arianon's comments

Seems like line separators were lost (or were deliberately removed) when Y_Y pasted the contents of the hastebin. I realized this after I did a double-take on the word "cleveland."

Shocked to find out that this is very much a static website, it's "merely" downloading a small portion of the 43GB SQLite file in question with HTTP Range requests, and then it uses a WASM-compiled copy of SQLite to query the requested data. Very impressive.

> Is there something I'm missing in the use of the word "utility"?

Vitalik uses the word "utility" the same way (mainstream) economists do: A numeric estimation of the satisfaction, pleasure, benefit, advantage, or happiness given by an increase in wealth.

What you're calling out is that the concept itself is problematic: as you pointed out, the assumption of log-utility of wealth is not entirely accurate because, in reality, increments in wealth have diminishing utility.

There are other limitations with the idea, for example, is it possible to capture in a utility function the well-accepted notion that losing a given amount of money is more painful than it is pleasurable to gain it? Or that receiving a small amount of money now may have much more utility than receiving a large amount of it in the future? Maybe, maybe not, but this is how economists attempt to capture and quantify human behavior regarding our wants and needs for wealth, inadequate as it is.

I see the YouTube link, I see it is grayed out, I know that I am in a thread about Never Gonna Give You Up, and STILL I managed to get myself Rickrolled.

This meme will live forever.

Use Incognito Mode/Private Browsing if Medium is telling you that you ran out of free member-only stories.

Frankly, I believe that capitalism is the strongest it has ever been, and will continuously grow ever-stronger, with stock market indexes growing ever higher relative to wages, signaling a seemingly unstoppable wealth accumulation towards the capitalist class. Deteriorating labor conditions are not a signal of bourgeois weakness, but a show of strength, and workers need to also gather strength if they are to fight back. You might make the argument that unionization only serves to make labor safe for Capital, and that's true to a large degree, but I see no other solution on the horizon.

By the way, I think you got downvoted because using a Marxist technical term such as "late capitalism" without proper elaboration only serves as flamebait. Those who are not already familiar with the theory have very likely only seen them in the context of Marxists airing their grievances on social media and/or aggressively engaging with Conservatives.

That's true today, but will it remain true when the cryptocurrency bull run ends, we enter a bear market, and mining becomes far less profitable? Not just that, but the most profitable coin to mine, Ethereum, is on track to move away from Proof-of-Work, so we can expect a lot of second-hand cards to be sold at fire-sale prices in 2022.

"The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy. This provides a definition in the sense of a criterion and not as an exhaustive definition or one indicative of substantial content. Insofar as it is not derived from other criteria, the antithesis of friend and enemy corresponds to the relatively independent criteria of other antitheses: good and evil in the moral sphere, beautiful and ugly in the aesthetic sphere, and so on. In any event it is independent, not in the sense of a distinct new domain, but in that it can neither be based on anyone antithesis or any combination of other antitheses, nor can it be traced to these. If the antithesis of good and evil is not simply identical with that of beautiful and ugly, profitable and unprofitable, and cannot be directly reduced to the others, then the antithesis of friend and enemy must even less be confused with or mistaken for the others. The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation. It can exist theoretically and practically, without having simultaneously to draw upon all those moral, aesthetic, economic, or other distinctions. The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. These can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party.

Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict. Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one's own form of existence. Emotionally the enemy is easily treated as being evil and ugly, because every distinction, most of all the political, as the strongest and most intense of the distinctions and categorizations, draws upon other distinctions for support. This does not alter the autonomy of such distinctions. Consequently, the reverse is also true: the morally evil, aesthetically ugly or economically damaging need not necessarily be the enemy; the morally good, aesthetically beautiful, and economically profitable need not necessarily become the friend in the specifically political sense of the word. Thereby the inherently objective nature and autonomy of the political becomes evident by virtue of its being able to treat, distinguish, and comprehend the friend-enemy antithesis independently of other antitheses."

—Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political. [emphasis mine]

The author is simply making it clear who the target audience is: people who already agree with him, the purpose of this article is not to inform or persuade the reader, but to help the author therapeutically vent to like-minded people who will agree with the premise of the article. The racial jab at Whites is simply the political litmus test du jour.

The first three maps of Black Mesa: Xen were just released a few weeks ago, actually.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzR3vllw6O0

You can keep a very comfortable degree of separation between logic and presentation with React, and there are multiple ways to do so, such as using Container Components for state-management and stateless Presentational Components for the actual appearance of your app, using Higher-Order Components, or the "Render Prop" technique that's been making rounds lately . I am working on a React SPA and I have no problem at all keeping things such as data fetching, local state and what not separate from the presentation, either in my codebase or in my head.

While it is up for debate if certain abstract characteristics of BTC give it value (such as its scarcity, its usefulness and what not) you can certainly say that BTC is backed by the power required to mine it.

YouTube is now written in Polymer, a library made by Google that uses the Web Components specifications, which currently only Chrome supports natively[1], so they have to rely on polyfills on the rest of the browsers, so it's understandable that YouTube can perform bad on browsers other than Chrome.

[1]: https://caniuse.com/#search=web%20components

"Query whitelists" sounds like sending to the server something like `{"query_id": 4, "variables": ...}` instead of `{"query": ..., "variables": ...}` which are straightforward to implement using any kind of server side key-value store and a middleware that maps the `query_id` back to the corresponding `query`, a tool that can help you with this is Apollo's PersistGraphQL [1]

I have no idea how I would go about implementing complexity caps though, but I guess I would do something like what GitHub has done for their own GraphQL API [2], which they explain better than I can.

[1]: https://github.com/apollographql/persistgraphql [2]: https://developer.github.com/v4/guides/resource-limitations/

Not too bizarre, both groups were Nationalists, so I presume that they saw that cooperating on their common objective (total racial segregation) was more useful in the long term.

Interestingly, both George Lincoln Rockwell and Malcolm X were assassinated by members of their own parties (a former one in Rockwell's case, though). Sadly, I don't know much else about them.

I'm pretty sure that if HN allowed you to do what you just tried, it would be a XSS vulnerability. :P