearly anything. Many people, mostly students, in our neighborhood smoked a fair amount of pot, and everyone would save their stems and regularly feed them to the chickens. We would routinely harvest their eggs, and more than once did we have (non smokers) who also harvested the eggs complain that they'd get headaches or feel drowsy after eating said eggs. Fascinating.
There are companies that do better.

That said, corporate culture is soul crushing for the most part. And it even got worse in recent years because of additional language and behavior rules and strive for "professionalism". Which geniuses thought people want even more of that? Seriously, it is like letting children take control.

Perhaps look for smaller companies. There is as much high tech here, chances are you are even much closer to it and it doesn't have as many of the usual suspects that drive such cultures.

Competence also doesn't mean that you will be loved. Some just feel threatened. Especially often true for managers that have to justify their leadership position to themselves and others.

If it doesn't get better I would recommend to look elsewhere.
Do you know what it's like in military organizations around the world and in history? Most men don't have a problem with authoritarian hierarchies as long as the hierarchy is justified in their view. Tech people are extremely coddled and clueless about how the rest of the world works and the moral intuitions of normal people.

"The authoritarian relation between the one who commands and the one who obeys rests neither on common reason nor on the power of the one who commands; what they have in common is the hierarchy itself, whose rightness and legitimacy both recognize and where both have their predetermined stable place."

https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/uprising1313/files/2017/09/ar...
Ask HN: Anyone go through Montessori education until age 12 (end of grade 6)?
Am curious what peoples experiences from Montessori transitioning to other education systems was like and how they perceived the school worked or didn't for then? Have some children decisions and looking for outside opinions! Thanks!
Sounds like what you need is a change of environment because staying too long in such a toxic place will hurt you professionally and mentally. Have you considered relocating? I would start by sending out resumes and cold emails to companies you like.
In France, you can often pick up free "newspaper" at train stations. One of them "20 minutes" begun, from time to time, to print a special "20mint" (think 20 min_t___) edition talking about web3 and cryptos. This, plus other advertisement, makes me afraid that it will increase the impression for people who are a bit less tech savvy that web2 is has-been and web3 the future...
Exactly. Researching AI safety today is like researching how to reduce the proliferation of black hole bombs.
One thing I once saw a coworker do but I never managed to do for me was he'd write down what he'd just done, every 30 minutes or so over the day. He told me he does that so whenever someone would come and ask him how he had spent his time at work he could just read out his records. I think that's smart.

These days almost everything I do I do under git version control. I wrote a script that goes through all the dozens upon dozens of project directories and collects all the commit histories, so I can run that and get a chronological view of all the things I've done over the past days and weeks. I can say that I often do it just to see it for myself and I often find some things in those logs I could not have told you from memory.

This is just one teensy piece to get along with a problematic manager but might help if you walk into those meetings withs reams of printouts, ideally after having marked off the more important stuff.
Make UTF-8 Mode Default
Game devs definitely are much more aware that their consumers don't buy into the crypto scam. I've seen way too many NFT and crypto bros in the UI/UX/Design field.
It's absolutely essential to deal with renewables' intermittency.

Of course this wouldn't be a thing if people wisened up and built nuclear plant instead of wasting it on feel-good project with less than 20% of actual capacity (solar in Germany ... lol).
Perhaps, but how much of that it just an imperative phrasing?

I think the visual capabilities of horizontal and vertical spacing are, certainly, vastly under-used.

We could easily divide regions of files into two 60chr lines, or many 20char lines,

GetWater .
Boil(Water) |
| GetCoffee, GetMilk, GetCup .
Grind(Coffee) |
| Pour(Milk) .
Brew(Coffee, Water) .
Pour(Coffee) .
Sure -- I was just refuting that only Ukraine was using them. This appears to have been an AA miss causing an accident.
I went with applied maths route that had a lot of pure math, yet I'm a code monkey anyway. There is beauty in maths but while I was able to graduate I'm too dumb for advancing it, and I'm ok with that.