skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bitcoin has reached a limit on how many transactions per second can be confirmed. There's lots of ideas for how to resolve this, but no consensus.

The author is suggestion that one way this might soon be resolved is if 51% of the mining power all choose one specific option, a change in the protocol, and just start mining coins like that's the option everyone has agreed with. So long as you control most of the mining power, you can do that.

Now, this doesn't mean 51% of people- just 51% of the current processing power confirming Bitcoin transactions. And just for as long as it takes for everyone else to follow your lead. Once a couple big players give in, the rest will follow quicky.
Bitter/hating much? I know Uber is not liked, but the fact that they have done a great job at disturbing the market in a great way. (Lyft as well, but they are still a minority player)

Having have to deal with NYC cabs often, when they will lock the doors and ask where you are going before letting you in, Uber is a great improvement overall.

Also, a NYC taxi medallion would cost 500k to almost 750k (that's like a mortgage). Basically half of your fare is going to some dude's coffers, and not to the drivers and taxis. Classical rent seeking behaviour caused by misguided regulation. Glad to see an outsider disrupt it.
It's an absurd position to take. Maybe he picked his lawyers based on quality of the lawyers he'd be facing. I've met some of Google's lawyers, and if I were being sued by them, I'd get the best damn lawyers my money could buy.
What's the app if you dont mind sharing. Or at least a vague idea of what it is
I just got the Voxatron and PICO-8 bundle. This is how my kids will learn to program! I love everything about these projects. I just started working on a Robotron: 2084/Smash TV style game idea with LÖVE but I think using Voxatron is going to be way more fun for me. The first cartridge in the list is a Robotron: 2084 style game.
The biggest problem Nix[OS] has right now is documentation. The wiki is deprecated, but still the only source for explanation of several key parts of the system. nix-shell is fantastic, but hard to learn simply because there is no specific place to learn. Nix language really needs some clear documentation so a user can understand how to get from "I don't have X" to "I have a working default.nix for X, and X installed in my environment."

GuixSD seems nice, but seems to have no method for installing non-free software, which is, unfortunately, necessary for many setups.

One thing I would like to have is a Nix/Guix wrapper for Debian packages (and possibly other packages/distros), so I could take advantage of Debian's robust ecosystem, and NixOS/GuixSD's totally functional environment.
Another study from July 2016 said that Uber doesn't save many drunk driving accidents although the study referenced in the Economist only focused on NYC, whereas the study from 2016 was focused on multiple metropolitan areas.

[1]: http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/07/22/aje.k...
You are missing the point and needlessly tripping yourself up on nitpicking. The point of the piece is that PBS delivers a lot of quality content to children (lots of other content too, but that isn't the author's focus). A couple minutes per hour of "Brought to you by XYZ Corporation" vs 20 cumulative minutes of animated bunnies selling breakfast marshmallows aimed at 2-7 year olds is not the same thing.

You can hide behind your dictionary definition and declare yourself the victor, but you must know there is a substantive difference between them and that is exactly the point that author was making.
You might find ipython more compelling as an interactive shell:

https://ipython.org/ipython-doc/3/interactive/shell.html
This is not an attack, this is just the miners working out a way to increase transaction throughput on the block chain. Maybe they will go with the Bitcoin Unlimited plan or maybe they will end up going in a different direction. We'll have to wait and see. They're not doing this to attack Bitcoin, that's ridiculous. They've spent millions of dollars investing in mining equipment and they will do everything in their power to keep the price of bitcoin high. Calling this an attack is just pure nonsense.
Thank you for answering that. It's still totally alien, but thanks.

Small cities, under 100,000 people even, can have hackerspaces. Maybe they aren't to your standards. (local one here has CNC, laser cutter, 3D printers for plastic, etc.)

To not cook is odd. Even when I lived alone in Boston, I cooked my meals. If you cook, you can be sure that nobody: picked their nose before handling your food, spat in your food (politics maybe), sneezed on your food, scratched their ass before handling your food, failed to wash the salad, plucked out a mouse and called it good, etc.

There are only a few restaurants where you can dine naked, you'd be seen by others if you went there, and you might have to suffer seeing people that make you want to rip your eyes out. At home there is no problem.

While waiting for your food at home (as it cooks), you can spend time together. It's the same as what you get, but with privacy. You can be as politically incorrect as you like, you can cry or shout, you can hold a burping/farting contest, whatever.

At home there is less trouble with kids. I'm guessing you might be single... if yes, how do you find any meaning in life? I remember being single, and I found it to be horrible. There was such a feeling of my existence being pointless. I very nearly jumped off a bridge. So life without family is unfathomable, and family makes restaurants awkward. It takes consistent discipline to keep a crowd of them under control, meaning that one can not relax.

Restaurants are nearly always too dim. I suspect it is so you can't spot defects in the food. At home I can put a 4000 lumen bulb in every socket, which is 6x or 7x normal.

You can go as a group to the supermarket. You can cook as a group. If you want peer bonding, this does it.
Can you elaborate? It's just a plugin at that lives at /blue. In my experience it doesn't remove functionality at all. You can still use "normal" Jenkins just the same.
That's some kind of bullshit. If "ride sharing" was the only causative factor then taxis would have addressed this already, given "ride sharing" is a euphemism for taxi.
To all those complaining about ride sharing systems: phhffft!
Those poles, conduits, and other rights of way are regulated by the FCC (or a state agency under delegated powers). See: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/224. Nothing is preventing another company from running fiber along those telephone poles, other than the fact that there isn't any money in it.
TL;DR Do not try this at home: "The IRS’s own internal watchdog found that the IRS had a practice of seizing entire bank accounts based on nothing more than a pattern of under-$10,000 cash deposits."
Those features sound really nice. Any links/screenshots?
Ugh, that's ridiculous. There should be some form of accountability system for hackathons. Maybe like charitynavigator.org.
For python, Xonsh makes a good attempt at bridging this gap.

Ruby also does this well, since everything in backticks runs in a shell (just like in bash).
How is a PowerPoint presentation hacking at all???
Elizabeth Holmes Owes About $25M to Theranos
I would guess that Android would be the easiest, since you can make your own lock screens and also root it. But I wouldn't know where to start.

There's no specific reason this shouldn't be possible, but it's simply not implemented in anything I know of.
Most of the time it's unanimously agreed to follow the majority of minors. Everything runs smoothly.

When that's not agreed, preventing a fork requires some way of blocking the non-majority miners. That is an attack, and not just 'how bitcoin works'. Bitcoin has no builtin way of handling such disputes.
In 1919, John Maynard Keynes described what the world was like (for the elite, anyway) in the years before World War I (or the Great War, as it was called at that time, since no one was expecting a sequel). The world of global mobility, communication, and finance actually took shape soon after the laying of the trans-oceanic telegraph lines (that is, by the 1870s); it didn't require the jet plane or the internet.

One excerpt from Keynes' book:

The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep...

He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality, could despatch his servant to the neighboring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient, and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference. [1]

[1] http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Keynes/kynsCP2.html
Fun at the Unix Terminal
Nice to see such a great paper from a fellow CUNY grad. NY's city college system is underrated.
Night isn't the only source of solar intermittency, overcast also has a large effect. Solar also isn't cost effective at higher latitudes. When people are freezing to death, your simplistic approaches won't appeal much.

Efficiency is great and should be encouraged. We still need increasing amounts of reliable, plentiful and cheap energy going forward. You may be willing to accept a diminishing standard of living, most are not.
Wow this is BAD this is soooo bad. The company behind Adblock Plus is very evil.

- "Acceptable Ads" aka extortion money enabled ads enabled by default.

- Their CEO made money with scamming sites.

- They used to have a url correction "feature" that added Amazon reflinks to your urls without asking.

- They lied back in the days about that companies can buy themselves onto the acceptable ads list. They claimed it was community decided, that everyone can get on it if the have no annoying ads. Then researchers found out Google payed them 10000€ already and stuff.

- They are connected to various German Media companies that are pushing fake news with their ads on it ...

Fattr on the other Hand was made by this awesome guy form the pirate bay who has a great vision for the web. The two now fit together at all if you ask me.

I switched to a Addon Fork (True Adblock or something) that had the "Acceptable Ads" removed very early on. Then swiched to uBlock origin. So much better in EVERY way. Guy who does it does not even want (last I checked) donations, no BS company that wants to make money, is dishonest ... behind it. Technical faster, much better UI, better list of filters easy checkable on one giant page the way it should be. Can praise it enough. Seriously if you are reading this install uBlock Origin NOW!
Segwit is still compatible with increasing the block size a la Bitcoin Unlimited. They are not being forced to give up segwit here. It's really two separate conversations. Supporting segwit doesn't mean automatically opposing BU.
Boostnote – Best Note Taking App for Ubuntu
Hmm, the study [0] credits over all reduction of drunk driving accidents to Uber. If ride sharing is the source of reduction, shouldn't ride sharing in general be credited?
Maybe Uber was the only ride-share available during the study though since it's data from 1989-2013.

"A recent increase in the ease and availability of alternative rides for intoxicated passengers partially explains the steep decrease in alcohol-related collisions in New York City since 2011.I examine the specific case of
Uber’s car service launch in New York Cityin May 2011,
a unique example of a sudden increase in cab availability for intoxicated passengers.7This study draws on a dataset of all New York State alcohol-related collisions maintained by the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles from 1989 through 2013. My inference is based on the variation in Uber access across New York State counties over time and the careful choice of New York State counties that provide an appropriate control group for New York City’s drunk-
driving behavior"

Edit:

Fair enough, looks like lyft only came to NYC around 2014[1]. But does anyone know if the ride share prices in NYC from 2011 [2] to now has significantly changed? I vaguely remember a lot of people using it initially because of dirt cheap prices during the first few month of introduction but I don't trust my memory over facts if someone has some.

-----------

[0]http://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyft#History

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/06/i-just-rode-in-an-uber-car...
Another bright light on the horizon: Self driving cars. I'm hugely optimistic that within the next 100 years, we could very possibly see deaths from drunk driving shrink to a small fraction of it's current value. It's a great thing when profit driven businesses also have positive side effects for everyone.
They're a chain, or at least they're also up here in CT.
uBlock Origin is written by gorhill, a user of much respect. I can't say I've heard of anyone auditing its source code, but you may find reading his comments interesting to make a better guess as to its legitimacy https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=gorhill He seems pretty cool to me. And you can peruse the issues in the repo https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock I'm pretty sure you can't delete issues, so if someone found something and reported it you should be able to find it.
Prolog is a logic programming language. It's not object-oriented, so it doesn't have objects or methods.

If you want to know the length of a list you can use the predicate length/2:

?- length([a,b,c,d], N).
N = 4.

The example above just shows you how length/2 works (albeit with some CLP operators that are not typical).

Edit: also, lists are not a "collection type" or any type at all. They're predicates, like everything else in the language. See my comment below - the easiest way to think of them is as patterns (just like in regexes, only Turing complete).
Send Charts in emails
Nobody is calling Bitcoin Unlimited itself an attack. It's the measures they might take to prevent a fork that would be an attack. An attack on the fork.
The typical strategy is to design a language that compiles to Handlebars, e.g. http://emblemjs.com/.

It would be possible to support other languages more directly but they will tend to have a Handlebarsy flavor.
I would not say that I use it regularly, but I have a somewhat working version of what I remember to be the Norton Editor in C++ / ncurses. It was 100% motivated by seeing antirez's artistic triumph, and my effort is sadly lacking in comparison. Still, I look at it every few weeks and add a new feature, and now I am mostly editing the code in the editor itself, which is gratifying.

I actually need to get off my duff and code what I really want, which is a version of what I remember the best parts of the Norton Editor implemented as an emacs mode. I have great memories of writing pascal code in ne.com, so it is a big nostalgia item for me.
Biggest team I ever did was 3 people, and I always picked my team ahead of time so we could prep (design what we'd build, make the pitch, etc.) anything except the actual coding
This is describing how you would implement LinkedList. Obviously, the size method has to be defined somewhere, and this is showing a potential implementation of it
Wasn't there an article here a few days ago that said Uber drivers were doing exactly the same thing?
Why would it not be agreed to follow the majority of the miners? That's literally the whole basis of the blockchain. The chain with the most work wins. If you don't like it then you can make your own fork, nobody is going to care or try to stop you.
Only if the introduction of other ride-sharing services happened at the same time - I have no idea of the timeline in NY, but the author send to be using the sudden introduction as a natural experiment.

Of course, the results are probably applicable to other ride-sharing schemes.
Recipes from a trained neural network
I'm really surprised at how the search is going too (by the article). "Go find these documents." "Didn't find them." "Okay go again." "Okay." Now if you're an employee that has any of those documents and you weren't searched the first time, there's no way you'll be caught with the documents by the time the second search starts.
I'm curious when self-driving cars become common place how the law will react to it. It's my assumption that the law will still require a driver to be sober in the event that manual control is needed, though I suppose if the car is driving itself perfectly fine police would have no reasonable grounds to pull anyone over and discover they're drunk in the first place.
Because the different chains are abiding by different rules. Software A sees both chains as valid, while software B only sees the shorter chain as valid. The result is a conflict that cannot be easily resolved.

It's a human consensus problem. (And don't say that only the original version of the bitcoin rules are valid, or that would mean that bitcoin actually disintegrated years ago.)
Yes, there is. Consider a URL followed by punctuation. How do you tell whether that comma, period, question mark, etc should be included in the URL or not? Had I put in a link to https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt in my original comment instead of "RFC 1738", there would have been a comma right after the URL, for example.

The possible solutions to this punctuation-following-URL problem are that you delimit the URL, contort your sentence so the URL is followed by a space and some other words instead of punctuation, start adding random whitespace after the URL but before the punctuation to avoid the linkifier eating the punctuation, or stop putting URLs in plaintext. I've seen all of these used; the first solution is by far the best.

Oh, and that's all from a Western perspective. If, on the other hand, you're using a language that does not use space-separated words (e.g. a number of East Asian languages), then delimiting becomes even more important, because you can't just guess that the URL ends at the space character; there are no space characters around.

I can't speak to your experience seeing or not seeing this syntax, but as I said it's been part of the URL RFCs for over two decades, is used in other RFCs where URLs can appear (e.g. the Link header syntax), and is reasonably commonly used by people who both put URLs in their email and want to punctuate it properly. I will grant that proper punctuation is out of fashion in certain demographic groups. As is writing plaintext, I guess.
There isn't really a standard definition of the word "startup". But many in Silicon Valley think of it as how PG defined it:

http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

> A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.
Bitcoin Unlimited IS a fork, why would they try to prevent a fork? I don't understand what you're saying.
But aren't they just disrupting it temporarily? My understanding is that VC funding is propping up those low fares. I guess it is good until that runs out though.
As a side note, the term "Byzantine empire" does not reflect how people called it or thought of it at the time of its existence at all. They referred to it as the (Holy) Roman Empire of the East and they considered and called themselves Roman citizens.

In fact the city Byzantium didn't even exist during the time of what we call the "Byzantine" empire. Byzantium was an Greek then Roman city that existed right until Constantinople (modern day Istanbul) was founded within a few kilometers from Byzantium by Constantine the Great in the 4th century AD. Constantine the Great moved the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to Constantinople in large part due to the new town's strategic and uniquely defensive position. Constantinople was built fresh though - there were no prior settlements on its location.

Byzantium as a city ceased to exist in name and otherwise as everything that was worth moving over got moved over and the new capital of the Roman empire took over as the main city in the vicinity in the area.

I suspect the name "Byzantine empire" got coined to imply that the Roman empire's 'holy', 'god-given' and 'ancestral' lineage does not go East but is rather 'subsumed' by the empires in the West that ended up forming much later from the vestiges of the Rome-based Roman empire in the middle ages.
Study credits Uber because specificity > vagueness. From 2011 - present Uber was responsible for vast the majority of ride-share rides: https://www.thestreet.com/story/13536061/1/uber-now-more-pop...
I think this only will cause more problems than it will solve (unhappy employees, stressed managers and ultimately depressed salaries (because companies will then peg salaries at the least common denominator to avoid problems) and unmotivated employees (they won't see that doing a good job is appreciated by a nice pay bump once in a while)).

Maybe an easier approach is to have an external arbiter periodically comb through employee salaries to check for discrimination?
In Vancouver,

If going out downtown, it's a 80$ cab ride each way atleast.

Transit would take atleast an hour but good luck taking it back at 2am when service is very limited.

I could drive after drinking and spend 30-40 minutes.

There is no ride sharing allowed here yet.

I usually don't go out if I don't have a designated driver as it's just not affordable or takes too long.

Many friends, and I admit myself when younger, would have just drove home drunk as it was cheapest quickest option

We have actually found it cheaper to drive downtown, find a cheap decent hotel on priceline and drive back home after a good sleep.

I can't wait for ride sharing here, I use it everywhere else when traveling.

Ride sharing makes it affordable convenient and quick... Can definately see how it attributes to less drunk drivers.
I'm curious how Uber (a private company) got access to someone's personal laptop. If my employer demanded access to my personal machine I'd tell them to pound sand.
No I appreciate the tip and have often considered diving into Emacs or Vim. Im very fond of the Scite and Lua combo as well now, and i would like to have the time to share and develop it more than to set up on a new system - but yes those other systems do look good...
After the free expose on HN, I like the three letter domain.

Didn't know a bit about the company until now.

I do wonder what they paid for the domain? I could almost picture the negotiations, 'Hay--because of Google, the price of three letter domains just arn't worth what they once were. So--here's--$50,000?'.

I love the picture in the article. So wholesome. Where I live, these busses are rented out by rich kids. They party heavily on them. Which is better than the way I partied. Driving around with a jug of wine on the back of a mustang that didn't have a front bumper, nor grill. I just got lucky so many Friday nights.
Why You Shouldn't Walk on Escalators