skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This raises an interesting question: is there a way to perfectly insure yourself? Or rather, a company that you pay to insure you for everything?

My understanding of insurance is that if there's say 1/100 chance of some event costing you 100 dollars, then you might pay $5 at some rate for some period of time to protect you in the case that the event occurs, costing you 100 bucks.

However, if you knew the odds of certain somewhat expected events in your life were, how could you capitalize on that? You could save, but generally people don't make enough for that to be worthwhile.
Could you upgrade the cheap model, or is the takeaway that the expensive options aren't really valuable?
There are already versions out there on github that have windows support built in, I've used it on windows. I also had problems with it however.
I could do so, but unfortunately I can no longer read your comment. If you're seriously interested in figuring out what's faulty in your approach, let me know and we can try to reconstruct this discussion.
Tried to look up modern memory latency numbers but could not find. Because "numbers every programmer should know" are about 10 years old as I understand.
This is fantastic. If the properties and aesthetics are good, I can see a lot of demand driving the filament manufacturers to adopt this material. Paste-like extruders for open-source machines exist on the market today for chocolate and clay.

Only concern for me is it sounds like post-processing is required.
Almost everyone I know in tech in the Bay Area isn't like you describe... some of those things are true about some folks, but on the whole, most tech workers are not stuck in the tech community bubble.
"In a statement, he said he was moving back to Kansas, where he is from, to explore politics. His exit has been in the works for some time, and his last day at Uber is March 28."
Ironically, when discussing the NYT and fake news, one might make a strong case with Judith Miller's reporting on Iraq, or Wen Ho Lee. There's lots of scandals where major outlets have pursued obviously agenda driven stories to the point of journalistic malpractice. But what Sparkzilla sees as fake news is the most literal reporting on the most straightforward example on which there's almost no disagreement by anyone else.
The stack traces are more than twenty deep sometimes.

Haven't counted but I think this is totally not unusual when I work on Java which I consider a modern stack.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Don't be ridiculous. Insurance companies exchange a guaranteed coverage of some risk at a calculated cost by pooling risk. Gambling is a repeated game tilted the house's favour where the players can lose big with every turn of the wheel. There is nothing guaranteed to the players other than the fact that over a long enough time frame they will certainly lose and over short times they may also lose.

It should be noted of course that gambling is generally not illegal as long as the government (read: the people) is benefiting. Whether one agrees with gambling as a tax or not is another discussion. Unregulated gambling is typically illegal because it benefits no one.
This isn't Reddit, if you have nothing of value to add then don't post.

Yes, this entire post is about generalizations. I figured that was sort of implied.
Planned obsolescence is a myth, ever seen a leaked memo where people discuss planned obsolescence?

It's just there's no incentive to make products last past warranty, so it doesn't happen.

Anyway, ever tried to move a 40 year old fridge? Good luck to your back.

They are also not very energy efficient.

But yes, TCO is a interesting topic we humans and markets can often get wrong.
Bitcoin Unlimited is at the moment the dominant version, as measured by mined blocks: https://coin.dance/blocks

The vast majority are picking a side for political reasons - "Core" is embracing censorship as method to push their client, Unlimited believes in open discussion.

This is best exemplified on Reddit, where /r/bitcoin is moderated, heavily, by core, but /r/btc has a no-censorship policy.

This makes the technical differences between the two almost irrelevant, most are picking a side because they don't (or do) believe in censorship.

"Bitcoin" is normally defined as whatever is the longest continuous chain of blocks, which if the current state of affairs continues, will be Bitcoin Unlimited. But somehow Core have managed to stake a claim to the name "Bitcoin", which is going to cause massive confusion if a fork happens.
Why don't you explain to us how, since everything core has done so far has been total garbage. The rhetoric is always the same, lies and half truths with no technical backing at all. You didn't bother to explain anything and risk exposing technically hollow arguments, you just plunked down a meaningless title you've given yourself and declared that it somehow makes you right.
I've been in a similar situation once [0], though it was really my own fault rather than being duped. Quitting fairly soon (after 7 months, IIRC) was definitely the right thing to do. I did it without arranging for a new job first, which was probably not the smart thing to do.

[0] https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2015-09-01-the-most-ob...
The article appears to have been deleted. Wonder why.
Buy, rehab, rent, refinance distressed residential property. I also manage two commercial properties.

I was born into it, but then didn't want to do it after college. I got back into it because I saw an opportunity that was too good to miss and I took it, now I'm hooked and expanding.

Some of the reasons I stayed away have changed. Just one example, paints used to be fairly heavily laden with VOCs and breathing that stuff is terrible for you for a number o reasons. Now zero/low-voc paint is really good and cheap. I wouldn't have wanted to paint an entire interior of a house with that stuff back then, now I am like Michaelangelo and the house I am working on is like my Sistine Chapel :)
He actually has about 13 million weekly listeners.

The weekly audience of The New York Times is likely 3-4x larger. Details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13911658.
Not "proud of what you're doing", but "proud of how you're conducting yourself". Make sure you can walk out at 5pm holding your head high thinking "All things considered, I gave them good value for what they paid me today".

Also consider that "the fastest way which is usually a bad hack" is sometime the correct pragmatic approach for a legacy codebase that's in the process of being replaced. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, think about whether the elegant design is really necessary if there's a ground-up rewrite about to happen.

Even if it's demonstrably true that they've been "claiming" a rewrite is "just about to start" for a _long_ time, sometime's that's just as frustrating a thing for management as it os for the coders - management may well honestly have always believed this rewrite was supposed to have started 12-18 months ago, and that it genuinely is only weeks away from starting... Just like they believed last month and six months ago... I've _been_ "that manager" before (and I'm sure I will be again).
If you were truly lied to, then at the least you should out the company because this is unacceptable - especially given that they had you move across the country for this. If they don't face any consequences for what they did, then they'll continue to exploit others like they did to you.
Yes, although it is likely that there won't be a 'BTU', bitcoin unlimited's protocol changes will be the majority of the mining hashpower and so the miner will carry on with the normal bitcoin chain having a dynamic blocksize limit.
I found this on Hacker News and found it useful
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13523943
Insurance is useful for low-probability high-consequence events, where the payout could be many years of salary.

It's true that in aggregate, insurance buyers lose, but no specific insurance buyer lives in aggregate. Either you have that $500,000 claim, or you don't. The only way to self-insure is to have $500,000 on hand.

>if you knew the odds of certain somewhat expected events in your life were, how could you capitalize on that

If you know that something has a 50% chance of happening across 100,000 people, you write insurance policies such that you can deal with it happening about 50,000 times.

If an event has a 50% chance of happening for you, preparing by saving 25% of its cost isn't going to help much. Expected value calculations don't make sense for N=1.
Some of them have them in a plastic sleeve inside the machine. Others you can find online. They're intended for repairmen.
I am 29, my parents stove+oven already existed when I was born.

I already had to deal with new ones 4 times, including one I personally purchased when I lived alone for a while... None of them ever got close to the 'granny' version my parents have in quality, the stove I bought never really pleased me.

I think it is just sad...

My parents also have older than me:
Photo Camera with cool interesting lenses.
A VHS player.
Programmable calculators.

Also one of my dad favourite computers, that he is still using, is a now 13 year old HP laptop... He happily uses WinXP and the newest Ubuntu in it without issue, and use it as his main coding computer, because despite being 13 years old, it works better than any of his new laptops, it doesn't misbehave, don't get slow out of the blue, and is just more useable and sturdy... he only uses his most new laptop when he needs beefier amounts of RAM and CPU, but for day to day stuff, the 13 year laptop somehow is faster. (I am not even sure how or why, but it is, I also used that laptop myself for a long time).
I should clarify that's over 20 deep of our code , not counting all the framework stuff.
it's funny how westerners in general have been completely brainwashed to think insurance is always good and useful and that insurance fraud by insurers against massive pools of those they ensure is just a small problem that is the necessary cost of 'doing business'.

if insurance is so useful and good why can't it be profiteable without massive tax subsidies that it has succesfully lobbied for from government? perhaps you can ask warren buffet....
Pebble had its own OS, the various fitness trackers have their own OS, I don't necessarily see things as grim as the author makes them out to be.

Especially if it lets the device last longer than 24-48 hours on a single charge.
I've got a book called "Game Programming Patterns" by Robert Nystrom which goes into this. It's not advanced, but it's very good.
You can't upgrade the cheap models unless you found a way to buy the control panel and fit it to your appliance. Which might look pretty Frankenstein.
> I really don't think there's much difference between learning as an adult or a teenager. It's just that we have less time.

I am a 40-year-old full time student with a kid, but no job. I disagree completely. I've got the time. When I was 20, I remembered everything I saw or heard even once. I could recall it with ease. Concepts came easily when they were explained in text or in lecture. Now? I'm still plenty smart and usually get the best grade in my class, but I have to work hard for it, where before I never worked at all at it. I have to spend time actually memorizing things. I have to take time to think about concepts in order to understand them. (Weird, right?)

As far as I can tell, the only real advantages I have over my younger self are that I am better disciplined and I appreciate my education more.
x-post of one of my reddit post. (disclaimer: I am employed by Blockstream)

It's helpful to evaluate the contribution of Blockstream developers to Bitcoin Core versus other non-Blockstream developers in the last year. Let's see

Greg Maxwell: 46

Jorge Timon: 17

Pieter Wuille: 163 (the only developer at Blockstream dedicated full time to Core development)

Mark Friedenbach: 0

Patrick Strateman: 31

Warren Togami: 6

Adam Back: 0

Greg Sanders: 32

Glenn Willen: 0

Total commits for listed Blockstream developers: 295

Wladimir Van Der Laan: 210

Marco Falke: 170

Corey Fields: 152

Jonas Schnelli: 87

Suhas Daftuar: 73

Alex Morcos: 65

fanquake: 56

Pavel Janik: 45

Total commits for listed non-Blockstream developers: 858

So about 35%. 15% if we remove Pieter, but I can confidently say everyone at Blockstream is hugely proud of his contributions and in no way shape or form are we interested in diminishing his accomplishment. From my perspective he has been the single most important contributor to Bitcoin development for many years now.

In short, this narrative is a huge disrespect to every other contributors building the software we all depend on. The obsession of certain people to lend power to specific individuals is simply an attempt to shut down their ideas by attacking their character.

--

I would add that most of the Core contributors working at Blockstream had been contributing before the company was founded and certainly did not "infiltrate the Bitcoin development team".

The previous lead developer had barely contributed anything before he quit out of his own volition after a series of failed attempt to politicize Bitcoin and force through a contentious hard fork. The last straw was of course when he was naively led to believe that notorious scam artist Craig Wright was Satoshi.

With regards to the "off-blockchain" solutions you refer to. Here's a couple of facts:

Fact 1: The Lightning Network was created by Bitcoin developers not involved with the Core project

Fact 2: No Core developer is involved in a business whose revenue model revolves around the success of the Lightning Network

Fact 3: There is very little profit to be made from operating the Lightning Network infrastructure/protocol.

Fact 4: The Lightning Network will happen regardless of the outcome of the current contention.

Fact 5: Bitcoin developers have no control over the consensus code being enforced by independent peers participating in the network. Bitcoin is a voluntary system.
Under deflation, there is decreasing motivation to work or produce. Why buy seeds to grow food when your money could just buy more later? A little inflation motivates people to produce, either by labor, investment or both.
(If you look at loss ratios in the insurance industry -- payouts and claim expenses over premiums collected -- it is closer to ~$1.20 in most fields, and coming down over time. Yay capitalism!)
You can read Gavin's writing directly. After all his contributions, the lies and manipulations by the current blockstream employees are pretty disgusting.

If you read /r/btc on reddit you can see a forum that in uncensored, unlike the HEAVILY censored and 'curated' (threads that don't go the way the mods want are sorted by controversial first) /r/bitcoin. Anyone on /r/bitcoin that says something alluding to censorship is banned and has their posts deleted. Anyone who mentions bitcoin unlimited is banned. The moderation logs are not open.
Insurance guarantees that you pay the expected value of the cost (plus some premium and buffer), dropping variance in exchange for a fee.

Gambling does the reverse, turning a fixed amount of money in to bursty payouts in exchange for a premium, adding variance.

One is basically the opposite of the other.

You can even use roulette as an event randomizer to make your trips to Vegas more exciting. (Games with probabilistic loot are more "fun" than predictable loot.)
I actually enjoy working on legacy code and improving it. I'm not suggesting you should enjoy it, it's just there's all kinds of engineers. The company should be hiring someone who does enjoy that sort of thing, and I suggest you look for another job that is closer to things you enjoy doing.
Notes on the Forrester “Wave”
This article was written the old fashioned way – from the command line
Walk away, please. It's clear that you hate your job. Do it now before you regret it anymore.
So Gavin, Mike Hearn and Jeff Garzik founded blockstream?
I will never use a smartwatch that won't last 4-5 days without charging.

It is the sole reason I gave in and got a Pebble; and now that my watch's hardware broke and the company was absorbed, I don't plan on buying another smartwatch unless I get an offer as good as that.

To achieve what they did, Pebble went with a low resolution screen and a low-power microcontroller with their own OS. If Swatch wants to do the same, they have my attention.
It wasn't; the link was malformed.
AI winter is coming
If all you've got are React and Typescript, you may be better off learning how to modernize old code. There's a glut of Javascript-only programmers. What's the old code written in?
Any plan to add the allocators used in modern browsers? bmalloc (webkit), which ever tcmalloc variant chrome currently uses, the current firefox allocator, I have no idea if edge has an allocator that is not the default windows one?
Two ways to keep a language lean (2015)
"This to me means that spyware might collect data at any time of the day via my TV, but it does not send it when the TV is off. At least when the TV is turned off, the CIA, or any other agent, cannot listen into my living room live via this TV."

This comment is irrelevent. If you read the wiki, it states that CIA infected TVs are put into "fake off" mode, which means screen/sound is black, but tv is on.
What's the legacy codebase, if I may ask (unless it identifies the company too much)?
I've had many cars with electric windows. They all eventually failed, usually when it was raining, and the windows could not be raised. Fixing them would cost over $500. My truck now has hand cranked windows, and mechanical door locks. They're no trouble at all, and I'm happy with them.
For me the take away to this podcast was not that Harari spends a lot of time meditating. It's that he's good at it. He's learned how to distinguish what is real from what is not, and how to focus his attention for long periods of time. It's not surprising that those skills are useful when it comes to intellectual pursuits.

So, yeah, he spends quite a bit of time meditating. That's kind of like noticing that top athletes spend a lot of time exercising.
Pebble is dead anyway.
Toward Machines That Improve with Experience
What I worry about with televisions is they'll come out with new standards that will render my keep-it-for-30-years TV obsolete in three or four years.
Only 802 People Told the IRS About Bitcoin According to Lawsuit
OK, so BTC and BTL?
An appliance salesman told me that decades ago. The dishwashers all had the same engine inside, the difference was usually the rack features.

This enabled the dishwasher maker to sell at various price points to different customers.
Ah, nice catch. Removing the `/?` makes it work for me. I've emailed the mods to let them know.

(fixed url: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/19/business/jeff-jones-leave...)
I'm curious about what fraction of the #deleteUber participants reinstall the app within a week... I'm guessing around 60%?
Don't do it. That's spam. If people want to send emails, they ought to send their emails themselves.
I'm not sure this answers the question outlined in the title. Gambling is wrong because the downside isn't inevitable but insurance is okay because the downside is?

If anything I imagine gambling to be introducing risk of ruin while insurance is protecting against it.
Might not be such a bad thing. Get all of the money out of GP AI and maybe let the hackers take this one.
Ask HN: Background Check – Job title mismatch
I got an job offer and final stage is background check via third party.

In my second job, my official job title is C# Developer while in my resume I wrote C# Tech Lead.

I wrote C# Tech Lead because during last year in my second job, I was mentoring 3 juniors and responsible for tech stack architecture.

However, I am afraid that my potential employee will rescind job offer because of job title mismatch.

What I think is explain to potential employee if they decided rescind job offer.

Any better advice?
One thing you might want to try is a sugar browning test [0]. I have an "ancient" oven - gas fired from the 1970s. It's a rental home and I don't feel like spending my own money on a kitchen upgrade, but it would probably be money well spent.

My own oven varies by over 100F plus or minus during regular cooking cycles. This is hugely significant when it comes to baking almost anything. If I put cookie dough in at the wrong time, they'll burn. I do my best to dampen the variability with a baking steel, but a more modern gas oven wouldn't have as much of a range of operating temperatures. Or, at least, a modern and high-quality one.

So, in response to your relatively sarcastic question: yes. Things have changed - not in how we cook, but in the quality of homeostatic controls for ovens.

http://www.xojane.com/diy/oven-calibration-article (technique from cooking for geeks)
I'm looking for a truck with hand cranked windows. What brand is this?
Can you share some links to real estate listings like you are mentioning, and what towns or parts of Boulder they are in? There are cheap homes in places like Longmont, but there is no real downtown to speak of. Are these cheap houses you mention suburban subdevelopment sprawl? Or are they urban homes on the edge of the city?
Note that the term "useful Arts" as used in the Constitution doesn't mean art as in performance or fine art, it means the same thing as if you were saying that something is "state of the art" -- methods of construction, craftmanship, or manufacture.

(Though you could probably say that copyrights might in some ways stifle people's artistic expression.)
Many things have gone down in quality in favor of being cheaper and/or more widely available:

- sound quality is worse: cds >> mp3s

- flying is slower: concorde >> easyjet

- articles more errorful: newsrooms >> bloggers

- etc.

People prefer to consume more, different, faster, rather than less, better, slower. And, of course, the true cost of externalities (on the environment et al) is not properly factored in.
I criticized the article for containing nothing but stereotypes, and you replied with more of the same stereotypes.
Could you explain for those of us with no clue what's going on instead of resorting to name calling?
Of course that averages out to 9 page clicks per user, and Alexa estimates that more than 25% of those clicks are Google referrals. Not exactly the same as millions of people listening to your every word.

Then there's drumdance's excellent point.
The traffic analysis is not based on the mode of the TV, it only checks if there are any wifi packets coming from the TV. My results suggest that there were zero packets coming from the TV when nobody in the house was watching TV.
> but generally people don't make enough for that to be worthwhile.

Yes you do.

But it doesn't have to be a zero sum game anyway. Both you and the insurer could be better off.

Life insurance is a dumb idea. But if you're human then sometimes dumb ideas stress you out. So to pay to lower that stress might be worthwhile.

But it's complicated. If you have a fire in your house sure it'd be nice to be insured.

But OMG you house just burned to the ground, you might have died, what if it happened at night, something way worst might have happened.

Your energy is better spent on fire proofing your house. You should never plan for events where you might die, you should reduce the risk of dying. If you really think theres a chance you house might burn down, perhaps you should move houses. That is more logical but less human.
Ask HN: What are some simple wrong decisions brought a business/system down?