ebcode

Then again, people wouldn't have an innate desire to believe in good and bad people if fairytales and religion weren't already so popular.

Rather, this is a reflection of an entire culture of woman-hating and female disempowerment that has been prevalent since Aeschylus wrote The Oresteia, of which these coworkers at this one small company are but a typical example.

Sure, but they're also being defended constantly by armies of programmers. When a vulnerability is discovered, the four projects you mentioned are all awfully quick to issue and distribute patches.

Think about how Google pressured Microsoft to fix a vulnerability when MS was too slow to respond[1]. That's the kind of crap you see with proprietary development.

Open source is just a flat-out better method of developing software, but especially so when it comes to patching vulnerabilities.

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2015/01/02/google-posts-unpatched-m...

My recommendation would be to go back to the original sources. Hardly anyone (on Medium or Techcrunch, that is) would know about Arthur Samuel's checkers playing program. His paper, "Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers", can be found in the compilation, "Computers and Thought" by Feigenbaum and Feldman.

Another good resource is the three-volume set, "The Handbook of Artificial Intelligence ", also by Feigenbaum. It's a very thorough catalog of programs developed in the 60s and 70s that illustrate various techniques used in AI programs.

In the words of Alan Kay, "the past is vast".

I keep a 3-ring binder with plenty of college ruled paper on my desk, and am continuously writing down bits and pieces of information. My keyboard is on a keyboard tray to give me room on the desk for the binder.

It's not an ideal system, but practical. In college, I remember coming across THOUGHTSTICKER, which I would recommend anyone working on e-learning to research and steal ideas from.

Not in "droves", you're right. BUT, there is a very small, privacy-conscious, vocal minority that does not want an obvious backdoor hiding in their CPU. I am one member of that minority, and I won't be purchasing from AMD again until they right this situation.

It's similar to the gaming enthusiast market, though a lot smaller. You can market to that small segment for a big win, because gamers will shell out for the newest GPUs, talk up the hardware online, which leads to increased sales. If AMD would see the benefit of working with this privacy-conscious segment of the market, I believe they would also see, not a major, but also not an insignificant uptick in sales.

If you forget about blockchain for a moment, and just focus on your last question, then you can see that the internet itself is a type of "decentralized data store", which solves one major pain point of humanity, namely, access to information.

If you're old enough to remember the days before the internet, access to information beyond what your parents and peers could tell you was found in the public library. Books. I have always loved books for this very reason. They give me access to information beyond what my immediate community can (or will, when you think about it) tell me.

Of course, the problem with the internet (in its present form) is that the information is so unreliable. There are just too many conflicting interests. With the library, you at least have the librarian, who, being a sort-of gatekeeper, makes sure that the library contains only "good" books.

So, blockchain. What problem does it solve? It's a really good question. The blockchain is a distributed ledger, that is, basically, a key-value store. The keys are the bitcoin addresses, and the values are the bitcoins themselves. What is unique about it, and what makes it such an interesting program, is that the record of transactions is constantly being updated, because there is a bitcoin "reward" for running the program. So, even if everyone stopped trading bitcoins tomorrow, if they were just like, "nah, we're over it", the bitcoin network itself would still generate some new bitcoins, and the ledger would be updated. It's really a fantastic invention, when you think about it.

The value of a blockchain is that it adds a type of "reliability" on top of the internet. Because the ledger is public, anyone can inspect it. Because the network is distributed, all the miners running the program are, for want of a better phrase, "keeping eachother honest". When you look at a regular website (or book, or movie), it can be hard to tell if the information you're seeing is legitimate/honest. Whereas when you look at the record of the Bitcoin blockchain (for example), you can be fairly confident that those keys (addresses) were assigned those values (bitcoins) at that time.

To sum up, the problem that a blockchain solves is storing a reliable record of transactions, by harnessing the inherent self-interest of people to "make money" (ha ha).

Isn't that the whole point of the Bitcoins themselves? Without that incentive, storing the public, distributed ledger would be a thankless, expensive task. By incorporating the Bitcoin "reward", the miners are incented to maintain the ledger. It certainly appears to be working, looking at the current value of Bitcoin.

From what I gather from the few examples in the post, is that JavaScript has incorporated a lot of the ideas in JQuery, thus making JQuery itself a tad redundant.

As for a "compelling enough reason", I don't know about you, but for me, "staying current" is the single most important aspect of my job as a web developer. If I'm not keeping up, I'm falling behind.

The last sentence of the article sums that idea up pretty well:

"... jQuery will increasingly be seen as a bygone relic from the DOM's dirty past."

Also, giving up JQuery doesn't necessarily mean that you also have to give up consistency. You and your teammates just get to decide on what the "new consistency" will be. It might even be fun?

>It's incredibly foolish to think you're only trusting mathematics.

Thanks for pointing that out. I suppose I'm guilty of "idealizing" my argument. Still, if the Bitcoin client could somehow be "written in stone", and everyone knew the protocols and source code could not be modified, I think it would be a safer bet to place my trust in a globally distributed network of selfish individuals, than to place it in a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires.

One benefit of having a distributed ledger (your thousands of different systems) is that it decentralizes trust. With fiat currency, you have to trust the government (or private company, in the case of the U.S.A.) that issues it, not to print so much that they debase it. I have no trust in my government, or fellow private corporations, given what I've been through. Bitcoin, on the other hand, well, at least I can read the source code and compile the executable myself.

Given a choice between trusting a person/corporation and trusting a mathematical equation, I would rather place my trust in the mathematics.

The internet is a mass market system, and it was designed with biological growth in mind. Bitcoin is built on top of the internet. So I don't see why you would think it couldn't see widespread adoption. It's just another program.

Since nobody's touching this (comment-wise) w/ a ten-foot-pole, I'll put in my 2c just to say that this article illustrates well how large corporations squeeze the wealth out of small, already poor communities, leaving them worse for wear.

It was a big deal in my town when the city allowed the local Walmart to start selling grocery items. The concern was that the long-running local grocers wouldn't be able to compete.

I'm under the impression that the majority of commenters on HN are pro-Capitalist, and while these Capitalism-critical articles occasionally make it to the second or third pages of HN, nobody really wants to talk about the deletrious effects that Capitalism wreaks on the working poor. It's not just Walmart, the article also mentions McDonald's, as a provider of "cheap", "bad food", which is making people sick.

I know that a lot of people in tech are really, actually trying to make the world a better place; but... if we can't start discussing and unpacking some of our base assumptions about how the world actually works, we're just adding more fuel to the fire, feeding the beast, enriching the rich while impoverishing the poor.

I'm not starting a war... nor do I think that the other "ism", Socialism, however it might have been, or be, implemented, is the "one true economic theory" that will save the world from poverty. The world is not Black and White, no matter how many "Cops" episodes might portray otherwise.

I do think that we should question the status quo, and meaningfully consider, and attempt, alternatives to it.

My personal experience with pro-Capitalist folk is that they tend to view the world as a zero-sum-game, whereas I see it as a non-zero-sum-game. If there are any pro-Capitalists here who also see the world as a non-zero-sum-game, I would love to hear about your perspective. Hell, I'd love to hear your zero-sum-game perspectives as well, although I don't think they'll change my mind. But who knows?

People already in power have no incentive to change the rules of the game (as far as I can see). But people just now gaining power (e.g., people in tech), do have an opportunity to change some of those rules, and could very well "undo" some of the damage that has been done by the incumbents.

Again, just my 2c.

Just installed OpenBSD 6.1 on an old Lenovo Thinkpad T500, and everything works. Suspend/Resume when closed/opened, Intel wireless card, wired ethernet port, sound, trackpad, function keys for adjusting screen brightness, all work. Well, the fingerprint reader won't work, actually, but that's about it.

Would definitely recommend this setup for folks not needing anything fancy (not for gaming/3d apps), but for your average web developer, it'll do the trick.

The caveat is that a T500 isn't exactly "modern" (c. 2006), but it's got a Core 2 Duo @ 2Ghz and 8G of ram, which is plenty for my admittedly modest needs.

Thanks for this beautiful comment. I am reminded of a quote by Isaac Bashevis Singer, "In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka."

We've held ourselves "above animals" (superior) for far too long. We would do well to remember that humans are just one more tribe in the greater animal kingdom.

>What about antibiotics? That seems like a clear case of changing the world for the better.

At first glance, yes, but then you remember that the universe is not static, but dynamic, constantly evolving, and the introduction of antibiotics, while useful --- miraculous, even --- at first, eventually results in "antibiotic-resistance"[0], and now we have a worse problem than the one we started with.

There is a wonderful essay by Paul Kingsnorth, titled "Dark Ecology"[1] that identifies this pattern as a "progress trap".

This quote from the Tao Te Ching is especially apt:

"Do you think you can take over the universe and improve it? I do not believe it can be done."

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4378521/ [1] https://orionmagazine.org/article/dark-ecology/

It would appear that appearing to be indecent is bad for business. One way to appear to be decent is to actually be decent. As always, it's about the bottom line.

Yep, you're killing it. The Great Seal of The United States [0] is printed on the back of USD $1 bills. The motif on the obverse side of the seal is an uncapped pyramid with a floating eye on top. Thus, the pyramid "scheme". Then, the "All-Seeing-Eye", being some kind of symbol for God, is used to represent authority, or higher power, thus making me, a mortal and a peasant, feel less empowered, thus "poorer". Hope that clarifies things a bit. (note to self: stop joking on HN)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Seal_of_the_United_State...

This might be the best summing up of the/our schizophrenic attitude towards professionalism (and work) that I've ever read. The words, "in a professional setting, you aren't a person," just nail it. Meanwhile, the corporation itself has the legal status of a person, and can now even claim to hold religious beliefs. Ergo, we could probably fix some of these issues in the valley with a few properly Gorean S Corps.

Like the pyramid scheme on the back of the one dollar bill? That floating eye makes me poorer every time I see it.

Why must they be communicated? Surely it is the rest of civilization that decides which ideas it is ready for, and which it isn't. Go ahead and write a song like "Imagine", or give a speech like "I Have a Dream", and you'll see how well the rest of civilization responds. Civilization isn't pretty; communicating ideas the people aren't ready for gets you killed.

Don't shoot the messenger.

It really depends on your needs. I think you would get more helpful responses if you included more information about the purpose of your project in the question.

Well, first off, I don't think that advocating for anarchy/no government is "checking out of society." It's not like I'm saying "f* society, let's all be hermits!" I'm saying, "let's stop using state-sanctioned violence to oppress people into obedience." Secondly, your idea of constructive change and my idea of constructive change are going to be different. I'm not taking my ball and going home; I'm taking my ball and saying, "I just don't want to play dodgeball with you guys. I want to juggle. If you want to juggle too, bring your balls over to the park and let's juggle together."

Governments do not protect everyone, or provide basic services to everyone, equally. Also, unless you were there for the revolution, you didn't agree to the laws of the land where you happened to be born. As an anarchist, I don't find my relationship with my government to be one that I would enter into willingly if I were given the freedom not to. Instead, I live under the constant threat of state-sanctioned violence for any act of civil disobedience or political dissent on my part.

> "For the good of all of us."

Yeah, so who are you to decide what is good for everyone? That way lies tyranny, and for everyone but the tyrants, slavery. But really, you are advocating for less freedom for a specific group of people, so I suppose that what you have put forth is a pro-slavery argument. I pray that you reconsider your position.

I'll see your "maybe, sometimes", and raise you a "rarely, if ever".

That honor goes to melling: >Some guy whining on HN about a first generation product adds zero value.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9500455

Obviously not, but it will give them experience in building carbon-capturing devices. That's not nothing.

Thank you for this comment. Most people aren't aware of the relationship that Bell was in with the gov't because of its status as a monopoly. Before the gov't broke up Bell, it agreed to let Bell have the monopoly on the telephone system, and in exchange, Bell "gave back" to the public in the form of new, "public domain" technology. Not just the transistor, but also Unix and the C programming language. Sometimes I wonder how farther we might be in our technological development if Bell had never been broken up.

Folks wanting to know more about Bell Labs can check out "The Idea Factory" by Jon Gertner.

HN does this when a prominent tech person dies. The story will be on the front page. In this case, it was Chuck Thacker.

Right, the root issue here is trust. With a crowdfunding website, many people can give to one person, and one person can give to many people, and everyone can be sure that the person receives it, because everyone trusts the central authority -- the crowdfunding site.

But if you live under a dictatorship where your financial transactions are transparent to the state, then the state can step in and block any transaction. You need a way around that.

So I guess what you really want is to to set yourself up as an "offline crowdfunding site". So, maybe instead of building a network of people that you trust, you could build up a network of people who trust you to deliver the money to those in need.

There are numerous problems to overcome here, but I don't think that they are insurmountable.

One problem is just having the cash on hand, and thereby making yourself a target for attack.

Why not do a test-run with simple scraps of paper? Spread your idea around to your trusted network, let them know your idea, and ask them to ask their most trusted friends and family to get you as many scraps of paper as they would feel comfortable giving you if it were actual money?

Then count up your scraps of paper at the end, and then you'll be able to see if the idea will work.

Best of Luck.