skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Will cryptocurrencies ever become large enough to compete with national currencies?

it is an indirect consequence of my intended inference that mathematics will deplete the value of cryptocurrencies while simultaneously increasing the value of blockchains

> what will the acquisition of this company do for those who acquired it?

probably very little, both positive and negative

in a future where math has yet to have made nonce discovery superficial:

the company can use these chips for nonce discovery and increase their own bit wallets and move that currency around the community to convert it into 'national currency', or sell the chips and make 'national currency' from others wanting to use the chips for nonce discovery

in a future where math has made nonce discovery superficial:

the chips could probably still be useful for other applications.. look at another integrated circuit, the 555(o), whatever the original application was i am sure the developers would have been unable to predict all of the utilisations people have developed as a result of having the chip in their toolbox

(o) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_timer_IC
He's referring to hookers.
The OP is probably from one of the EU countries where you see those things only in museums.

(And we actually have problems when visiting USA because some of our banks issue credit card with numbers printed instead of embossed.)
Is it common for licensed lawyers to publicly post legally suspect, grammatically incorrect advice?

Does that not fall squarely under malpractice, the sort of thing that lawyers usually disclaim with "IANYL"?
He uses this screen reader: http://www.freedomscientific.com/Products/Blindness/JAWS

It doesn't have Linux support though so if he needs to work in the Linux OS, he uses Windows with a Linux VM

It's not built specially for software developers but just all visually impaired users in general
Many (most?) business checking accounts charge for large cash deposits.
I'm shoes & a bike... Which is how I got away with claiming $0 on that, but yeah, I'd go so far as to concede a metro-pass could be required for some.

Personally, it's a 20 minute walk to work at Yonge & bloor ... So car isn't really critical here for me.
"If someone made me choose between the Bay Area and Toronto, I would pick Toronto"

The thing is that for most people this wouldn't be the candidates. Toronto is probably a third tier city for startups, meaning there are more candidates and factors to consider.
Brings to mind the smiling with upper and lower teeth sketch from Silicon Valley

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGSJ8b9raJs&t=16
For me the point is being able to reuse the core code, in this case the logic of a small game, but it could be API integration just as easily.

So far the C# abstraction of Android has if anything been easier to use than the official Java API, or at the very least less verbose.
Or might you have problems because now you have fewer stem cells.
Ok, that can be different elsewhere but my experience with German cards in some European countries is that contactless payments are almost always online authorized even if no cardholder verification is required.
Visa's a way more friendly and straight forward for Canada than the US. We'd love to move to the US but life's too short for the visa process, my wife and I are both PhDs, electrical engineers (4 years automotive and 5 start up experience) and I genuinely can't see a sensible route in to the US, Canada looks pretty straight forward though.
FWIW, the author of that blog is a law firm that specializes in intellectual property.
The claim is that you agree not to sue Amazon for IP violations, so they could do whatever they want and an honest man constrained by his code of honor to never break any agreement would be powerless to stop them. Genies and devils would also have no recourse.

Most concerned users on this site are startup founders or CTOs, who aren't likely to have a code of honor of any sort except for marketing purposes. So it's worth asking what the punishment is for breaking the agreement and suing them anyways.

The punishment for violating the agreement is that they can shut off your service and tell you to go away in 30 days.

So my reading is that if Amazon stole your Redshift-competitor and you sued them for copyright infringement:

* You'd win the lawsuit, because you never gave them a license to use your code.

* You'd be blackballed from AWS, banned from either using AWS or working for anyone who uses AWS. You'd have 30 days to move your product to Google Cloud or Azure.

Which seems reasonable to me.
Lack of pistachios in grocery stores wouldn't affect me one bit, but I'd still be on the side of pistachio buyers (and pistachio salesmen) if my city decided to ban them.
edit: or if my city decided that all cashiers checking out customers with pistachios must be fingerprinted.
I have this. I see the year as a donut with December at the bottom.

I've thought about building a GUI calendar and a smart watch face for this. Has anyone attempted / seen something like that?
There is some aspect of the French law that keeps companies far, yes, though there's a limit (the law doesn't apply to small companies in some aspects)

https://www.thestar.com/business/small_business/leadership/2...
Tim Abbott here :)

The challenge of packaging Sage was primarily around packaging its dozens of dependencies (some of which I had to talk to the authors to fix their licensing terms) and making sure that an up-to-date version of those dependencies was available in Debian. It took about a month of my time to package Sage well for Debian (at the time I maintained over 100 Debian packages for MIT, so I was quite efficient at this).

What killed my Debian packaging effort was that Sage was very large and my package was submitted to the NEW queue (where Debian does copyright review) when all the reviewers were busy with managing a release freeze. So it took more than 6 months for Debian's FTP masters to fully review it, and by the time they did, I had moved from being a grad student to the CTO of Ksplice. It probably would have been just week or two's work for me to update Sage across those 6 months, but running a startup is a lot of work, and I never found the time to do that work :(.

Overall, my opinion is that Sage is well-engineered and not difficult to package given its scale (it has a fantastic test suite, so it was very easy to check if the package worked, and it was easy to get them to merge changes to improve the tooling). The problem is that it's a large project, with a large number of diverse dependencies, new versions of which aren't always backwards-compatible upgrades. If you talk to the folks who package other large projects for Debian, I'd be surprised if you find any that don't involve significant maintenance work.
[reply deleted due to downvotes]

I guess this isn't the place for logical discussion. You post a logical, well-thought-out reply based on science, and people just downvote it. Discussion over. Sadly, this obviously isn't the place to discuss innovative research like this.
What a horribly wrong post. First off, I'm confident that many big-boy lawyers have been over those terms with a fine-toothed comb, so I wanted to lead with that, since I'm not a big-boy lawyer myself. All emphasis is mine.

1) Section 3.2 on data privacy makes it clear: "We will not access or use Your Content except as necessary to maintain or provide the Service Offerings" [or if legally and lawfully compelled]

Full stop. I shouldn't have to go on to number two.

2) Section 8.1: "As between you and us, you or your licensors own all right, title and interest in and to Your Content"

Full stop again. It's pretty clear. But, hey, there's a dead horse over there, and he looks like he needs a beatin'...

3) Same section: "[with exceptions noted later] we obtain no rights under this Agreement from you our your licensors to Your Content, including intellectual property rights"

But let's go directly to his quoted section.

4) "You will not assert ... against us ... any patent infringement or any other intellectual property infringement claim regarding any Service Offerings you have used"

So, if it's not clear: you can't sue Amazon claiming that Simple Storage Service (S3) comprised a patent violation. You can't sue Amazon saying that they're violating your intellectual property rights when they serve your web page from an edge cache in Zimbabwe. They've already stated unequivocally in prior sections that they assert ZERO rights to your code/images/markup/etc ("Your Content").

How is this person practicing law?
No you don't abort, aborting or trapping is of last effort. A shared library aborting will kill whatever it's linked to which allows zero chance of recovering. There are two sane ways to go about handling 'impossible states': The API is designed in a way that it returns error info somehow, a type system that tracks side effects in order to allow rolling back.
TL;DR

Reporter based in an area with great transportation choices (NYC) says, "Austin w/o Uber and Lyft ain't so bad. There are new alternatives."
This wouldn't actually help in the case of Node becoming upset about Amazon using their code. The agreement is between the AWS customer and Amazon - Node's owners aren't party to it.

Besides which, Node's licence expressly grants permission to build commercial products on top of it.
Great to hear you can go without a car in SF I'm a 20 minute walk to work in Toronto with a large grocery store across the street from home. Basically everything can be done on foot. Add in a bike and a nice transit system and no-car is pretty easy here.

Are you in SF? Does $4k for a 1 bed+den seem to be in the ballpark?
do you get a green card easier as a canadian than people from europe for example? I'm from germany and know many people who would like to work in the states, but it's really a big problem to get the green card. It takes companies much effort and money to get you in the states for more than 3 months.
Original title: 64% of new electricity in Q1 came from Solar Power – is it enough?
How Giving Up TV for a Month Changed My Brain and My Life
Scientists Have No Defense Against Awe
Immediately the article associates 9/11 truthers with mental illness. That is the main point of the article -- to remind everyone that if you believe your government did something truly heinous, you must be crazy.

There is a long history of governments using accusations of mental illness when they get caught.

Maybe you are all just living in a false reality created by constant propaganda on television and a type of collective denial.

9/11 was a false flag attack.

Now people will tell me to 'get help'.
A few interesting tidbits from the table in the article:

1) Coal is seeing a dramatic decline! The decrease in electricity generated by coal in 2015 was four times the increase in renewable (wind+solar) electricity generated. In fact, it was more than all other electricity increases combined. This is great for the environment, and not just from a carbon perspective, also from an ash and air pollution perspective. (But unfortunately bad for the areas where coal mining is the sole economic driver)

2) The total amount of electricity generated actually declined significantly (~5%) in 2015. Since we're not seeing a dramatic economic crash, does this point to efficiency gains, weather, or something else? Hopefully, we'll begin realizing more 'negawatts' - the most efficient watt-hour of electricity is the one that is never produced.

3) From a PV perspective, I live in an area attractive to solar power both physically and economically, yet only a handful of my neighbors have installed solar panels. There's still a LOT of room to grow!
Right, because HN is the customer service department for the site hosting the article that somebody submitted a link to. And because "unreadable on mobile" is such an informative statement that contains so much useful data about why it was hard to read and what it was hard to read on. Surely you weren't downvoted for those reasons. Nah, it's just HN being HN.
Well, isn't there some precedent?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11533973
I loved living in Toronto, it's a great city. Like any city, it has its problems, but it feels like a healthy city. There's good transit, it's reasonably affordable[0], there is great diversity, there is tech but there is also everything else.

Living around SF, the problems don't feel like they're being treated, but rather covered up with more and more money. It feels dysfunctional on too many levels (many of these problems are not at the municipal level). At this point, I can't afford to live anywhere near the SF core (and I'm not sure I'd want to if I could) while maintaining the lifestyle that is important to me. Living on the outskirts has taken a big toll on my happiness over the years, and it's a good time for us to move for a multitude of other reasons of varying importance (political, cultural, financial, social, etc).

I hope Toronto becomes an even more important player in tech, but it's in a great position even as it is.

[0] People constantly debate that Toronto is overpriced because prices keep going up, but it's still very cheap compared to most other cities in the world of similar calibre.
At the risk of derailing this conversation, do you have resources to show that transitioning works? The debate on both sides has muddied the water for me and I'd love to see evidence for this. Thanks in advance.
Don't tell people to npm-install stuff as root user
Rail against the credit card companies if you want, but realize this is Walmart, not an orphanage. This story is part of a negotiation between Walmart Canada and Visa. They want outrage. They want us to get mad. They want this on CNN (not likely considering what just happened). Public outrage puts pressure on Visa to cut them a better deal. Walmart admits the intention to cut a deal eventually. Let the heavyweights fight it out amongst themselves. I choose not to participate in the farce.
Unless I'm mistaken, 'protection' goes beyond AWS to include "any of our affiliates, customers, vendors, business partners, or licensors."

This effectively creates a safe harbor against not only trolls but also legit patent holders who foolishly decide to use AWS.
This is such nonsense. I just went to phonegap.com and installed the top showcase app (Localeur). You've got to be kidding If you're going to tell me it's impossible to tell it's not native. Scrolling is janky, taps don't feel as responsive on some elements, weird UI glitches, etc.

It's a fine app if you don't care deeply about UX, but certainly not indistinguishable.
Try being out downtown after midnight. The insincerity of the "safety" concerns is on full display then, when you can watch drunk people knocking on windows and offering random drivers cash for a ride home because it's impossible to find a cab.
> DOS batch language was designed to run on a single-user single-process machine.

This. My preferred explanation for the difference between Unix and Windows for a long time has been "Unix assumes a lot of people are doing different things on one computer, all at the same time. Windows was designed with the mental model of a calculator."
But it's the variance that you want to reduce if you want to be more efficient about resource usage (ie. cashiers and cash machines). As variance goes up, your overhead for burst capacity goes up.

Also, variance is what people perceive as bad service, not the mean time. If everyone takes a little longer they feel happier because of the perception of fairness.
Seeing as more gun control will only serve to get Trump elected, why not have an "Arm The LGBTQ" movement? If one of them had a gun, this probably would've been avoided.

(a LGBTQ gun owner/NRA member. Yes, we exist.)
Odd they didn't mention Amazon Toronto or IBM. Amazon has 300+ SDEs here (myself included), room for 800 developers in the new office that just opened. Not sure how big IBM is, but I've heard it's fairly big operation here.

It's not that Amazon is a startup itself (what, 100k+ employees worldwide doesn't count?) but that when you have a big company like that you often see people leave to make startups. Young guys spend a couple years being mentored and becoming great developers, then leave to go pursue their passions.

I have two former managers that are both very senior people in local Toronto startups, plus a number of friends who've left to hit up the start-up scene both as founders and early hires.
I was more surprised that this got to number 2 on the front page, it seemed that it was something people might have actually been waiting for, was wondering why that would be the case.

My day job is networking for a UK ISP/DC, and the only thing I could really think of people wanting this was on devices like route reflectors within your network, or an peering exchange.

However I suppose people are just using OpenBSD to do more than I thought.
It's really not fair to compare the legibility because that code is not at all doing the same.

He's basically comparing his naive "one byte at a time" strlen to one at least processing at register size. The naive version looks just as good in C, frankly better, because what is this "0.." offset nonsense.
I'm personally very uneasy about directly exposing my bank accounts

I think ACH is probably worse than debit cards.

We had some sort of discussion here a few days ago (I forget exact topic, maybe Swift?). Someone linked to why Donald Knuth no longer sends checks to people: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news08.html

It's an old rant, but if anything, things have gotten worse.

We desperately need some sort of cryptographically secure means of moving money. But it can't have all the baggage of Bitcoin.
New functionality and polish in FreedomBox 0.9
What may go wrong when machines become intelligent
Oh thanks for the correction! I find that reassuring.
I thought this kind of thing was "normal" for some people on par with how many have photographic memories, or almost innate math abilities.
Right. It's around us$0.05/transaction. First of all, it's lower, and second, it's a flat charge instead of a percent, which is probably more fair for users.
it's its
> Don't the "best" models make surprising predictions that we go out of our way to design experiments to collect data for - and find that they are, in fact, accurate?

Models like e.g. the heliocentric solar system, or even relativity, weren't developed that way - they were developed by noticing flaws or incompatibilities in existing models, and proposing a better explanation for them. (The much-touted "experimental verification" of relativity in an eclipse was a nonsense - the errors were as large as the measurements - but it didn't matter; the theory was elegant enough to be obviously correct).

String theory is mostly still at the fiddling-with-the-epicycles-and-thought-experiments stage. But at least it has a model that contains a) standard QM and b) a graviton. None of the competition has even got that far (and there's little reason to think they ever will in most cases).
I worked in the SF Bay Area for ~4 years. After wanting to re-visit life in Canada for personal reasons, I ended up in Toronto last year. With no expectations, but some sense of understanding that Toronto is Canada's best tech hub, I made a move and worked at an early stage tech consultancy. A lot of smart and talented people from local schools (e.g. Waterloo/UofT). But like most have mentioned, you still see a huge migration of that talent going to US-based tech hubs as the opportunities are more favourable (career-wise and financially).

After a year (and luckily meeting my significant other) we've decided to explore opportunities in the Bay Area again, and will be moving back this summer.

There really isn't anything quite like the SF scene at the moment for tech startups.

This article is great in championing what the city can aspire to, but there is a lot of room left to become a contender.

Can't wait to see what Toronto's tech scene will evolve to in the next 5-10 years. Hopefully in time for when I want to settle down again in Canada.
Only there will you find real answers

.. which it's illegal to tell anyone else. And if you find evidence of abuse the only way you can do anything about it is to flee to a country from which you can't be extradited.

This is why we can't have a discussion about this and as much as possible needs to be moved from "intelligence" (secret, unaccountable) to "evidence" in courts.

The only sensible answer to "how many terrorist plots have been prevented" should be a count of convictions.
Again, I have read Dave Cheney's posts, and I totally agree with his conclusion that sentinel errors (i.e. public package level singletons) should not be used. I don't necessarily agree with his stance on error types, because sometimes we need access to specific data attached to errors (e.g SQLSTATE).

But the standard library uses sentinel errors everywhere and third party packages often do the same. That's what creates the inconsistent and messy status quo of handling different types of errors. It's also not going to change because sentinel errors can never be changed into anything different without breaking clients of the API. No call specific message or other data will ever be added to these standard error values.
Failsafe – A lightweight, zero-dependency library for handling failures
Anonymous hackers take over ISIS Twitter accounts
I love what they're going for! However, I really don't think that text messages are the future. Looking at things like WhatsApp, iMessage, FB Messenger and others, a company like Apple will probably drop support for them very soon. A possible fix for this would be to support 2FA apps like Google Authenticator for communicating those codes. If not, I'm more than sure that Apple will release some kind of API for services that allows us to send messages...
I remember when I learned that command.com kept the current .bat file open when running it, rather than reading it into memory (like most other interpreters that I used or learned at school). We had a client on a Novell network with a menu program that generated .bat files to start the program selected, then restart the menu program. This turned out not to work very well on a multi-user network, as user A would exit an app, and continue running the .bat at some offset, which user B would now have caused to have different content, and probably not even a line break at said offset into "THE" file.

Easy enough to fix by having the menu program put the run script (.bat file) into the Novell equivalent of each user's home directory, but it was a real WTF moment at first :-)
While we're at it, a bunch of YC companies are headquartered or have an office there like Appcanary, Upverter, PagerDuty. Big tech companies have offices there too, like Mozilla and Google (mostly sales in Toronto for now, eng in Waterloo). Lots of small bootstrapped tech startups, consultancies, and agencies, too—like the famous Teehan+Lax agency that got bought by Facebook. This is just from the top of my head, I'd love to see a more comprehensive list.
I'm unclear on whether they mean "errors with stack traces attached" (trivially available) or "errors that are stacks of errors" (requires small third party library".

If the latter: fair enough, but it's not as if that's a common feature of other mainstream languages.
It would have been interesting if this had come out before the Indyref. What did happen to Willy McRae, anyway?
> Or, you may believe that extremism in all forms is bad.

I assume you're using the "aaron-lebo" scale of extremism.

I'm not saying you should support Sanders, I'm saying that disagreement with his positions is substantially different then denying that Trump has said racist things, or insisting that the State Department allowed Clinton to do business on a privately administered email server located in her home after the State Department says that it didn't. You can accept the falseness of both of those claims while still agreeing with Trump and Clinton on policy.