skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We can't force merchants to accept GD payments, but they have a fairly strong incentive to. When we first launch, every GD in existence will be backed 100% by our USD reserves. It's free money. All of the GD the merchants receive, if they hold onto it, is guaranteed to convert into USD no matter what.

Once a currency is widely accepted as payment, there's a self-reinforcing network effect: "I value this currency because I know others will accept it as payment." The challenge lies in bootstrapping the currency to the point where the network effect can take over. We start by taking USD from our investors and handing it out to consumers who will spend it. But in the process, we package that USD inside GD.

So we start 100% backed by USD and then we ease up with time. As merchants come to rely on their GD revenue, they'll gradually be willing to accept slightly lower reserve requirements lest they lose all their Gresham Dollar business. And since the reserve requirements only come into play when our USD reserves get low, once merchants accept lower reserve requirements, they have skin in the game and an incentive to see Gresham Dollar succeed.

Note that any user can accept payment in GD. You don't have to have a merchant account. But non-merchant accounts are subject to the Activation Cap which limits the pace at which GD can convert into USD (e.g. $20/day). We remove the cap for merchant accounts, but in exchange they must set the same price in GD and USD.
Historically, when there is no cash, barter or something that plays the role of wampum in Amerind society takes its place.

In a way, isn't this the drug trade in rural Massachusetts? Or in Baltimore in "The Wire"? It's a jury-rigged cash substitute.

I suspect that not only is cashlessness impossible, but that some sort of scrip money will be needed to meet unfunded liability.

I don't live in a high-marginal rate system, but in the US, taxes aren't high enough to be a real problem except in a very few cases.

It still confuses me that any normal person believes that any sort of prohibitionism is good policy. In fact, I
don't think they do - I think that prohibitionism is pernicious snake oil sold to those in search of a Utopia.

One need only look and it's obvious that it can never work.
I find that morality follows a distribution. Of course, the distribution is different in different sectors than in others, but there is still a distribution.

This is interesting, because it tells me that no matter how crooked the business sector, there is some company so awful that that puts all the others to shame. And there is another out at the other end that has good people trying to do good things.

If you're looking for a job, you can only work for one company, so that provides some hope: You just need to find that positive outlier. And if they are also successful and not crippled by attempts to stay sane in an insane world, you'll be fine.

It's much the same as with startups. Lots are absolute nonsense, conceived with the purpose of extracting money from a gullible market for investments in hot technology.

But you don't have to work for or with any of them, you just have to find the people who are genuinely trying to make the world a better place in a way that fits with what you have to offer.
SpaceX already landed one on land, December 22, 2015. And received a license to do so.
I don't think Thomas Frank would view the kind of rich SF is as a positive. It is more unequal than rich -- unequal with a peculiarly liberal flavor -- and I believe he would agree to causality (relating to the "new kind" of liberalism).
I think the goal to be good at taking notes when typing is to learn how to take notes. It seems the only way to do that is by starting with hand written notes.

But I just think it depends on the class.
Is it worth paying for a course?

No.

Is it worth paying for a course so that you complete it?

Yes. Paying for something hits us hard in the accountability checkbook. The more you pay (and the harder it is to get out of), the more you are committed.

Is it worth paying for a course and telling your friends, significant other, random strangers that you are going to learn X, even if that course is only part of learning X, so that you cannot quit because of pride and accountability?

Big YES.
I think one of the big problems with statistics for most people, besides the complexity of the math, is understanding when to use which techniques. How will you help the user choose the correct way to analyze their data?
Our legislators have lost - if they ever had - the wisdom to see the effects of unintended consequences. "Something must be done, this is something, this must be done."
That, and Mathematica's NDSolve is also quite hard to beat.
And the longer it takes more you miss during lecture.
Origins[0], for those not steeped in Amiga lore. I love it when this sort of humour or inside joke works it way into production...

I also recall the schematics for the chips/PCBs having song lyrics[1] (I assume this is a Tom Petty reference) on them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation#Origins

[1] http://www.amigawiki.org/dnl/schematics/A2000_R6.pdf (page 9, bottom right)

Edit: Now I see that it looks like _all_ the pages have pertinent lyrical hints... the Tom Petty lyric happened to be what stuck in my mind
Read 'More Awesome Than Money,' by Jim Dwyer. It's a history of Diaspora. It was technically OK, but had no use case.

Here's something that might work. FratNet. Get major fraternities and sororities at a big party school to use Diaspora nodes. The pitch is that the frat controls who can get on, and there's no snooping by Facebook. Expand this to frats nationally, creating a big distributed network of frat members, and, over time, alumni.
This is the correct answer, since this exact problem is a major issue when dealing with distributed system failovers. Here are a few examples of AWS service disruptions due to exactly this problem, where they were unable to recover the system because nodes kept failing over under load:

https://aws.amazon.com/message/5467D2/
https://aws.amazon.com/message/2329B7/
http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/

An example quote:

"When this network connectivity issue occurred, a large number of EBS nodes in a single EBS cluster lost connection to their replicas. When the incorrect traffic shift was rolled back and network connectivity was restored, these nodes rapidly began searching the EBS cluster for available server space where they could re-mirror data. Once again, in a normally functioning cluster, this occurs in milliseconds. In this case, because the issue affected such a large number of volumes concurrently, the free capacity of the EBS cluster was quickly exhausted, leaving many of the nodes “stuck” in a loop, continuously searching the cluster for free space. This quickly led to a “re-mirroring storm,” where a large number of volumes were effectively “stuck” while the nodes searched the cluster for the storage space it needed for its new replica. At this point, about 13% of the volumes in the affected Availability Zone were in this “stuck” state."

So these things are very hard, can occur in totally unexpected situations, and I'm not at all surprised that a company like Google comes out with something like this.
Popcaan – Wicked Man Ting
That was done deliberately and must have been quite hard to achieve. He did it to make it more interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NSKCuwnh_U&feature=youtu.be...
Well, sure, when a low-tech catch-all solution exists, its usually better- the best form of secure communication is to whisper the message in the recipient's ear in a dark alley. But this is not always feasible, so we have a set of more-secure-than-plaintext methods to at least give us a good shot at secure communication other times.
Don't worry, it's always got your mic open; no need to click on the tab.
I think it takes discipline and practice to be good at taking notes with a computer in class.
George W.Bush is actually incredibly smart. I have read the book Bushisms. I know he has said plenty of stupid things on camera, and that he wasn't an A student at Yale, but I am tired of hearing this myth.

http://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/
And what do I do with all the other firewalls in other companies? I was told that a lot of bigger companies in Germany use the WatchGuard firewall. And probably on default settings.

I can't use Drupal 8 for web projects because of this. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing in this case because I hadn't the chance to evaluate it, yet.

And all the other options need to get checked for the same problems. Any CMS without "special" HTTP response fields could get some in the next update.

I'm feeling a bit lost right now. (Programming since 1984.)
I am one of the few people who do not feel bound by social protocol. Peer pressure and the like have no influence on my actions. As a result of this, my actions contain meaning.

Often I find human interaction redundant and so rely on written protocols (such as the one I shall paste below) for day to day interaction.

This is the human equivalent of the initial pings between two modems.

-Hi, how are you? [Hi, I am a human being and I acknowledge that you seem to be one, too. I suggest that we use SP (Social Protocol) for our further communication.]

-Fine, thank you. How are you? [Hi, I am also a human being , and I have a functioning installation of SP and am ready to commence communication. Please verify that we have successfully set up an SC (Social Connection).]

-I'm just fine. [SC confirmed. Awaiting further communication.]
One of the advantages of taxing land rents is that most if not all the information needed is inherently part of the process of protecting property rights.

Since most intellectual and "brand" property must also be registered, I am sure the same can apply to that.
This seems like a cool technology

> Just needs porting to Golang

What will that give you? If it's working now, why rewrite it?

How will you get users? How will you make money?

What could I use this for besides filesharing?
This isn't constructive in any way, but I've got to tell you that that's one of the most entertaining genesis stories I've ever heard from a founder at this stage. Good luck and I hope your leg is 100% better! :)
I got a value = true so definitely not a joke
> EDIT: It seems that my account is dead. Yet another victim who dared to disagree with the great tptacek

Please don't post petty stuff like this.

Your account's fine, but it won't stay fine if you continue to break the HN guidelines. That's no doubt why previous comments of yours were flagged (by users, not moderators), and it has nothing to do with disagreeing with someone.
You mentioned how you're different from a bunch of dating apps -- do you see your app as primarily competing in that space? My first reaction was instead that if successful, your app would do more to disrupt the Meetup.com space than say, Tinder.
Vale a pena comprar um Gol G3??
For some context do a search for "infant surgery without anesthesia". Allegedly infant surgeries were routinely done without anesthesia into the 70's. It was believed babies do not really feel pain and we are just anthropomorphizing their reflexive responses. Anthropomorphization is a real phenomena that needs to be taken into account but so is the use of skepticism as a tool for rationalizing established beliefs.
Add they try "flipping" where you watch video lectures at home and actively solve problems in classes. Small, active classes arent cost effective for universities.
About 5 years ago when I was still in high school I found $500 in a derelict paypal account that had been locked. Having finally gotten a debit card I was able to unlock the paypal account by linking my bank account. I decided to immediately chuck $350 of it at coursera (although it could've been a similar product I can't remember). I wanted to become a successful mobile app developer and self-learning seemed the best way to go.

Long story short the courses I happened to pick were of low quality and never completed. Four years later I still cringe when I hear the word eclipse (even though I'm getting into mobile development now after a few years in webdev land). While I'm sure there are a number of very good courses, and quite a few people capable of completing them and benefiting from them in their lives, I believe I was at the time not only the prime demographic for the product but also in the majority of their users.

TLDR; you can make any learning opportunity beneficial. Is courser and similar products worth the effort to make productive? Maybe, maybe not. There are other alternatives that should always be researched.
Almost more extraordinary is the story of the winner after Lorz was disqualified for his 'joke'. The trainers for the eventual winner, Thomas Hicks, injected him with drugs _during_ the race. Twice!

While Lorz had used a car as a quick fix, Hicks had used, well, a quick fix. His trainer afterwards admitted they had decided "to inject him with a milligram of sulphate of strychnine and to make him drink a large glass brimming with brandy". Hicks then "set off again as best he could". But one hit was not enough. "He needed another injection four miles from the end to give him a semblance of speed and to get him to the finish."

Hicks kept his medal, a decision possibly influenced by the embarrassment Lorz had already caused. The leniency also reflected the fact that doping, and strychnine abuse in particular, was commonplace at the time. Now the drug seems so archaic that Hicks's story has a certain twisted humour. But the ramifications of its use were just as obnoxious as those of HGH and steroids are today.

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2008/may/30/drugsinsport.ol...
Your comments break the HN guidelines on a regular basis. We ban accounts that do this, so please reread and follow the rules from now on:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

That means posting civilly and substantively or not at all.
I don't know about good and evil but war and megacorps both redraw the map; in that respect they're similar.

I think facebook gets a lot of hate because it's a community tool designed to organize communities around external influences. Alexis de tocqueville talked about americans dropping everything at work to go build a church or school (community goods). Facebook is people dropping work to look at bikini photos or 'engage with brands'.

The alternative is communities like kickstarter, where like-minded people get together to invent something new. It's niche and local; if you want to only support kickstarters in your city or neighborhood, you can. Many kickstarter projects have supporters who are involved in the project IRL.

If you could choose between the facebook economy and the kickstarter economy, which do you pick?
If you talk to many MVNOs a few offer segmented plans like these for developing countries.

Look at Bharti Airtel in India and Wataniya in the middle east.
I just did a quick Google search and found this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz9nxzgtBaU

It's wound up like any other old pendulum clock.
Some forms of safety - the industrial kind - can be "science" based. Others cannot. Safety and control are illusions unless you're prepared to do a great deal of work to understand the risks. And control can easily be too expensive.
English premium bonds started using "Ernie" (Electronic Random Number Indicating Equipment) way back in 1956. They've upgraded it since, but it's still electronic. When they introduced it it was probably seen as modern and hi-tech - people were talking about Electronic Brains and about to start talking about the white heat of technology.

http://www.nsandi.com/ernie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premium_Bond#ERNIE
I agree with some of the comments about effectively being able to play the exam game. That said, some courses I've seen have offered extra credit, and distinction grades, if certain extra work is undertaken which is not simply guessing exam questions multiple times. Such an example is Cryptography by Prof Katz which is part of the Cybersecurity specialisation. You can pass the course by playing the system, but to do well you need to write code to crack crypto systems. Not something everyone is capable of and offers a different perspective on the overall result. I've done several coursera courses and they've landed me some pretty decent jobs. Just depends on how You sell them :-)
Post-Its for rawidea phrases.

Scrap paper, big post its for longer ideas, phone calls, notes while reading.

Both of those create physical baggage for me forcing the next function: drop, file, delegate, share, etc.
> the idea is more useful than intended

This is useless for anything serious.
Thanks for the comment and suggestions. I'm actually working on a lightweight CSV uploader for some of our early users who are Realtors.
Keep in mind that the role of a modern truck driver covers far more than just hauling a trailer on the freeway. Drivers also have to navigate city/suburb streets to an actual end destination (usually a warehouse), work with the loading dock workers, sign paperwork, etc.

Personally, I think we will see a system where trucks like this do all the long-distance driving and stop at a drop-off location just outside cities. Then the role of truck drivers changes to that of delivering cargo the last mile to the final destination (the part that's much harder to automate). That, too, will eventually be automated, but not for a while.
Year or two ago I'd be surprised to see something like this on HN, now it's just "sigh...".
Recently some bikers were caught with small motor assists in the tubes of their bikes. While small 100 watt motors dont sound impressive, they are about a third of the sustained power of human bicyclist and can make a difference.
This looks cool. I think hyper-niching is important in anything related to educational videos online.

TED talks is presentations.
Udemy is lectures/courses.

Etc...

The video format is well defined for each site.
Religious flamewars are not allowed on Hacker News. We've warned you about this before. Please don't do it again.
OT: As a web developer, you might be more comfortable with iOS development. Checkout Swift and Xcode Playgrounds. Even though Android Studio 2.0 was just released this week, iOS and Xcode is more like Visual Studio (complete ecosystem) than Android will ever be. Good luck!

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/recipes/Playground_H...

Android Studio 2.0 released https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11449029
Hotels are willing to sign up as long as we deliver on our promise. In exchange, we are getting six months to try.
Reminds me of the infamous "no brown M&M's" rider...
Slack lets you know who's online.
Thanks!

The thing is, these aren't automatically translated books, we're matching real book translations, so at least our approach isn't applicable to articles online.

We have a lot of features planned, from word lookup, to hooking them up to real audiobooks, and a lot more.

Our motto is "Provide maximum good" so we don't want premium-only features, and all the books in the public domain would always be free, but as our business model, we'd like to offer recent, in copyright books in this format for sale.
Isn't this what blab.im is doing?

What differentiates this from that?
Maybe OT, but I think the main difference between this story and many other stories on HN is that this story is overtly political, while many other stories (from basic income, through what kinds of technology investors should invest in, to Bitcoin and OSS project governance) are not any less political, just less self-aware of that fact. Actually, HN has more political stories than any other tech-oriented site I'm aware of. I believe that doing and talking about politics while claiming to be apolitical or being unaware of the politics involved just guarantees bad politics. Politics is the practice of affecting how power and resources are distributed in society, and doing/discussing "inadvertent" politics -- a staple of HN, IMO -- is often worse than "unconstructive", polarized, overtly political debates, because while the latter may be futile, the former actively blinds people to politics; it makes them less aware of their role in society.
meaningless because our reporters are the ones looking at it and will choose what to publish.
As a Kansan myself, I like to think most of my relatives can handle a modicum of dark humor.
We've adopted this style guide at my work-place. I created a few AngularJS apps before running into this great resource and every thing it proposes matches my experiences and intuition from poking and prodding the library.
I feel like you could almost as easily say "Why do some people thrive?"
Micro apartments – the solution to the housing problem in New York?
I always took notes on paper and just the act of writing them down helped me internalize the info. I almost never had to read my notes, which is good because they were rarely very legible.
Yes but they're trying to ban cash
They don't really offer any argument for this though. Apparently one infected cell can infect 10k new cells after a day or two[1], the mutation rate is 4 per kbp per cell[2], and the HIV genome is 9 kbp long[3]. That would mean 36 new mutations for each newly infected cell.

I'm not positive this is right... but I would think a rough estimate on the upper bound could be arrived at assuming each mutation is equally likely and independent. Then the probability of a single mutation at any given site would follow a Poisson distribution with k=1 and r=.004:

r^k*exp(-r)/k! = r*exp(-r)= 0.00398

Then the probability of a mutation at n=2 sites in the same cell would be:

(r*exp(-r))^n= 1.58 x 10^-5

If each infected cell infects N=10,000 new cells each generation g, after one generation (g=1) the expected number of cells containing a set of two specific mutations would be:

N^g*(r*exp(-r))^n= 0.158

However after two generations there would be 10^8 infected cells and 1587 would be mutants at any two given sites. Then for any n=3 sites there would be about 6 cells containing mutations at each.

As I said, that would definitely be an upper bound. Some sites will be less likely to mutate than others, eventually you run out of new cells, etc.

Also, this ignores that cutting the DNA may be killing the cells.

[1] http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000906
[2] http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002251
[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/AF033819
That really was off topic...
Classical slavery was an answer to "what do we do with the people left over after conquest?"Of course, the transition to kings from judges in the Old Testament ( which I use because it's one of the few written artifacts left from then ) led to various prophets decrying the hubris of conquest. This hubris led to things like the Temple falling

American Peculiar Institution slavery was a widening of the scope of Iron Triangle trade in the Carribean by rapacious Mercantilists.

And to your last point, there's the line from "A Man For All Seasons" - "It'd give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake."
Jupiter Broadcasting's programme (http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/) is not stricly about computer science, but it's my favorite in computer related podcasts/videos.
And Todd Rundgren videos[0][1]...

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mH8PaWbi1E

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2nd_Wind
Another date for you: there's an HTML comment in the <head>

<!-- Changed by: Ursula N. Owen, 8-Mar-1999 -->

It's possible that it's referring to the HTML skeleton, not the article itself.