skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most people casually interested in the crusader period know about the Knights Templar. But it turns out the Knights of St. John are just as fascinating, still exist, and have sovereign status similar to a nation-state. They built the impressive fortifications at Rhodes, which have technically never been defeated (they surrendered after a six month siege and only with the word of Suleiman the Magnificent that the survivors would be granted safe passage off the island). Then moved to Malta where they built an even more impressive set of fortifications and civic structures.

The Knights were composed mostly of nobles from Europe and thus brought tremendous wealth with them. Initially they set up hospitals in the 12th century to care for pilgrims traveling from Europe to the Holy Land. That role grew into a militarily defensive role and then grew some full-on military features by the 14th century.

Being composed of rich Nobles, the order at one point may have had access to more wealth than the entire rest of the Roman Catholic Church during this time period. During the early Malta period of the 16th century, the Knights built one of the most incredible and beautiful buildings I've ever seen. The outside isn't much to look at, but the inside is one of the most decorated buildings I've ever been in -- pictures don't really do it justice. The local "real" Cathedral built by the Catholic Church looks positively spartan in comparison even though it also is a beautiful building.

http://www.maltacultureguide.com/admin/images/stjohn_04_big....

http://www.divine-name.info/worldwide/malta/mdina/Mdina2.JPG

The order survived into the modern age, and over the ages did a number of works, continued to administer Malta, and happened to colonize parts of the Caribbean. Weakened during both the Protestant Reformation and the Napoleonic wars, but returned to the roots as a human welfare and religious group. They eventually changed their name to "the Sovereign Military Order of Malta" (SMOM) which they keep to this day as the oldest surviving order of chivalry.

Amazingly it actually is a "sovereign" order, meaning they're viewed in many circles to have power equal to that of a minor nation-state even though they have no territory at all -- the only example in the world today. For example, SMOM is a permanent observer in the U.N. [1] and maintains diplomatic relations with 106 countries. It can enter into treaties, issue passports, coins and postage. Their headquarter buildings in Rome are treated as Embassies and enjoy diplomatic extraterritoriality.

1 - https://www.un.int/orderofmalta/

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Military_Order_of_Ma...
Can someone get the imbecile media to shut up about the misnomer "artificial intelligence"? Either an outcome is computable, or else it is not. If it is computable, it is not "artificially intelligent". If it is not computable, it is also not "artificially intelligent". We do not need that kind of retarded terminology.
I guess by the author's logic, there has been stagnation since the the stone age, because cars still use wheels to move stuff. A smart phone is no different than a rotary phone ,because they involve imputing numbers into an interface, etc.
A practical explanation of a Naive Bayes classifier
They didn't mention it, but unlike Uber they aren't being sued by a rival company, their employees and their contractors while being actively boycotted by customers. Also, prob don't have a 10-figure burn rate.

So simple vc math would dictate a valuation like:

Absolute value of their earnings.

9999999 Growth Multiple

+ $1M for having an app

- $500k for not blogging about react

Basically already a unicorn
I didn't understand your comment.

1) Do you think cookie notifications are a bad thing ?

2) Do you think it is web bureaucracy ? If so, laws protecting every european citizen with digital neutrality are also bureaucratic ?
They probably don't pay 1.5k/month to live in a RV.
What are non meat dietary sources of B12? Or does it mean you'd need to consider supplements?
> They were billing $125-$150/hour.

The hobbyists and have-a-go developers aren't billing anything.

Look, personally I could afford 10 of these at short notice if I wanted to. But that's not the point. Growth in the Apps market is slowing. There's a whole market for developers going underserved because the cost of entry in other areas is pretty much '0'.
I think he may have meant equiparation.
Ask HN: Should I leave my company?
Hi there,
I'm in a complicated situation and don't know what to do:

I work as a developer for an outsourcing company and I have been without an assigned project for the last several months, at first I didn't worry because there is always some downtime between projects but now its been too long, I'm worried how this affect my career because I'm doing basically nothing(I use the time to work in some pet project)

I have had several times when I was about to get into a project but for different reasons it didn't prosper.

What would you do? Would you stay in this comfortable(because I get paid for do nothing) but probably bad in the long term situation or find something else?

Thanks!
Clojure is a fine language, and I wrote it professionally for a few years.

However, I don't see why this would be true:

> This sort of stuff would have taken weeks of effort in a static language.

I've also written plenty of things in typed languages, and in many ways they can be faster to develop in than dynamic languages. Of course, you do need to change the way you program a bit to really take advantage of types.

I think the main advantage Clojure has over most typed languages is macros, but there is work being done to rectify even that.
Who knows? Maybe it was by mistake. It really doesn't matter. Everyone gets them. Try to let it go and focus on making your next comment a good one :)
Happy Memorial Day
0. If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good 'Show HN'. Show HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

1. To directly submit a link, leave the |text| field empty on the submit page.

2. Often there is little need to explain why a link was submitted because it is assumed that the person submitting it thought it was helpful or interesting.

3. But it is ok to add a regular comment after the story appears on the |new| page.

Good luck.
Energy Attacks on Mobile Devices
China to implement cyber security law from Thursday
Can you please elaborate ?

SV seems like the place to be, but I lived in a cheap french city for the past 5 years, and I'm sure living in SV has its downsides in terms of quality of life.
Bonus: please include numbers :).
To name a few --

Payments: Adyen, Transferwise, and (arguably) Stripe

Music: Spotify, Soundcloud. Shazam

Travel: Booking.com, SkyScanner

Fashion: Zalando

Telecommunications: Skype

Gaming: Rovio (Angry Birds), King (Candy Crush), Supercell (a.o. Clash of Clans)
Staff should be compensate based on the value of they provide rather than their living standard needs.
How do you argue that an environmentally sustainable diet is important to someone that has no concern for environmental sustainability, nor any interest in such things?

Also, why do you assume highly intelligent people are predisposed to care about environmental sustainability?
I don't think this technology can provide 40% of world electricity without totally destroying all of our wetlands. Industrializing all the tidal zones with huge complexes to control all the water flowing through them is an environmental nightmare.

Renewable energy has environmental costs, some forms have higher costs than others. This one seems like one of the worst.
Yeah, you can get B12 from eggs, milk without consuming meat/fish.. it's not vegan though.
What tech do you use for the site?
Earliest evidence for dog breeding found on remote Siberian island
I really enjoy stories like this. Are there any place with more like it?
Only because they have not yet come to the US, it does not mean they aren't productive, international businesses.
Non-intuitive downtime and possibly not lost sales
So I am no expert in this field but I think the traceability by the random guy is not necessarily a problem because:

- until an amount in your possession has been spent, you can avoid that anyone knows who the corresponding BTC belong to (= you) by just using a new address when receiving the coins. Public knowledge about "having possessed coins" is only after a transaction and only if the random guy new that at least one of the last sources belonged to you.

- when you send BTC somewhere, nobody knows if these still belong to you if all outgoing amounts are sent to new addresses.

- There are "mixing services" that intend to "mix" amounts of several addresses, so traceability can be mitigated but IMO people have mixed feelings about them.

- There might be legal issues in case traceability becomes much better. E.g., coins might be blacklisted because they were gained illegally. Since you can trace those coins, it could be legally possible (though technically challenging) to "forbid" these coins and accuse of money laundering whoever accepted them anyway.

- There are other coins that are more concerned with this, I think monero (See sibling comment) is the most popular. You can always check what the dark market accepts to see what's good for you :)

- Finally, one mitigation is to keep only small amounts in many addresses, so all your counterparties only know a subbranch of your "transaction DAG" ("directed acyclic graph").

My own take is that all this means that nobody can ever track with certainty how much you have, only your "turnover". This holds as long as your counterparties (e.g., exchanges or employer) are not compromised and sufficiently well intended.
Not productivity-enhancing: "A driverless or electric automobile is just a new type of car."

Productivity-enhancing: "Word processing software didn't eliminate the need to type out documents but eliminated secretaries and typing pools, leaving individuals to do the task themselves."

Sure, those are totally different.
Nope you should leave and find something more stimulating. You can sit around and get paid for doing nothing when you're retired.
> brings in the equivalent of a nice Senior Developer salary

Can you give ballpark? I hate it when people do this as senior dev has different range depending on location. 80-100K or 100-150k/year?
Because sustaining the environment is important to all our survival?
Steam Users' Forums End of Life June 5th, 2017
Earplugs are my #1 life changer when it comes to sleep. I found these really soft ones that don't really get in the way when you're lying on one ear, they filter pretty much all of the sound and when I take them out the next day, my ears don't hurt. As it turns out my wife's breathing kept me kind of awake, and traffic sounds too. And now that I got used to it, thanks to the associativity of the brain, these days I fall asleep within 10 minutes of putting them in. Most of the time, anyway. Sometimes I do need sleep meds to just tip me over into actual sleep. But if there's one thing I can recommend to other people is to spend some time to really find your own suitable ear plugs. I'm just lucky my wife is ok with it, she doesn't have these sleeping problems and is on stanby for if our boy might wake up in the night... Which almost never happens.
> Why a shop owner would store the price and currency symbol in an item's description is beyond me...

Have you never watched Pulp Fiction?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoJAc_aSM7E

This video will explain exactly why a vendor might put a price in the description field.
This list seems to think its present in some dishes?

http://www.dietandfitnesstoday.com/vegetables-high-in-vitami...
Maybe pay in startups is not good, but if you need a kick of money, go contracting in big business and get wealthy... there is more than startups to tech.
> Stripe

The opposite. They specifically moved to US, presumably because it was so much better than EU.

https://patrickcollison.com/post/stripe-ireland
What Business Chatbots Are and How They Transform Customer Engagement
This is like saying you never understood the split between a carpenter and a welder, when both are involved in producing the finished product of say, a cabinet.

Sure, for simple enough projects a single person can do both, but doing that severely limits your potential scope.

For more complex projects, it's more convenient to have someone who specializes in carpentry provide the specs for what the welder needs to provide.
Yes. It is greyed out though. I hope it's not a trend for HN.
Billionaires prepping for the apocalypse
Personal Observation: Cookies are an antipattern since you have to sully your webdesign with this awful message.
(take 8 (phil-hagelberg)) (2010)
The CoL in Europe isn't much cheaper if you take in the large tech hubs.

People also underestimate the value of being able to occomulate wealth which is nearly impossible in Europe.

Salaries are much lower, taxation is much higher, bonuses are a joke and real equity is almost unheard of.

Startups in Europe also tend to pay less than the established businesses which makes it much harder for them to attract good talent other than the original founders and fresh graduates.
This also arguably extends to the tech sector at large if you are a developer you would be much better off working for a bank or any other financial institution, a consulting firm (esp big4) or in any other "non-tech" industry as the pay and the job security tends to be much better.

This is pretty much the opposite of SV.
Well obviously if health, ethics and environmental sustainability aren't a concern to you, then I don't expect you to go on a plant based diet.

Many otherwise intelligent people do care about the environment though (driving electric cars) and still eat meat and animal products.
Wait. There are two possible cases:

1. Either your restrict yourself to the kind of text CP437/MCS/ASCII can handle (to name the three codecs in the blog posting). In that case unicode normalisation is a noop, and you can use unicode without understanding all its quirks.

2. Or you don't restrict the input, in which case unicode may be hard, but using CP437/MCS/ASCII will be incomparably harder.
> Europeans in general don't seem to have that same drive Americans do to create new products

Maybe they don't want to work 70 hour weeks?
Although it'll always be tempting to provide isinstance() type checks in your dynamic language, there's no reason you have to have them!
Must-Have Trucker Supplies for Every Cab
Finally, a to-do app AND calendar; been waiting for this. Getting sick of people saying SV never tackles hard problems.

Kidding aside; nice job OP. Appreciate the hard work and xplatform is nice. Cheers
> This assumes the poor and middle class don't see a decrease in wages

I disagree. I think it only assumes that relative wages fall less than the relative incremental value of the new tech increases.

> Wages are a function of supply and demand

Yeah, but my point is that wages in isolation don't tell you much. The difficult-to-measure value accessible with those wages matters too.

> A good example is the effect globalization has had on the Midwest[1]

Irrelevant. Globalization need not move in lockstep with new technology.

I don't want to be reductionist, and perhaps my original comment came across as overconfident. My core assertion is that "it's not that simple," which decreases the value of conclusions based on oversimplified analysis. I think the article is oversimplified.
The code that sends the price to the printer was written with currency symbols in mind, and selects the correct code page before sending the code for the £ symbol.

The code that sends the "product name" was not, and doesn't correctly translate its input to the code page that the printer is using.

When I made a homemade POS system for a bar, years ago, I ran all the printers in bitmap mode and rendered the receipts in software, to sidestep this and other problems. The performance was still acceptable, but I think the reason many POS systems don't go this route is compatibility; they have to work with many models of printer and bitmap support is not universal, and even among those printers that support it I am not sure if it is standardised.
The US has one thing that Europeans cannot compete with:

One language spoken by close to all 320M Americans as a native language and spoken by More than a billion worldwide as first or second language and which also happens to be the language most technology uses, incl in documentation and tutorials.

Would Google have reached global fame if it had been in French to begin with? Of course not. What about if Facebook started at Bocconi and in Italian? No way Americans would have adopted it (let alone Spanish or Dutch).

Bureaucracy, taxes and other obstacles are possibly worse in the US than in most European countries (I lived both there and in three different European countries). We have very little to learn from the US in that respect. But without a common language it's difficult for Europeans. It's not a coincidence that most good startups in Europe are in countries where English is a first or very strong second language (UK, NL, Scandinavia etc).
I actually emailed Gary the week before I launched IH to try and get him on the site, but didn't get a response. I'll try reaching out again!
Well, why shouldn't some small airports close if they're not profitable?
This particularly worries me because if technical skills go out of vogue, then people skills would become conversely more important, and the thing I've optimized for all my life would become useless.
Evidence? I'm all for environmental sustainability, but there are very few people who would have their survival threatened by any environmental changes in their lifetime. For those few on an island somewhere who very well could be threatened in their lifetime, there is no intervention that will prevent that change - the damage is already done.

Looking further than that, technology has historically found solutions and we seem to get better at technology every day. Beyond that, climate change is just 'change' - the new may be just as livable as the old, albeit with significant differences in e.g. population distribution.

If you think about what sustainability means, being unsustainable isn't all that bad; it just means you'll have to change at some point, either when you have a choice or when you don't. In the absolutely terminal case, where we don't make any effort to be sustainable, we're looking at lifestyle changes and maybe a population contraction - not the survival of the species.

Sustainability is nice and good - who likes change, really? - but there is no case to be made for it being an issue of survival.
Have you been to much of Europe? English is spoken very well in much of Europe and, well, there's the UK and Ireland...
Ten Longreads for the Long Weekend
Jitterdämmerung (2015)
okay, I will bare this in mind for future submissions
Rust: A Scala Engineer's Perspective
Oh and regarding deflation (I know, you didn't ask for this):

If prices deflate 5%, a worker can buy 5% more of his salary, making him effectively richer (ceteris paribus). There is no need for savings, future income is sufficient.

Secondary effects like unemployment are likely to occur but still you'd need to show that 5% of deflation cause 5% workers dismissed so that the net effect is the same. If only 3% of the workforce are dismissed, the poorer got effectively richer.

Tech products have been deflating constantly, yet no one stopped buying them (to the contrary, they got cheap enough so that a lot of people were able to buy them, think smartphones).

So you might not agree with me on a general rule but bear in mind deflation has positive effects. All innovation causes deflation.
Why did the Nazis steal so many books?
London, Rome and Athens don't strike me as seaports. They're somewhere not far from the sea, but not on the coast.

Venice reinforces my point, if anything. It was more like a large corporation than an empire, and then it failed to produce a nation state.

Istanbul is not a capital of Turkey. Before that it was a city-state of Constantinople for a long time.
Stranger Things: The Rise and Fall of UFOs and Life on the Moon – Boston Review
Due to the high number of regional languages, most startups simply start with the English version of their product (if the product is not primarily aimed at their home country). So Google in France would have been in English first and French second.
11k? Whoa.
and every supermarket has vegan food now.
No it is not except for Scandinavia and just around Denmark. In reality the further south you go the more you really need to speak the local.
The logic may not be sound as you cannot tell for sure if there are more English speaking front end developers or Chinese-only speaking ones, given the population of China.
FWIW, here is a pretty complete shell mostly written by me in ~18K lines of Go: https://github.com/elves/elvish
Global Dystopias, Critical Dystopias: A Podcast with Junot Díaz – Boston Review
If you compare SV to some village in Romania then yes, it is cheap to live. But if you take salaries into account, you will be living from paycheck to paycheck, forget about saving anything. Prices in London are exorbitant for something habitable. Even if you choose to live in a shoebox, you hardly get any decent living from average £60k senior dev salary.
Different people have different priorities. EU may be a better fit for some, while SV is for others.
I don't even know where to begin with this one. I guess it's hilarious that we have found a defender of the incredibly stupid EU cookie notification law on an actual tech forum. Or maybe just sad. One of the two. It's unique though!
runn1ng was being tongue-in-cheek and talking about vegan dogfood.
Isn't "purchasing power" by definition after taking inflation into account?
Difference between knowing it and being good at it. Knowing how to do a join query does not make you a full stack dev
I believe that's how macros in Racket work, but each iteration is considered a separate phase. At least, that's how I understood it.

This page has some useful information about phases: https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/phases.html
How to implement the Mobile Growth Stack at a tech startup?  Shapr3D case study
so you earn 800$/day? Or is this freelance kind of thing where you only get to charge 3 hrs/day? Still 100/hr for remote work is a lot of money.
That's an interesting aspect I didn't consider.

Another issue though is traffic during rush hour in Silicon Valley. I can see myself traveling 20 miles in/around Munich in half an hour, while in Silicon Valley, that would probably take me 1.5 hours, because of the pretty much non existent public transportation.
Everything is speculation until someone makes it real.
Interactive Design and Stability Analysis of Decorative Joinery for Furniture
You're well within reasonable bounds to request that they be removed or ask for an attribution. If you created those images, they are covered by copyright, and their use of those images without permission is a copyright violation.

Speaking of attribution, why doesn't that article reference Lloyd's algorithm? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd%27s_algorithm
My name is Léon, with the acute accent on the e. I usually leave the accent when I need to enter my name somewhere digitally, since in about 50% of the cases it's not handled correctly. It usually ends up as L'on.

Even in the travel world it goes wrong all the time. You'd expect large international travel organisations (yes, talking to you Tui!) to be able to handle UTF8 names since many of their customers and locations will have special characters, but no. I once was nearly refused to board an airplane because the name on my ticket did not match the one on my passport...
Learn CSS Grid – A Guide to Learning CSS Grid
Real engineering disagrees: http://www.onlineethics.org/2959.aspx
I'm not 0xAX, but care to make a pull request to get the ball rolling?