skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bitcoin was struck the fatal blow when the bubble popped and Mt. Gox died. Everything since has been nostalgia for its past dreams.

The main problem is that it was built on crank economic assumptions. It is literally an implementation of Federal Reserve/gold bug conspiracist economic theories and weird Bircher ideas of where inflation comes from - that's actually its point. The white paper alludes to this, the Bitcoin 0.1 release notes are clear about it:

> The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.

Bitcoin failed at every one of the aspirations here. The price is ridiculously volatile and has had multiple bubbles (this should be impossible with a fixed supply if Bitcoin economic theories were true); the unregulated exchanges (with no central bank backing) front-run their customers, paint the tape to manipulate the price, and are hacked or just steal their users' funds; and transaction fees and the unreliability of transactions make micropayments completely unfeasible. Because all of this is based in crank ideas that don't work in practice.

Ethereum is hipper, but has similar problems with ever working properly. (Remember the Skype chat where the devs admitted sorting out its problems would take several years?) Its basic problem is that smart contracts require humans to program perfectly, and even the best and brightest of Ethereum coders came up with The DAO, a $150 million clustercuddle.

If you follow the "Venezuelans are turning to Bitcoin" link, you'll see the actual number is ... 370 BTC traded a week. This may not rock the central banksters to their foundations.

Almost all Bitcoin use is speculation on Chinese exchanges; day trader gambling, basically. I need to find the figures, but it's something like 95-97%. Next is the drug trade, next is ransomware. Western Bitcoin advocates are a sideshow, except the actual core developers.

(I am literally writing a book on this, God help me. I have read more and worse PDF white papers than any human should have to suffer. Currently 30k words and six weeks into writing a 15k short I was supposed to take 2 days on. http://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/ )
Reading this type of stuff makes me feel very small and insignificant - kind of like the total perspective vortex. It makes me truly sad to think that I will be long gone by the time humans are exploring these things.
1. Funding the opposition, is not the same as fund a coup or arming factions in a civil war. The US funds opposition movements in many countries. The link you give is about the US performing a raid into Syria against an Iraqi insurgent network.

2. What happened in Syria is a civil war not a Coup d'etat.

>"the Syrians who had been trained, armed, and radicalized by the CIA fled to Iraq when the coup failed and started ISIS."

The civil war was going well for the rebels all throughout the rise of ISIS, so I'm curious when you thought this was happening? All sources agree that ISIS was formed in Iraq and then infiltrated into Syria.

"the US and its allies weren’t only supporting and arming an opposition they knew to be dominated by extreme sectarian groups - they were prepared to countenance the creation of some sort of “Islamic state”"

Lets parse that carefully as it is deceptively written:

* "the US and its allies" that is, the US had one policy and its allies had another, but the author chooses to group them together to blame the US for activities undertaken by US allies which the US actively opposed and ran counter to US interests.

* "supporting and arming an opposition they knew to be dominated by extreme sectarian groups" while true the US was going out of its way to arm the less extreme elements (unlike some US allies).

* "they were prepared to countenance the creation of some sort of “Islamic state”", that is, a DIA intelligence assessment considered the possibility that the Sunni population of Iraq might break away from Iraq. They didn't support this possibility, just said it could happen (and it did). This state need not be "The Islamic State", but author choose the name "Islamic State" to make it sound like the US supported the Islamic State.

The author of that piece is being willfully misleading. Note that it was published in the Opinion section of the guardian. Even with all that the author supports my claim that ISIS started in Iraq.
Very useful resource for bot developers which includes bot platforms, bot job boards, newsletters and many more. WOrth for bot makers.
Yeah, I'm especially bitter because I just spent my entire weekend getting colors and tty detection to work consistently in Windows. It was unbelievably hard. (The central difficulty is that you need to support both native Windows consoles like cmd.exe and cygwin terminals like mintty.)

It's worth it though. There are lots of people on Windows! And thankfully, most of the other pieces (like the build system) in Rust are cross platform by default. :-)
Official ZAP Jenkins Plugin Released – Security Testing as Part of a CI Build
Please just no. Part of the charm of the guitar is that its this kind of organic piece of wood and metal that you have to learn to master to make sound good. A lot of the different character and style of different players comes from their different technique and how they learned to play which I think would be lost if you could just easily make perfect notes by basically pressing a button. I guess this is the same reason why I prefer listening to instruments like guitar, piano (real piano, not electronic) and saxophone and synth/electronic music I find all sounds similar and lacks individual character.
Thank you for being great and apologizing!
A similar defect that was "fixed" breaking backward compatibility was the resolution of initializer_list constructors of recursive types:

T(initializer_list<T>);

Before, if you did

T element;
T list = {element};

the second initialization would be dispatched to the initializer_list constructor; after the fix (for GCC, after 4.9) it would call the copy constructor. See http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/cwg_defects.html... .

For us, this changed the semantics of folly::dynamic, which used the initializer_list constructor to construct lists:

dynamic element = "hello";
dynamic list = {element}; // ["hello"] before, "hello" after

We had to deprecate the initializer_list constructor and fix all the occurrences (https://github.com/facebook/folly/commit/07dc3ce5923b2d761ca..., https://github.com/facebook/folly/commit/d458b0a14486b9d80d5...).
I did, though I can't edit it now sadly. And it's not that TLS isn't secure but about what features TLS gives the system.

The gist of this is that TLS doesn't give one a durable/persistable form of security vs ppk-sig's ability to verify that x signed y at any time. TLS is much faster than verifying the sig with every transaction on every node but after, say, a cluster restart the question of "who sent x" is answered via consensus and not cryptography.

There are a couple other issues too. Using ppk-sigs means that the mail clerk and the CEO use different keys to sign transactions vs TLS where you'd either have a logical "from:" field or a different connection for different users. Both of the TLS solutions have rather obvious flaws. Finally, a TLS based approach puts an attacker 1 server away from impersonating, potentially, an entire organization because the system using TLS cares only that it came via the correct pipe.

Overall I'd describe systems using TLS as not being paranoid enough about who authored a transaction, as PBFT/SmartBFT are by default very trusting of a client's transactions vs Bitcoin's model where everything is to be questioned/require independently verifiable cryptographic proof. Hence the tradeoff.
From the article: "Norway and Sweden, for example, make all tax returns publicly available. It’s harder to enjoy your illegal gains when your neighbors can easily check your lifestyle against your finances."

Is the article advocating neighbors to check on each other by snooping on tax returns and other stuff? feels misguided.
I think a manager was told to increase the value of the technology stack for a potential acqui-hire. In this case, the CTO may have "sell to Google" in mind.
please, if you had 10 years of experience in the language, read every article on C++11/14/17, followed closely the evolution of the language, the answer would have been obvious...

... ok, even I can't say that with a straight face.
I feel like that's inherit to the term "Do it yourself" and I'm not sure why people feel like they need to explain it every time someone has a DIY project.
Thanks, that is good insight. It's hard to know what to refer someone to when there are so many "intro to CS" classes listed.
C++ is hard. If one sticks to a strict subset it is a nice language. The problem is the code one didn't write. Even the STL is ugly to use. They are trying to fix the language by adding features but it's like Javascript, the old ugly ones are still part of the spec.
> eval ... makes me shudder

Why do you prefer using ``pip`` despite ``pip install`` using the package's ``setup.py`` (and therefore is an eval)?

Further, if you're using a package manager, I expect you won't be combing through the source to check for malicious code anyway.
> and insisting a default clause

It does not insist on a default clause it requires match completeness, which depending on the matched value may require a default clause (e.g. it does for integrals[0], it does not for enums as you can match each case individually)

> it's just like C's switch, right?

Only in its most simplistic form (though even then it does not ever fall through — whether by default or optionally — is type-safe and requires match-completeness), match performs refutable pattern matching on possibly complex values and allows additional per-match conditionals.

match foo {
// complex destructuring and multiple patterns for a case
Some((42, _)) | Some((55, _)) => { println!("1") }
// simple destructuring + conditional
Some(a) if a.0 % 5 == 0 => { println!("2") }
// matching + wildcard
Some(..) => { println!("3") }
// trivial matching
None => { println!("4") }
}

or

match (i % 3, i % 5) {
(0, 0) => {}
(0, _) => {}
(_, 0) => {}
_ => {}
}

[0] because the completeness checking doesn't really handle non-enum values currently
Agile is (in part) based on small iterations of tasks to eventually accomplish user stories, basically, right?

Can someone explain how this has anything to do with either administration work or building a physical appliance to sell to a customer who will be using it offline? Because while both have user stories, both are things that require you to not use the agile methodology.

When you're doing system/network/database/etc administration, you have a specific request or task to accomplish. But there is no iteration. There is no, let's do a little work and see how it evolves. If you're practiced, you know exactly what to do and how long it takes. So you just do it. Spending time updating boards and stories and tasks is a complete waste. Yet I've seen Agile shoved down the throats of teams who used to simply get shit done as fast as they could, and now go through some mandatory red tape to justify what they've been doing on short staff and no time for years.

When you have to sell someone a physical product, I just can't see Agile being very useful, mainly because of the iteration aspect. Yes, you could go through all the motions and provide full features over time and watch them grow with agile, but there's very few times I've seen a product designed from the beginning reach its target goals with any sort of a redesign. In my experience, what I have seen is the Agile method wasting everyone else's time, eventually requiring a redesign.

Story time: A meniacal team lead who's trying to make a name for himself in the company sees a way to save the company tens of millions by spending only one or two million on a product. But first we need to customize the product to work for our specific needs, which means writing middleware and customizing the interfaces to give our teams what they need to use the product. Basically, turn a kit car into an actual Ferrari with the 12 cylinder engine and everything. We take six months and actually mostly accomplish it - and then the maniac decides it's time for an upgrade, while teams are trying to learn how to drive this thing. The upgrade requires massive changes, but of course we're Agile, so we iterate and iterate until the Ferrari is now a Lamborghini. It's now been a year, and we're back where we were six months ago, only with a different looking car. Only one team managed to drive the Chimera in that time.

The fallacy of iterating on user stories is that the user knows what they want, the product lead knows how to get there without it becoming obsolete, and the developers will magically replace whole systems by iterating over features that they already know will not be changing before the product is done.

Personally, I think anyone could come up with any methodology at all and they would have exactly the same success as with any other methodology. The only thing that makes it all work are teams who get their shit done and have the bigger picture in mind, and help each other. But you don't even need a methodology at that point.

Agile just seems like so many pie charts for managers, and a buzzword to repeat to gain relevance.
Size constraints and the need to be able to smoothly scale to a wide variety of screen sizes.
Vim/neovim: Arbitrary command execution (CVE-2016-1248)
Exactly!

This should be wrappable by a React Native Component, it really is screaming for somebody to do that...
I'm holding out for the one with "special offers" pricing :D
Common Lisp Music has the best piano synth out of any of the music generation packages I've ever used:

http://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/clm/
I definitely agree that it's a skill to be learnt and it's something I enjoy.

Is it really useful to do it all the time though? Like there must sometimes be edge cases where people will achieve more alone, e.g. if it's something simple/repetitive, isn't it more productive to just hammer through?
Sometimes it is easy to miss them while climbing!
Most Students Don’t Know When News Is Fake, Stanford Study Finds
"my" is the key word there...

Your argument sounds like "A man shouldn't be allowed to marry a man because I don't want to marry a man"
Excellent resource. I'm almost at the end of Andrew Ng's ML course on Coursera and was looking to learn more about convex optimization. I will definitely try out some of the links there (Machine Learning > misc machine learning topics)
I got lucky and was able to pick up a lack table with the bottom support and wheels for cheaper than the regular lack table. Use them to house a 4u server and my amp.
This is really dissonant to read. White geese, yes: territorial and ill-tempered. But the Canada geese I've known have been polite almost to a fault. Protective of their young -- but in a very civilised fashion. When I was a kid, I got to know one family of Canada geese particularly well, and after a while they were politely waiting their turn to literally eat out of my hand. Really lovely creatures.
Google’s Real-Time will tell you exactly how busy a place is before you arrive
Constitutional amdendments require ratification by 3/4 of states. 20/50 states voted for Clinton. That is still quite a high bar.
In our startup, the biggest cost is bandwidth. We live in an age where videos can be created and streamed in seconds to millions of people. With so high cost for bandwidth, it's very difficult for bootstrapped startups to grow as quickly as those who raise VC funding. I hope AWS can reduce the outgoing bandwidth cost by 50%.
>What an amount of negativity!

Sad but true, if you don't have constructive feedback to someone's DIY project, why bother giving it? Maybe it's a great invention, or maybe it's a horrible one that is their stepping stone to that great one later on. Encouragement really helps DIYers and inventors as a whole.
I think there is something to be said for the author's argument that time and motive are crucial factors for a historian to write, but:

> The exception is Brasidas. Brasidas, brave defender of Methone, and thus “the first man in this war to receive the official honors of Sparta” (2.25). Brasidas, whose strategems almost defeated the Athenians at sea (2.86-87). Brasidas, the daring leading who almost stormed the fort at Pylos (4.12). Brasidas, the savior of Megara (4.70-73). Brasidas, the only Spartan eloquent and wise enough to raise all of Thessaly into revolt (4.84). Brasidas, the general who defeated Thucydides.

I think this is really too reductionist, but also inaccurate. Thucydides did not enlarge Brasidas out of a motive of glorifying himself in his defeat: Brasidas never defeated Thucydides, who in fact arrived too late to assist. Brasidas' record largely speaks for itself. That said, he was exiled because the Athenians blamed him for the defeat - probably unjustly and for political reasons. If anything, his unjust exile was his major motivation, and he in fact spent a lot of time among the Peloponnesians afterward
I have the answer for you:

songsster.com

It's free, it's like Wikipedia in that anyone can edit it (so crappy transcriptions get replaced eventually by better ones), it even plays the song for you. The only bad thing is that it uses Flash.
The trouble you describe is, kid you not, one of the foundations for the technique Wes Montgomery developed of brushing with his thumb.

I can genuinely say that for about $100 a person can get a PC or Mac sound card that enables 1/4" guitar line-in, probably comes with ProSumer level amp modeling and a DAW license, a set of headphones, and explore a world of tone and recording and jamming along. I also completely agree that doing so is very, very different than filling a room with the din of a jangly tune or distorted growl. Finding a practice space though is as old as I can remember, because between parents, room mates, neighbors...police...people tend to like listening to music but not the practicing part it takes to get good haha.
AWS to launch Aurora PostgreSQL
It is amazing to me how little of the Chinese historical classics are widely available in the US in affordable, accessible editions. Part of this is the longer history of Classical studies, so contemporary scholars have to compete with the public domain.

But the main English edition of "Records of the Grand Historian" is Burton Watson's translation, which heavily excerpts the material to focus on the Qin dynasty, rather than including some of the more mythological information about the Zhou.
C works great, as an alternate to assembler, to bootstrap unix up on meager, 80s style, hardware.

Based on things like the shell tools and languages like awk (and other related descendants), I don't think even the unix creators meant for much application level work to be done in C, though, but by assembling components in higher level languages. Try telling that to The Management and all the macho/masochistic Real Programmers, though. Bounds checking? Memory management? (names you can identify to the left of the types, like in Algol, instead of to the right?) That's for sissies!
Offensive lineman have to know a ton about the play being run, whether they should pull left or right, who he's responsible for blocking, if he should drive block the man up or chip and work to get in front of a linebacker, etc.

Receivers have to be on the same page as the qb as to what is getting done and how they'll adjust based on coverage.

Running backs usually don't have to do a lot of thinking, they're more reactive, initial responsibilities and steps set but changes quickly as the play develops.

Thats not to say anything about the above except that FB is in many ways the most "team" of team sports with vastly different body types, roles and responsibilities at play. If you can't make an analogy related to business work within a gridiron (american) football context, you probably can't make it work :)
Maybe not the biggest breakthrough ever, but it does fill a gap. Animations like this on the web really weren't possible without either using Flash or SMIL. A completely JavaScript based solution is very welcome.
It's technology that enables the problem, not the actors. Technology can advance a position on a matter well ahead of anyone else at that moment, giving the actor temporary power over others. While most won't use this for their own gain, some will and do. If we want to stop this problem, we're going to need a way to slow technology down, at least when interacting with itself.
Even with 100kb (assuming it's not only text), 1mln pageviews per month across all sites will bring you to 100GB, a point where a small vps at DO/Vultr/Hetzner/OVH would be cheaper than AWS. And since he was talking of several pages, 1mln pageviews isn't even a very popular page.
Why does the software license [1] include the following clause:

> provided Your Software does not consist solely of the Software

Why didn't you guys choose MIT or BSD? It feels like the custom Facebook license is close to the intent of these, but it has that mysterious gotcha.

In any case, thanks for the software! It looks really slick, and I definitely have a use case for using it to replace the sprite sheet I used for Donald Trump on jungle.horse.

[1] https://github.com/facebookincubator/Keyframes/blob/master/L...
Sometimes I find it easier to find good conference talks than to wade through a lot of these classes, but some of them overlap with what I took in school.
I wholeheartedly agree. The bandwidth cost reduction is long overdue.
Any plans to wrap this in a React Native Component (either as custom component or a part of the RN distro?)
The Backwards Brain Bicycle (2015)
Looks like it could be really useful. How difficult would it be to replace the audio to a live stream? Or for that matter the background as a live video?
> Yes, but this function you defined, that applies tens of judgements to select a "random" number, is based on a random number input itself. The random part is just the seed, it then passes through various neural nets that expand on it and turn it into a plausible answer.

On what basis do you make this claim? Humans are empirically terrible random number generators. If you ask someone to pick a random number, the result is very not random. Our biases are large and obvious, so it seems faulty to claim that our "seed" number is in any way truly random.

> Randomness is injected into all brain processes on account that biological neurons are stochastic. So there is an amount of randomness mixed into everything the brain does.

There's also some amount of randomness in what happens if you drop a rock but the net result is largely the same: it falls down. The fact that there is some randomness to a process does not mean that the randomness is actually driving the process.

> Some neural nets can map real images into a Gaussian, and back. That means they disentangle the factors of the image into a mix of independent factors that map into the standard deviation. Any set of random numbers could be converted back into an image, by the reverse process.

I don't see how this is relevant.
> And since this Pipfile is just a bunch of function calls

That hasn't been settled yet. It's being actively discussed [0].

> Or is the idea to eventually get rid of setup.py?

Yes, a replacement for setup.py has already been agreed on in PEP 518 [1]. It's called pyproject.toml.

[0] https://github.com/pypa/pipfile/issues/10

[1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0518/