skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I question the assumption that this would fail outright. It would likely result in a hybrid visible/invisible transactions.

Look at how the underground economy of drugs uses commodities like detergent [1]. This would just take that economy to the next level. Clearly to prevent currency from failing outright, going cashless would likely result in the ban (effective or not) of cryptocurrencies and the like.

[1] http://nymag.com/news/features/tide-detergent-drugs-2013-1/
Now I'm going to have to watch the movie this weekend as a flood of memories of my childhood have come back (on how much I enjoyed it in 1983...)
"The complexity and learning curve of vim will kill the project"

"The complexity and learning curve of Emacs will kill the project"

"The complexity and learning curve of LaTex will kill the project"

"The complexity and learning curve of Sendmail will kill the project" <-- The only one that's partially true and it took 35 years.
Literally, the age old wisdom holds true: "The fish rots from the head down".
> Well yes, but surely that's something that cash does even better, isn't it?

[...]

> Agree re credit cards, but I never carry a balance, they're just a payment mechanism.

I think you just answered your own question.

For most people here (Holland), a credit card is not a 'default' (and so many people don't even have one). We still use our debit card all the time because it's so much more convenient as payment method than messing around with cash.

Over the past few years they've been rolling out contactless payment, which is even better. You see the amount of a screen, swipe your card, and only after x transactions or over a certain amount are you asked to use the chip and enter your PIN. I'm pretty sure most of these machines also allow you to use your phone (or watch) to pay for things, but that's not as common yet.

Or another example: one of the big supermarket chains here has been rolling out self-checkout kiosks at many of their stores, making the process even easier: take the stuff you want, scan it, swipe your card, and just walk away!
> This second mode of money is essentially private, running off an infrastructure collectively controlled by profit-seeking commercial banks and a host of private payment intermediaries – like Visa and Mastercard – that work with them. The data inscriptions in your bank account are not state money.

This raises a question in my mind which probably shows my ignorance of finance more than anything, but here goes:

Why not just have a public system of electronic transactions?

What I mean is, the current system of electronic transactions feels to me a lot like the way things were back in Ye Olden Days with cash. Cash didn't start out as state money, it started out as private money -- notes issued by individual banks, promising to pay the recipient in coin or specie on behalf of the bearer. (Which is why paper money is still referred to in some places as "bank notes.")

Which was fine for a long time, but as commerce got bigger and more widely distributed, it reached a point where it didn't scale anymore. Every note was only as dependable as the bank it was drawn on, and the farther away the transaction was from that bank the harder that reliability was to evaluate -- uncertainty which added risk to transactions. So governments started removing that uncertainty by organizing central banks and issuing their own notes, which became the paper currency we all know today.

Fast forward to now. We have modern cash, which has all the virtues the article cites; and we have a separate system of online payments which lacks those virtues, run by private companies who take a non-trivial piece of every transaction for themselves. Those drawbacks weren't too important when electronic payments were a new thing, because it wasn't clear then that they would ever be more than a niche product for the convenience of rich people. But now they're everywhere, and it seems inevitable that at some point they'll become the universal method of payment.

So why not do like we did with bank notes and cut out the middleman? Why not have electronic payments systems operated by governments, in the same way that they print currency? It seems like it could solve a lot the of problems with a cashless society at a stroke, and help the economy to boot by returning the percentage of each transaction that used to go to the banks back to productive circulation.

(The cynical part of me says that the reason is because the middlemen in this case are banks, and in the modern world banks tell governments what to do rather than the other way around.)
Look at it from my perspective. I deploy elasticsearch, hazelcast, mysql, apache, haproxy, maxscale, diamond, and a lot of other stuff. All of these applications except diamond are out of my reach to really change. Thus, it becomes natural to accept the software as it is and build workarounds, because you cannot change these applications.

And then there's that one in-house application. It's easy to just lump it into the pile of crap we need to deploy and maintain and handle it in the same way we handle the other services.

And at least at this shop, this was reinforced further for some time. We in ops had two choices: Either, we block a release for hard reasons, no matter how close we'd have to look for them, then we'd get some bandaid quickly. Or we could attempt to explain a highly technical issue or a really weird configuration glitch to some entirely non-technical product management, who put it on the latter half of the "never happens" backlog inside the round ticket storage, which is groomed daily by the room services.

At this point, just scripting around bullshit costs me like 2 hours to do, while all that other nonsense easily costs days and days.

But yeah, all of this is being mediated because devs now see the amount of nonsense we have to do, and they can relate this nonsense with their own testing problems, their own dev setup problems and overall, both teams start to support each other against sales and PM.
I get: "Your access to this site has been limited". "Reason: Access from your area has been temporarily limited for security reasons.".
Pee in the Pool: What You Should Know, What You Should Do
There's two things working against this theory.

First, such systems only work in the presence of a unit of account, because otherwise it's impossible to coherently price items in a pure unlike-for-unlike barter system. The unit of account would, of course, be money. So what you're talking about isn't a collapse of the money system, but black markets. When you say "people who want to keep their transactions off the books will use black markets," it sounds much less prophetic.

Second, the value of state money is maintained by the state's ability to levy taxes, and the state only accepts tax payments in its own money. For people living "on the grid" in a country with a credible government, this means that most of their economic action has to happen in the state's money. Since people have to, at the very least, acquire enough money to pay their taxes, and most people don't want to put up with multiple systems of exchange.

Not coincidentally, this is also the biggest hurdle for serious adoption of cryptocurrencies.
Some also prefer living in a large city, and cannot afford a living room you can park a hobby aircraft in.
While reading the account, it seems the Manager is from India perhaps?

Edit: I am an Indian and it is a big deal in India to wear "revealing clothes", albeit I have no idea what a tank top is neither do I care

Just FYI do you don't assume that I am a sexist and downvote me.
And then track down a Sony Betamax player and transfer the VHS tape to Beta and watch it like that until the tape degrades and ends up unwinding inside the machine and you have to take the machine apart to detangle the mess from the record/playback heads.
Neat, but what's with the notifications permission? Notifications are pretty intrusive and turned me off of your site - is there a good reason you need them?
Tokyo University puts out some seriously badass researchers. Think Caltech, MIT, and ETH Zürich quality.
The Genera terminal, or "listener" was a real eye opener for me the first time I used it. It can display rich text and images, has mouseable elements like buttons and editable forms, and has a powerful incremental online help system. It's almost like a kind of scrolling desktop.

The thing I really liked was that the console output was independent of the input line. You can start typing in a command, hit <help> and have the (rich, hypertext) documentation appear in the console above where you are typing in. You don't have to delete everything and type man foo like in Unix, only to have the man page disappear when you quit.

Simply in terms of usability the Genera listener craps on any Unix or Windows terminal I have used.
> What's particularly odd about these stories coming out from Uber is that there are so many of them in a single company.

No, it's not. When toxic ideas are given a place at a company, only people who are toxic will embrace the toxic ideas enough to survive as managers. The non-toxic people either knuckle under, but don't fully "live the values" of the company, which shows. Or, they leave or are "managed out" of the organization.

Toxic management seems to happen when a company's management lives in an echo chamber made up of only themselves, and more than one member of that group has a personality disorder.

I had a similar experience with, sadly, a company with whom Y-Combinator leaders are still involved. The words "If you don't want to work in the way we want to work, you should just leave right this minute in good grace or you'll lose the fight and you'll be unemployable" (said in a meeting, by a C-level leader, in answer to an innocuous and helpful question) still echo in my mind.
> The idea there was ok, they'll torture, murder, and abuse their people for a while, but at least as long as the capital revolves, eventually people will get Democracy.

Does anybody really believe that's the real reason?

> that's why we tell everyone "We export Democracy" we fight for "Democracy" and so on.

I think we tell everyone that as propaganda.
The post doesn't say anything about ongoing community development, I guess because there is basically none? Maybe I'm not looking in the right places, but I see very little activity in https://github.com/mozilla-b2g or https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/c/b2g-os-participati... or https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-fxos ... am I looking in the wrong places?

I'm sad FxOS didn't carry on and really appreciate the writeup!
Australian man arrested under Australia gun laws for 3D printing replica guns
American Healthcare system micro-aggressions, or death by a thousand cuts
+1 for pen and paper at school. Didn't touch a computer until I was 15 and didn't do me any harm.
I don't have numbers but in general I'd call it no less usable than X forwarding over ssh. For a long time I used to connect to a Japanese Plan 9 server using drawterm (a Windows/Linux application which essentially emulates the /dev/draw infrastructure) and it was pretty decent considering the latency--I used it to read email, follow IRC, and write code. Over a LAN, it's so fast as to be indistinguishable from something running on your local machine.
The Chip+PIN system includes an offline mode, which is especially suitable for small transactions like this.

"The transaction is authorized either online and offline. For an online authorization, transactions proceed as they do today in the U.S. with magnetic stripe cards. The transaction information is sent to the issuer, along with a transaction-specific cryptogram, and the issuer either authorizes or declines the transaction. In an offline EMV transaction, the card and terminal communicate and use issuer-defined risk parameters that are set in the card to determine whether the transaction can be authorized. Offline transactions are used when terminals do not have online connectivity (e.g., at a ticket kiosk) or in countries where telecommunications costs are high."

http://www.emv-connection.com/emv-faq/

It's in wide use in Europe, for instance a ticket machine on a train or tram, or for low-value transactions (bus tickets, fast food), or where there's no connection (purchase on a plane -- where they will probably only accept credit cards beyond a certain amount).
Interview with WhatsApp
Why aren't managers graded on retention? If you lose too many people you're penalized or fired.
Nothing like a television to make your room look garish! Or to ruin the potential to hang out or go on and do something else.
This isn't about the content but the structure and explaining the intuition behind algorithms. There are insights behind every algorithm which needs to be put down explicitly in simple English; not mathematical symbols. A course should be accessible to everyone given the prerequisites. Just because a course is easy for me, does not mean its a good course. The Hinton course is not palatable and you can clearly see that in the discussion forums.

Andrew Ng's CS229 course goes beyond the mathematics and explains the magic behind these algorithms. Unfortunately, I know many people who use the mathematics trope to not share these insights and keep them closely guarded to their chest.
The USA rules are interesting for this. If you marry a non-US spouse you will not have these problems. You cannot BRING a spouse or fiancé to the US without the minimum financial requirements. But once they are in the country one (like if you married a tourist), you would not have these problems nor are they being proposed. It is relatively easy to bring your spouse or fiance to the USA.

I know someone whose spousal visa was under processing and the spouse was out of the country. He suffered a stroke and her visa was expedited with the doctor's note to help him in his healing. I think the US system is quite reasonable. The UK system does not seem like that.

In the UK they wanted to deport a spouse because the husband did not make enough money.
Tie one arm behind your back.

Try to do the stuff you've been doing but without the resources that have been at your disposal. Build a simple Twitter clone API using only C APIs. Roll your own HTML layout renderer in Open GL. What if NGINX and Apache didn't exist? What would you do then?

Watch "Halt and Catch Fire" as an engineer. Listen to the problems they're solving and try to solve them yourself.

At the end of the day, hacking is about creative problem solving.
Latest Aphex Twin EP (1) was sold on cassettes, so you are not far off :)

(1) https://warpnet-media.s3.amazonaws.com/86a1a1adb9a901ee16566...
In Japan, vending machines that take Pasmo and similar smart cards are pretty common. But Japan is pretty much an outlier AFAIK in its extremely widespread use of this type of technology.
Claims an order of magnitude performance increase over react, inferno, preact, & vue. Looks interesting.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but I think it's just the gradient?
For clarity, guns were non functional replicas.
I can remember looking through computer magazines copying code into my TI/4A around that time. Even though I had to convert it from C64 code. Damn PEEK and POKE....
Paper trail?

What are you hiding citizen? Nothing to hide, nothing to fear.
You will enjoy watching this then:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9wsjroVlu8
I go to less than half of happy hours or other team "outings."

That way I'm not cast as "anti-social" and I don't let people start to expect me to go to each one.

Useful excuses coughliescough

- a simple, "sorry, I already have plans."

- friend or family member in from out of town

- oh, I've got <some exercise class or hobby> tonight
> Steven P. Jobs

Who?
> Why would I want to borrow money (and risk owing interest), if I already have money readily accessible via my debit card?

Because if your credit card is used fraudulently, you tell the credit card company, they disallow the charges, and nothing comes out of your pocket.

If your debit card is used fraudulently, the money comes direct from your bank account, and you get to find out how much work it is to get that money back--and in the meantime, you don't have it.
There's a reason I said foldr. In Haskell, even foldl is implemented with foldr. It's that powerful of a tool. In contrast, foldl is far weaker, and necessarily strict in its input. It loses nothing moving to mandatory strictness. But foldr loses everything.
Ash HN: KVM vs. Xen (as of 2017)
Has KVM/Qemu become the de facto for server virtualization in Linux or are there new deployments/users of Xen ?
Question about the standard HSA, you say I can invest and withdraw with no penalties unlike a 401k. Is that true?

What are you guys doing to make it easier, specifically for small business to leverage your product?
That sounds about right.

At the shallowest level, we can't pass `m ()` to forkIO unless m ~ IO, 'cause the types don't match.

But beyond that, there is the question of how that extra context would be passed through. For something like ReaderT this is straightforward. But consider StateT - `set` in one thread can't be visible in the other.
I recently purchased a Dell Precision 5520 because its linux support is terrific (or, it was on the 5510). If they pull this off then the next laptop I buy will almost certainly be a razer. No question.
I don't understand why they decided that Firefox OS would be a good fit for low-end hardware, when they had empirical evidence of how poorly webOS performed.

Firefox OS and webOS are essentially the same concept. Palm built theirs for 2009 top-end hardware, and it turned out that the hardware just wasn't quite enough to run a browser engine for the entire UI... And then Mozilla goes ahead and tries to do the same thing on low-end hardware that was worse than the Palm Pre.

What was the rationale here? I can only imagine this choice was imposed by the hardware partners they could round up. If so, it's a classic example of how engineering and business development manage to undermine each other to destroy a product.
There IS something inherent about culture that leads to a greater incident rate of sexual harrasment. Most likely these are not racial Indians born and raised in US culture, who I would expect to have a sexual misconduct % no different from their white or black peers, but immigrants from India where there are higher incidents of sexual misconduct then Western nations at the moment.
Never saw that as a kid but I bought this DVD[1] last summer for $5 at WalMart just for The Wizard. Gonna check it out now (right after I re-watch Ghost Dad)

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Family-Favorites-Collection-Henry-Tho...
I don't follow. When the book was written it was System 7 days. That's about as far removed from UNIX as you can get. This book was also before Linux was really on the radar outside of enthusiasts. You'd get 386BSD on a CD-ROM, FreeBSD was just released by Walnut Creek. This book was mostly a response to the absolutely atrocious landscape of commercial UNIX... the catalyst for Windows NT tremendous success.
Plus, problems like this are known by many but talked about by few. One person goes public, and that triggers years of similar experiences that have been built up suddenly flooding out.
Well, I think I'll refrain from buying razer because of this: https://mobile.twitter.com/internetofshit/status/83665111681...
Or "The culture of any organization is shaped by the worst behavior the leader is willing to tolerate.”
PJ MCFANCYDANCE for #standup2cancer
Well, the browser already did replace Unix for most people=( Presumably we'd be trying to design something good and not awful though, so lets not stop there. But it does give us a starting point:

+ one click installation of applications

+ applications are always up to date

+ applications are sandboxed

Then, since we want users to be able to tinker:

+ the source for all software installed through this mechanism is available

+ optional binary caches NixOS style so it's not slow

And while we're talking about NixOS:

+ immutable package directory so you can rollback at will

And then on to data storage, which is my favorite topic:

+ defaults to tags instead of a hierarchy for organization

+ everything is schema'd, so a file saying it's a contact entry or whatever actually has to be that thing

+ data is immutable by default, so undo and versioning can be built-in (you could still turn this off for certain tasks like video-editing where immutability isn't feasible)

I have more thoughts on data storage here if anyone's interested: https://juniorschematics.com/
what are you implying?
For me, it was realizing that I wasn't any better or worse than the other people on the team, and that my opinion was just as valuable when discounted by my experience level.

Before that, I was always reluctant to speak up, or express any strong opinions, because I was always surrounded by people who appeared to have their shit together and were very confident and forceful about expressing their opinions. I've probably overcompensated since, but finally allowing myself to feel that freedom to just say, "No, I think that's not the right way, we should try this instead," has allowed me to progress much farther than any technical achievement I could name.
Indeed. The attitude that world is full of interesting problems to solve is the basis of the hacker mindset.

Thanks for suggesting Halt And Catch Fire. It looks great.
> I can't imagine using a haskell-like language without laziness. It's what makes it possible to actually write small reusable functions.

I don't understand your point. Why is laziness a requirement to write small reusable functions? Are you thinking about currying?

OCaml is (relatively) similar to Haskell and is not lazy. Function currying does not require laziness.
The way things are: a story of intrigue and corruption, deceit and murder
Sure. As an "exempt" employee, the assumption is your option to leave and find another job is your protection against mistreatment. Of course there are some specific things that the company can't do, but demanding longer hours isn't one of them.
I think she was the one not making enough money, not the husband. I think, these laws can get very complicated.
>> I know this is completely untrue because I wear this tank top almost every day and am close with him and members of his team (we eat lunch together and even go on the occasional run for ice cream).

You wear the same shirt everyday?
Eventide want to change how you think about processing audio
1. Do you support individual/non-employer accounts?

2. What are the investment options for the accounts? Can I put it into low-fee Vanguard index funds?

3. Can I roll over from an existing HSA provider, and if so, how painless do you make that?
So... Tina's an asshole/jerk/bitch, but where's the sexism?! (I'm not disputing sexism in Susan Fowler's case.)
It seems like to get your mobile OS into the door, you need to have your foot into two doors- competitively priced, cheap phones to snap up underserved demographics (in this case, developing world markets), but also a flagship device to enthrall the upper tier of the market and get name recognition.

Seems like Ubuntu Touch is also facing such struggles ticking both boxes (they still don't have a flagship product, especially after the failure of the Ubuntu Edge campaign), and Windows Phone had some impressive Lumia phones with fancy cameras but I don't recall that they ever tried to fight Android on the lower end of the market.
In the times where most of the things are cloud tools, what are the advantages of having a WP APP installed in the laptop instead of using the native backoffice?
Thanks!
Great stuff!

"Were you surprised when you started getting charged a monthly fee for your HSA when you left your employer? Yeah, so were we!"
-- this surprised a friend of mine. I sent this his way.

Any plans to offer investment options as part of the HSA?