There's been a big push to develop modern standards in the IndieWeb community [0]. There are two important standards:
- WebMention, a W3C standard that is basically the equivalent of @ing someone on Twitter [1]. It is simply an http request to a discoverable endpoint with two pieces of data: the webpage being mentioned, and the webpage mentioning it. WordPress had a similar standard called Pingback and websites supporting WebMention often support both for backwards compatibility.
- microformats2, an ad-hoc standard for adding metadata to webpages, meant especially for providing metadata for web mentions [2]. For instance, you can specify that the mention is a "like", "reply", or "reblog", and set the author name and avatar.
Independent websites that add support for this can then parse the WebMention to create a comment section and like counter and readers can follow the links to other blogs that talk about the blog post they just read. There are a decent number of personal sites that already support this, like those mentioned in [3]. With enough adapters, it might build the network effects necessary to become a viable social media alternative. Right now though, those in the network are predominantly tech oriented since there isn't a ton of third party support.
Pingbacks are so helpful if you’re a blogger of any kind. I manage the blog for a family member who’s an author, and the huge a blog to share thoughts with the readers of their books. Pingbacks let’s them see where their blog posts are being discussed, go answer questions, and interact with the community in a really personal way (on top of the comment systems that are also used extensively).
It might’ve lost popularity over the years but it amazed me that there’s still entire micro-communities of authors/fans doing this. Their own little social networks, all self hosted and self managed through blogs and comments/Pingbacks.
You cannot prove the null hypothesis; you can only disprove it. The p-value is the probability that the null hypothesis is true. So if the null hypothesis is that there is no difference, and there is a low probability of that being true, then you have shown that there is a difference between the groups. If the p-value is high, you do not show that the null hypothesis is true. Instead, you show that you did not find a statistically significant difference. This can happen when the difference between the values is small or there is not enough data to make the difference clear, which is why a high p-value is not enough to reject the alternative hypothesis.
> The p-value is the probability that the null hypothesis is true.
No, the p-value is the probability that the given data generated is as far away or farther by random chance given the null hypothesis is true. That is to say, we assume the null hypothesis to make some predictions and see if the data is a likely occurrence under those assumptions.
This is not the same as the probability that the null hypothesis is true. If that is what you want (and most of us do want this), then Bayesian methods are more appropriate though they are more complicated and more sensitive to initial assumptions.
>"You cannot prove the null hypothesis; you can only disprove it."
Sure, but thats why the null hypothesis should be predicted by your theory. Then you are checking your theory. Most people could care less about whether there is a miniscule difference between groups or not.
>"The p-value is the probability that the null hypothesis is true."
No. This is something entirely different entirely.
Mining a cryptocurrency goes something like this: spend a ton of money investing in a state of the art server farm, hook server farm up to mining pool to earn Bitcoin, withdraw Bitcoin for money, spend money to upgrade your now obsolete server farm.
In addition to being needlessly inefficient, server farms are causing significant harms to the environment in ways that traditional currency does not, and is causing increases in electronics and electricity prices due to their high demand.
Proof-of-Stake is a way to solve this. Instead of computing power determining who creates the blocks (and earns the transaction fees/block rewards), and instead of miners spending Bitcoin to make Bitcoin, miners put their cyrptocurrency in a form of a lottery, with the winner writing the block without using any computing power. The result is the same, but much more efficient and without the environmental cons. It also may make the network more secure, since an attacker would need 51% of the wealth in the network in order to compromise it. And even if someone gained 51%, they would not attack the network because they have the most value to lose.
This article is also about using a lottery, but for a very different purpose. Microtransactions are difficult with current solutions, because vendors like PayPal, Visa, and Cryptocurrencies usually institute minimum fees. This system get around this system through the use of a lottery. As an example, instead of paying $1 to 10 different sites (say in a pay-per-view of newspaper articles), you pay with a reverse lottery ticket. This lottery ticket has a one in ten chance of winning, and if it does you have to pay $10. The resulting payment is the same, but all your payments are in large sums so that transaction fees are taken care of. If the newspaper receives 10 reverse lottery tickets, they will receive equivalent profits to charging each customer $1. Therefore, the customers pay the same and the sellers receive the same, but without transaction fees eating up nearly as large a percentage of the transaction that a micro transaction would.
Both systems use a lottery powered by blockchain randomness, but the similarities end there. The purposes and the meaning of the lotteries are completely different. In the case of the latter, it is actually a lottery you don't want to win.
In theory, a miner could try to manipulate the hash of the future block to change the outcome. It is much more difficult with Bitcoin, where valid blocks are more rare and produce a high income, but with Ethereum blocks are so frequent that it might be possible to collude with the mining pools is done on a large scale.
Additionally, how does this deal with Proof-of-Stake algorithms? Ethereum is heading there, and as far as I am aware the blocks would no longer publish hashes.
- WebMention, a W3C standard that is basically the equivalent of @ing someone on Twitter [1]. It is simply an http request to a discoverable endpoint with two pieces of data: the webpage being mentioned, and the webpage mentioning it. WordPress had a similar standard called Pingback and websites supporting WebMention often support both for backwards compatibility. - microformats2, an ad-hoc standard for adding metadata to webpages, meant especially for providing metadata for web mentions [2]. For instance, you can specify that the mention is a "like", "reply", or "reblog", and set the author name and avatar.
Independent websites that add support for this can then parse the WebMention to create a comment section and like counter and readers can follow the links to other blogs that talk about the blog post they just read. There are a decent number of personal sites that already support this, like those mentioned in [3]. With enough adapters, it might build the network effects necessary to become a viable social media alternative. Right now though, those in the network are predominantly tech oriented since there isn't a ton of third party support.
[0]: https://indieweb.org/ [1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/ [2]: http://microformats.org/ [3]: https://indieweb.org/Webmention#IndieWeb_Examples