skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I take issue with this part of the article:

> Absent clear and easily enforceable property rights, relying solely on private investors to monitor and discipline the behaviour of opaque intermediaries has never been safe and effective. There is no prospect for a technological solution to these age-old problems.

The technical solution to opaque intermediaries is already here, and it's transparent intermediaries (enabled by smart contracts.) They let you replace an opaque piece of code running in a company's back room with a transparent piece of code that can be publicly read, understood, and audited. It can make an interaction with an intermediary very predictable and reliable, because you can trace/simulate the intermediary's exact code execution path (and thus know exactly what they are going to do with your money) before you even send the request.

It's striking to me that the author doesn't state his opinion on smart contracts anywhere in the post. It makes me wonder whether he really thought they weren't a topic that readers would naturally use to contextualize his post, or whether he's ignorant of their existence.

That's aside from the entire premise of the article being based on this idea that "crypto" is some monolithic corrupting force, rather than simply a messy emergent series of public databases that are as unthinking and uncaring as MySQL or Git.

> Both crypto and traditional finance are simply combinations of a database and computer code. It would be straightforward for a group of technicians to convert any set of conditional cash flows from one into the other.

The author seems so close to "getting it". If only he asked the question "now what changes when the general public has unfettered real-time read access to those databases and computer code," perhaps he could see the uniqueness of the design space, and appreciate that there's much more emergent game theory to work through before writing crypto off as being on a path of implosion into irrelevancy.
1) Doing something is better than failing to do everything. I was accumulating notes on useful low-pri habits to have / things I maybe want to do for like 7 years, hardly doing any of them. Sometimes I'd try to do all of them - start the day with a cold shower, meditate, do hard work before email, go for a walk, apply pomodoro, message a friend, exercise, 50 more things, and have a perfect day, but it's pretty much impossible to maintain. Making a list and doing one habit per week (or an approximation) I actually started to make progress and get better at some things. Ditto with exercise - consistent simple short workouts are much easier to maintain than perfect workout program with long awesome workouts.

2) For projects too, doing a little bit is better than failing to do a lot. Ditto, I've made a lot of progress on projects, especially icky ones like minor house repairs (but also e.g. personal coding projects that became hard to do quickly after my early 20ies due to other things) by committing for 10-30 minutes at a time and accepting that it might take me a year to finish.

3) Life-scale timing. That's something I really wish someone told me when I was 25, although it probably only applies to exercise. I got serious about training for climbing (my hobby) when I was 34... that is too late, and now I'm 38 and I get injured easily from intense training. I wish I did that earlier and did whatever I did then, now :)

4) Getting rid of hassles and not introducing new hassles that are not worth it. Something as simple as choosing devices/tools/appliances/building materials - how much maintenance worry does it require? How much manual labor does it add vs a more expensive/less pretty/... option? To where to live - how long do you want to spend driving around places/etc.? Feynman's bio where he describes putting on chains and his thoughts about that were very instructive for me.
Then, larger choices, like I am the type of person who would enjoy skiing, but I find skiing to be logistically complicated and generally a giant hassle, so I can find similar hobbies, like climbing, with much less hassle and cost. But also larger life decisions, after looking at tons of people (from close friends/family to coworkers) with kids I choose not to have them, it's just not worth it, your whole life becomes one project with (for me) very low reward. Ditto about buying a house - an interesting tradeoff for me, cause I'd prefer semi-rural living with condo-level hassle level, but they don't build condos in rural areas ;)
> Single common thread has to be poor governance. Certainly in politics and the civil service and also, from what I hear, amongst business leaders.

Strongly agree. I used to work in the civil service and there are many good individuals but the management structure is poor (though I think generally very effective at line management) and plenty of duffers get promoted. Many ministers are really very mediocre.

Good ideas and techniques are very slowly adopted, but then things like Agile are cargo-culted in an inappropriate way. To be fair, plenty of tech firms do this.

Dominic Cummings has lots of interesting ideas on this on his Substack. When Truss’ mini budget nearly broke pension funds, he pointed out that not only No 10 not know how leveraged they were, but nobody seems to care that they didn’t know. Surely central government should be able to pull together all the data it gathers?

Unfortunately he turned out to be not very good at governing.
Anyone know how this differs from a similar-seeming paper that was published a year ago?

https://en.chessbase.com/post/acquisition-of-chess-knowledge...
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.09259.pdf
That does not seem at all obvious to me. It's a big, slow, easy target. Yes you can use them to project power into, say, Sierra Leone, but not against China. None of the expensive and fragile missile defense systems have a demonstrated history of doing anything useful.
Let's hope this peak of FIFA corruption and unabetted greed will result in some changes in football. The Premier League already lost a couple of rich Russians, if we now see less oil money "investors" buying a whitewashed reputation through sports, maybe just maybe, athletes can critisize countries like Qatar or China. Would only be good.

That being said, I don't care who will be World Champion 2022. Nor will I watch a single match.
Sorry, you just haven't dealt with any real-world scenarios and real-world people.

Yes, recursion is not acceptable.

No, this isn't about copy-paste. In the "real world" non-coders produce write-only code. (Nobody can read or reproduce somebody else's "formulas", but they will happily write their own, spanning multiple pages.)

Troubleshooting and writing complex code is acceptable for non-coders, as long as the programming language is not Turing complete. (The human brain seems to have real trouble processing Turing-complete constructs, it is somethig that needs explicit training. Recursion or loops doesn't matter.)
agreed, I think this trap is related to fear of failure. if you're not telling people your plans because you're worried you won't finish, that might be bad. but then you don't want to take any credit for simply making me g plans either. maybe better to discuss what you have done _so far_ toward your goal
Implications of oral streptococcal bacteriophages in autism spectrum disorder
If it is bad, then hopefully someone will improve it.

Even if it has "low 4:3 resolution" that is not necessarily a problem; some people might prefer that.
> However my gut feeling is that Oil&Gas refinery and extraction are grossly under reporting Methane emissions. So it could be that the chart doesn't show the full picture of GHG.

There's been a fair amount of focus on this in the past ~5 years. We can constrain methane emissions both from a "bottoms-up" (measuring direct-from-source emissions or tallying up expected emissions given natural gas production and leakage rates) and "top-down" (measuring atmospheric CH4 over time and constraining the year-to-year emissions required to drive observed changes). Work like Rutherford et al (2021; https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25017-4) definitely leave room for some unaccounted leakages arising from O&NG production, but there likely is not room for much more "grossly under reported" emissions.
With Bitcoin, we're talking about a concentration of wealth (on early miners and "hodlers") orders of magnitude worse than with fiat. It benefits mostly a tiny fraction of the human race.
Semachrysa Jade – an insect species discovered on Flickr
Relevant paragraph: The species was discovered when a Malaysian amateur photographer, Hock Ping Guek, posted a picture of it to the online photo-sharing site Flickr. A California state entomologist saw it and was unable to identify the species; nor were any colleagues he shared the image with. Eventually, he contacted the photographer and was able to obtain a specimen. Further testing at the Natural History Museum in London confirmed that it was indeed a new species. Its discovery has been described as a triumph of citizen science.
If we wanted to remove leverage we could sign a law to remove it tomorrow. The problem is credit is a good thing that lets us accomplish more that what resources what we have right now. The fact that some people abuse trust doesn't mean we should throw trust out altogether, rather find ways to cost of breaching trust more.
No it isn‘t. The single most impactful one would be to not have kids. And let me make it clear that I‘m not saying to not have them. I’m just saying that there are different factors that contribute and how one person chooses to cut is their and only their decision.

Going a long distance by car is about 4x better than flying, but if you drive 4x as far you have emitted more than on that flight.
And hacker news. I just want bigger upvote and collapse thread buttons!!
Still has some ads though
What the planet can absorb divided by the number of people.

> Why do I have the same goal as an Indian or Nepalese person?

I do not understand, why not ?
As far as I’m aware fraud is still a crime. Authorities have convicted hundreds of people of crypto frauds.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Western world, specifically, the English Revolution of
the seventeenth century. Brought birth to a radical libertarian movement, even though only partially successful in its birthplace, Great Britain, it was able to usher in the Industrial Revolution, thereby freeing industry and production from the strangling restrictions of State control and urban government-supported guilds.

The classical liberal movement was, throughout the Western world, a mighty libertarian “revolution” against
what we might call the Old Order—the ancien régime which had dominated its subjects for centuries. This regime had, in
the early modern period beginning in the sixteenth century, imposed an absolute central State and a king ruling by divine right on top of an older, restrictive web of feudal land monopolies and urban guild controls and restrictions.

The result was a Europe stagnating under a crippling web of controls, taxes, and monopoly privileges to produce and sell conferred by central (and local) governments upon their favorite producers. This alliance of the new bureaucratic, war-making central State with privileged merchants—an alliance to be called "mercantilism" by later historians—and with a class of ruling feudal landlords constituted the Old Order against which the new movement of classical liberals and radicals arose and rebelled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

-- For a New Liberty / by Murray N. Rothbard

Today we have a much worse alliance of government and privileged monopolies, corporatism. The few have decided that the companies are "responsible" for doing the decisions for us. Effectively removing any personal freedom the people might have, freedoms that most countries had in their constitutions for centuries are today being removed by government-backed corporations, as-if they don't need to exist at all.
BBC has a duty to cover the human rights issues, but to ignore the opening ceremony seems like they are going past the line of reportage into controlling what people can choose to watch.
I think one thing to remember is the following:

> The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said it was hitting poorer households hardest, as they spent around half of their income on food and energy, compared to about a third for those on middle incomes.

The branded foods that middle-income families eat would likely try to absorb as much of the inflation as possible. It's the "no-brand" food that will rise in cost the most, the food that the poorest families eat.

For example, Tesco (a popular supermarket in the UK) used to have a brand named "Tesco value" which would sell very cheap items, even at a loss sometimes. See the following examples: https://youtube.com/watch?v=wZCcuiS0his

This brand has since been wiped out almost entirely, replaced with "Stockwell", a much more expensive alternative. There is no longer any 'cheap' alternative. You used to be able to buy a tin of beans for 9p about 10 years ago, in the shop the other day I couldn't find any less than 40p.

This wouldn't be a problem if wages also raised at the same rate, but they have been locked as they are in most Countries. The only time we see the wages raise is when then minimum wage legal requirement increases.

But this problem is much worse. The government will increase the payments to the non-working due to the increased cost of living, but as a result they will also increase taxes on those who do work. The increased taxes will move even more families into poverty. You have families where both parents work reasonable jobs above minimal wage, barely paying their bills.

Not to worry though, the ONS are going to redefine troublesome terms such as 'growth' [1] and 'recession' [2].

[1] https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2022/11/11/inclusive-measures-of-gro...

[2] https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2022/11/11/uncertainty-and-the-r-wor...
Arm is probably the poster boy for UK high tech development and frankly it's just a little bit sad to see what's happened in the last decade. The Softbank deal was always going to be a disaster, from a business perspective it's been a shitshow, the china debacle was absurd, and the idea that you'd get away with the most anti-competitive acquisition in history was just a waste of time. It looks very much like during that time period any strategic position they had has evaporated. Apple has successfully disintermediated themselves, and the largest customers like Broadcom are going to eat Arm's breakfast, and are in full swing with litigation.

There's also something a little suspicious about the news as well:

> which could value the company at up to $40bn (£34bn),

Really? Nvidia announced it would acquire Arm for $40Bn in Sep 2020. Ordinarily you would expect a private sale to be a premium over public markets, and the general stock market performance of tech comparing today to Sep 2020 is night and day. My guess is this is all driven by Masa desparately needing a win, but it won't come, they'll be forced to IPO and it'll be closer to $20Bn than $40Bn. They're too important to the ecosystem to be acquired by a competitor/customer, and not important enough to have pricing power. That all means, of course, that Softbank somehow will have lost money on their acquisition of Arm, which is just frankly quite embarassing for them. I imagine it could turn into a fire sale if Masayoshi Son doesn't secure some wins soon.
It uses webauthn, according to 1password:

https://blog.1password.com/what-are-passkeys/

> Passkeys leverage an API called WebAuthn, or Web Authentication.
Oh, to be clear, that is exactly what he mentions in the book, that you need only get specific about the part you love.
Muhahaha. The stories are actually great. Much better than the average blog.
Agreed that Elon is making Twitter iterate and ship much faster, but not sure the price he is paying in loss of "tribal knowledge" will be worth it at the other end.
Where's the streaming media?
Hominids have been around for 10s of millions of years. The idea that the current civilisation that has combined knowledge of a few thousand years at best is better in every way than everything that has ever existed is bizarre. It should have been discarded soon after Christianity was seen as just another religion (as opposed to the ultimate Truth).

The only reason it is not is because it is maintained mainly by the big business interests which want to ban all the tribal and cultural knowledge to sell their overpriced short-term quick-fix as alternatives.
Ask HN: Has anybody else had payment trouble with the blogging platform Svbtle?
Came across tonyarcieri.com (known for RustCrypto) and thought the formatting was pleasant, so I decided to investigate the Svbtle blogging platform. Unfortunately, the website tells you very little and forces you to enter your card to create an account/see its full capabilities.

The 'Sign up' page clearly states 'The first week is free. You can cancel at any time'. To me that reads 'we won't charge you until after the first week', and yet I was immediately charged for a year.

I didn't like the lack of customisation and want a refund, so I've deleted my account. However, some comments on Twitter are concerning as they suggest the platform keeps charging them after cancelling, with no response contacting the Svbtle support email and owner of the platform (@dcurtis). For instance, see this: https://nitter.net/cterickson/status/1523997786542428163#m

So, thought I'd write this as a warning and to find out if anybody here has encountered similar problems.

And before anybody says 'should've used a virtual card', they're less accessible in the UK. Although if anybody has UK suggestions, I'd appreciate it.
Well there are two general ways of financing economic growth - debt-based and equity-based. Equity-based is the main way that the startup ecosystem works, for example, though debt is also a part of it.

With little or no debt, economic growth would no doubt be slower in the short/medium term. But an equity-only system with slower growth might be comparable in the long-run, due to continuous growth with no principle drawdowns and setbacks from periodic financial collapses.

I don’t know of any research attempting such comparisons, everyone assumes debt is inevitable and doesn’t bother thinking about this.
Copying my comment from an old thread because I'm still looking for a satisfying answer:

> To the crypto-inclined people commenting on every thread about how failing centralized exchanges don't effect you and are actually good for Bitcoin, how are you planning to convert your hard earned crypto into US dollars that you can spend at a grocery store? If your answer is "P2P exchanges," how do you plan to secure your cold wallet against the infamous rubber hose cryptanalysis?
There’s another reason. Hedge funds don’t want your $2,000-20,000.
The BBC has a viewpoint, and that viewpoint is very critical of its own government. If you want evidence but don't want to watch any of their news programmes, I highly recommend the series W1A, in which the BBC satirizes itself as a ineffective, out-of-touch, farce that wastes the public's fees.
They should have. Want to help fund an ad to educate the public?
Nearly every story before this on HN was "he gave to republicans too!" yet the numbers you show is that he gave less than 1% to republics, and >99% of it to Democrats. I guess anyone who wants to be considered bi-partisan can just throw a few dollars at the other party now
I haven't gone as deep as I'd like to into Forth, but I liken it somewhere in between Assembly and C in terms of level of abstraction, and from what I can see the trends of programming languages are features that move further away from hardware and computer specifics towards higher level concepts (the first thing that jumps to mind is Lisp)
I went to a LAN party on Microsoft campus in 1997, which was held in one of the bigger conference rooms. Amount of networking equipment that the hosting microsofties brought in was truly staggering, at least to me at this time. We played a lot of Quakeworld and other adjacent games with low, low pings I've not seen before, having played largely on dial-up. Fun times.

I recently hosted what is essentially a LAN party with my two teenagers inviting their friends to play various games. There was ~10 kids crammed into my TV room, organically switching between multi-person arcade controller games around our big gaming PC (glad I have like 16 USB ports in this sucker to connect them all), Elden Ring'ing with their various PCs, and then I don't know what. They had a lot of fun. Smelled just like the LAN party from 1997, too!
No such a thing as a buggy smart contract. The contract is right by definition, and that is what was agreed upon. Therefore, it’s the humans who signed it who are buggy. Or something.

I wish I was joking.
A quick scan of the books you recommended did not exactly make me want to read them - it sounded like the same sort of narcississm and bad philosophy that I've come to expect! Indeed, the apparent premise of the first - how can we eat some animals and not others - strikes me as downright inane. Probably as inane as it might strike you, if I were to rephrase the question about plants. The answer is very simple: because we choose to. Some animals we choose to befriend; some we choose to eat; some we choose to protect; some we choose to destroy. We are absolutely in the right to make those choices, and indeed I think the alternative is chaos. :)

The truth is that our perspectives are very different, at some really deep levels. I don't intent to change your mind, only to explain to you a perspective that you apparently find incomprehensible: I absolutely think compassion for animals is compatible with raising them to eat.
This is the most performant option for virtualization on arm64 Mac, right?
The new aim-260 had a range of 120 miles. The combination of long range Air to Air missiles and stealth is very hard to defeat.

https://youtu.be/DRt2I39qU5U

Has an interesting simulation of a carrier battle between a Chinese naval group and an American naval group with expected 2025 equipment.
I am not for banning professionalism but to make sure you can get everything from it. Allow doping so that we get really everything from the people who decided to turn their body into a machine anyway.

I do not understand why we are such hypocrites and talk about "purity" for an activity that has nothing normal in it.

As for non-professional sports - I play mixed volleyball with friends and it is great. the level is average, there are very good players (who tone down their capacities) and less good ones (that try hard). We have fun and we get a beer afterwards.

We even play in a business league where we are systematically last and somehow a mascot of the league. Since we will lose anyway, the other teams play fair and let us play (and try risky combinations on their side for the fun).

I watch these matches with a lot of pleasure because everyone is there for the fun and get exactly nothing out of the game - except pleasure and friends.
FCC Requires Broadband Providers to Display Labels to Help Consumers
Because the Olympics, since ancient Greece, served as a way of wnemies to come together. Which is, despite the rampant corruptuon in the IOC which is only surpassed by FIFA when it comes to sport, Olymics can be held in coubtries belonging to the "other side". That Olympic Games are sold the same way FIFA sells tournaments is even worse, because of the diplomatic angle of Olympic games.
Jet airplanes are last millenium's weapon. You're more likely to make them laugh than surrender.