mantap

Feels like the author has an axe to grind.

Research isn't about knowing all the answers or always being successful. Negative results are just as important as positive ones. Author does not even mention the recent protein folding result.

This is well trodden ground but the genesis block message plus the distinctly British style of his writing convinces me that Satoshi has some connection with the UK.

She did that before the capitol riots, which seems to be the inflexion point at which Facebook threw out their old dogma of political neutrality.

Indeed, most people are not shopping for other ideas. Most people are too busy with their lives to think too deeply about the world, and are content to simply let the ideas find them.

That is the bargain of politics: "give us power and we will tell what to think". For such people, Twitter is entirely sufficient. The design of twitter as a textual broadcasting platform is ideal for a unidirectional transmit/receive of ideas.

I've been reading stories about tether's imminent demise for years and years. It's still going. Sure maybe one day it will collapse. Just don't bet on it happening any time soon.

I would draw the line like this. Text is anything you can represent using Unicode.

Source code is text. Emoji are text. Some simple math expressions are text, but more complicated ones involving specialist layout rules are not. Architecture plans, no way.

It makes sense if you call that person a designer. Writing CSS is not programming. It's design with a text based UI.

Just open your SQLite database in read-only mode :)

SQLite works really well for static or semi-static data. For example, a blog where you have a small number of users writing and many users reading from the DB. If the authors are content to use one server to edit the DB then you can easily push that DB to the servers handling the reads.

Intelligence has a strong nurture component that we call education. It's unclear what good, if any, better genetics would do. We are already capable of reproducing and outsourcing many of the brain's functions to computers, and it seems likely we will reach the AGI endgame within a century or two conservatively. Arguably we have far too much intelligence and will end up causing our own destruction.

Insecure by default is the same as insecure.

Imagine if your internet banking worked the same way. By default anybody can take money out of your account. But if you jump through some hoops you can set up authentication.

Nobody would accept that and rightly so because it is the default security level that matters not the highest one.

WhatsApp is much more popular than Telegram and it has E2E by default, so any argument that users won't accept E2E by default doesn't hold water.

Micromorts per 1000km.

The whole point of having that positive inflation is that it encourages people to not hoard dollars and to instead invest their savings in something else. There is a hope that the something else is something productive but in many cases it's not anything particularly productive.

Reasonable people can differ on whether capitalizing an internet currency is productive or not.

What about the damage of not having a functional healthcare system? The only reason that the death rate is so low is because people can get to hospital and get treatment. If we just let the thing rip then hospitals would have to start having policies of not providing care to people with covid-19, or we just say goodbye to the concept of emergency care in general.

It's funny, I have a policy of the opposite. Use undefined, don't propagate null.

map.get("missingKey") returns undefined.

The new ?. operator returns undefined, even if you pass it null.

Undefined means that you don't have to care about the difference between { foo: undefined } and { }.

The only pain point is that JSON.parse() produces null, but this is relatively easy to work around.

I don't find any reason to ever produce a null. I just treat it as a value that can occur when using certain APIs.

If your code depends on the difference between a missing key and a missing value, probably you should be using a Map which makes that difference explicit with separate set() and delete() methods.

The problem with WhatsApp is not that users are locked in. You can install as many chat apps as you want. WhatsApp has no exclusivity over its users.

The problem with WhatsApp is that it only has one alternative. In terms of chat apps that use the signal protocol there's two: WhatsApp and Signal. And Signal is not quite as good as WhatsApp. It's certainly much improved but it's not there yet.

I read that GameStop was at one point worth $24B. Do you really think that's a realistic valuation? This bubble was always going to pop, the question was not if but when.

Sure let r/WallStreetBets and Wall Street battle it out. But I don't think that you are accounting for the ordinary people who would read about an amazing way to get rich quick in the news and decide to buy in. That's when the real bubble starts.

It's a bubble. Bubbles pop. Robinhood's argument would be that they prevented harm to investors by preventing them from putting money into a bubble that was going to pop anyway. As soon as this hit the news you got all kinds of regular people wanting to get in on the action, not connected to WSB.

How many countries are there where people don't wear jeans?

I'd argue this is a good thing. Facebook is not immortal. Every user that Facebook alienates is a win. Already many non-technical people have been moving to Signal after Facebook's new privacy policy.

We need better alternatives, not better Facebook.

Bitcoin is actually somewhat hardened to quantum computers. Quantum computers can break ECC but are much less effective against hash functions. You can't attack the public key offline because it's not usually part of the blockchain, only the fingerprint is.

Although interesting, the title way overstates the claims of the article. The article is focusing on surgery to reduce pain. Pain can't be measured externally, it's subjective.

Most surgery is not like that, it involves some objective condition. Such as before you had an appendix, now you don't. Before your bone was broken in the wrong shape, now it's the right shape.

However much you may dislike the particular individuals that trump has pardoned, he has used the pardon in a much more restrained way than Obama, who gave an order of magnitude more. So far, the pardon power is still a net good.

I admit it's been a while since I bought a new Mac but can you not boot older macOS from an external drive anymore?

This reminds me of how the time derivatives of displacement "are" velocity, acceleration, jerk, snap, crackle and pop. Everybody agrees on this, except for the weirdos who use jounce. Official recognition is the lame way to get a unit adopted.

If this is their ploy it's a bad one. The US is currently a convenient place to base tech companies, but if the law makes it too difficult then people will just start tech companies outside of the US and block US users if necessary.

Isn't this solving the wrong problem? e.g. I don't have any issue with bots on discord.

Bots are a problem on twitter and Facebook because neither of those networks is truly social, it is just shouting into the void.

Bots can react but they can't interact, make interaction not reaction the foundation of a social network and you nullify the power of bots.

I totally disagree. Joined up writing is just more comfortable and has a relaxing cathartic quality. Just think that in East Asian countries they have to learn 1000s of Han characters, I think in the west we can find time to learn our 26.

Twitter has become a place for extremism. Once politicians figured out that they can say anything they want on Twitter, and that their supporters or sock puppets will spread it around like it's the best thing ever, it encourages extremism.

People talk about free speech, but free speech has never meant freedom from moderators. Twitter is well within their rights to place limits on allowable content, just as there are limits to allowable content on HN.

The Chinese embassy is well within their rights to make these comments on their own website.

The west needs to sanction China. This is violation of China's treaty obligations, it's not just a domestic issue, it's an international law issue, and it should have international consequences.

What is BLS?