skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> waiting <1 second for a visa transaction does not protect the merchant from potential massive losses, because of credit card chargeback fraud which is very real, exploited every day, and can be conducted up to 60 days after the purchase.

And yet it remains economically viable for merchants to operate waiting <1 second for payment, because the trust-based visa system and the broader legal system have countermeasures against chargeback fraud. With bitcoin that's impossible by design; merchants don't accept bitcoin in <1 second and never will, because there is no way to deal with the fraud that would lead to.

> And people enjoy making money, and so choose to pay the electricity to mine bitcoins. Same thing. People pay for things they enjoy.

Not the same thing. Bitcoin isn't decorative, it's a means to an end - paying for things. And there are much cheaper ways to pay for things, unless you're a criminal.

> I estimate that if Bitcoin's market capitalization reaches $1 trillion, then miners will still not account for more than 0.74% of the energy consumed by the world ($1.25 billion per TWh), which is more energy-efficient than, say, Canada (whose economy produces $450 million per TWh.) See http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-mining-is-not-wasteful/

That calculation is using an artificially low energy price and an artificially high profit margin for "miner"s, and it's completely disregarding how transaction fees are intended to displace mining fees as a source of mining profits. But even using that number, world GDP is $80t; at a conservative P/E of 20 that makes the world economy's market cap around $1.6q. So bitcoin would be 0.06% of the world's market cap, but consuming 0.74% of the world's energy.

> Yes and this is a physical exchange of cash/commodities. Bitcoin/cryptocurrencies make irreversible transactions possible digitally and have no other equivalent in the digital world.

There are irreversible digital settlement systems (those that currently exist are even slower than bitcoin, but there's no reason they have to be - it's just that at the scale of the financial entities that can make use of such systems, waiting a couple of days for settlement is a non-issue), and we could easily make more if there were demand for it. Credit card chargebacks are a design decision, not a fundamental limitation.
I can't help bursting out laughing after a while so it's not the best for sleep!
Foreign students are seen as a revenue steam for universities
You may also like this huge collection of spurious correlations http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
I find scihub/libgen a very important project actually. Mirrors should be done (not an order, just a plan).
Pro tip: he has a Twitter account in the same vein.
It is ludicrous to assert that Bitcoin protects users against "turmoil". Bitcoin is extremely tumultuous.

Still waiting to hear that compelling use case.
This will never, ever make economic sense. Human labor is orders of magnitude too valuable to waste on power generation. A fit man can, in an hour, produce about 400 watt-hours of electricity, worth about $0.05; his labor would be worth at least $10 in a developed country. In the unlikely event that all modern technology ceased to exist, we would revert to using animals and wood for power, like they did in the 1700s.
I wonder if it's the absolute temperature that's important or the delta.
Money can be relevant if, say, having some reserves at the right time makes the difference between gaining access to the technology or being left out. It's all utterly hypothetical of course.
> For extra motivation, all exercise machines in our prototype human power plant are facing a jacuzzi & shower where girls are invited to encourage the boys to flex their muscles and generate more power. Of course, the gender roles could be reversed, but during the first experiments we discovered that this is less energy-efficient. Girls don't seem to get motivated by guys in jacuzzis, at least not to the extent that guys get motivated by girls in jacuzzis.

Clever, but I'm guessing many will find this creepy or 'problematic'.
11 Useful Articles for Growth Hacking by Top Online Marketers
I'm not Peter :)
In this case we happened to have a variable already defined with a short name, but in other cases the name might be longer or you might have to introduce a temporary variable. If you don't need the reference to app in the rest of the program, you can do away with the name entirely:

with(Javalin.create()) {
port = 7000
start()
awaitInitialization()
stop()
awaitTermination()
}

When in comes to the question of how much this is saving us... the Java designers seem to have thought it was worth something, since Java has a somewhat similar feature: a method calling another method on the same object can leave out "this".

Python on the other hand doesn't have the implicit "this", so the JUnit API (the unittest module in Python) actually becomes uglier in Python. Instead of this in Java:

class TestNumbers extends TestCase {
public void testArithmetic() {
assertTrue(1 + 1, 2)
assertFalse(10 * 10, 100)
}
}

Python needs an explicit self variable:

class TestNumbers(unittest.TestCase):
def test_arithmetic(self):
self.assertEqual(1 + 1, 2)
self.assertEqual(10 * 10, 100)
This blog post is now it's own thread if you want to continue the discussion there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14437952
Is that the same guy who did that famous burn on HN? If so it's nice to see he's made it.
Nice project! The syntax does not appear very intuitive... I have hard time parsing it though I've used Datalog in many projects. Logicblox seems more intuitive -- www.logicblox.com -- but it is not free.
I once suggested protein folding on bitcointalk.org. The thing is : it's easier said than done. Folding protein can not trivially be used to mark data as a cryptographic hash does, and you need this for the whole protocol to make sense. But if someone can come up with a proof of concept, we'd all be happy to look at it.
You can click the link :)

It's a paid membership community - https://join.nomadlist.com/
Spotify hires four new directors ahead of expected float
That's funny... I accidentally stumbled upon the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon last week (reading the article at https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomeno...) and now I notice it again! It's Baader-Meinhof applied to itself :-)
Start with Ubuntu latest version, Ubuntu is easy to use and has large community to dig into in case of bugs
What is the most current state of art image style transfer?
A linter never fixed the runtime behavior of a language, this is beside the point. The point is the assumption that Javascript is a better language today.
Makes sense that they'd try this in the Netherlands. The Netherlands has a very high mode share of active transportation (walk/bike). For example, the walk+bike mode share in Amsterdam is 56% (chart includes other cities in Europe): https://charts.datawrapper.de/JsIir/index.html#embed

By contrast, most US cities are well under 10%. Even LA, which has pretty excellent weather overall, is only at 4%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_share
Backbone provided some useful stuff for working with collections, a router, and, perhaps most importantly, structure to your projects. You have to look at it in the context of the time it was written - it predated React, for example, by a number of years. It was lightweight and the code was easy to follow, the documentation was good, and the API was certainly very stable.

Nested views were problematic, undeniably, and did lead in the real world to a big old mess that wasn't much better than the jQuery spaghetti it was intended to replace, with events bubbling all over the place and unnecessary re-rendering and so on. I led a team that built a big Backbone app, back when it was very much in vogue, and it was certainly hard to get this stuff right in practice - perhaps not impossible, but harder than one would have preferred.
I don't think we should consider celebrities in this context. I feel the author of the question wanted to know about freelancers.
One of the things I believe people like you have great success with, is routine and wind down. Set a bed time, and 1 hour before that you stop everything that'll keep you awake. Put on some quite music, e.g. easy listen or classic, and do something benign. Some people draw, some knit trivial stuff like blanket patches, others meditate. The important thing is that it is something your mind will not continue to work on after you put it down. This really helps myself, and my children wind down and get ready to sleep, and my day improved 10 fold when I got this procedure down.
Ask HN: Applying to Start-up Denmark
Hi there!

I'll be shortly applying to the Start-up Denmark program (http://startupdenmark.info). If any of you has gone through the process (or is considering doing so) any insight or experience you have will be welcome. Feel free to post a comment or PM me.

Thank you!
Over 100+ Jobs in Sheffield HN: From tech to translators
>If students have to generate their own power, they are much less likely to waste it. How far would students go to reduce their efforts? Would hot showers go out of fashion?

The article's discussion of human power and incentives to use it beg the point to be made about the right way to fix the tragedy of the commons market failure with atmospheric pollution (and all the other problems with fossil fuels as well).

There are so many ways to reduce energy consumption that government regulation can't possibly legislate and adequately regulate (and it's barely even trying at the moment).

For example, I try to make a point to bike, walk, take the stairs, use efficient driving habits, and try to often take cold showers. I admittedly do this primarily because I like the exercise, the cold water is more refreshing and better for my skin, I save money, but as as an added bonus I feel some satisfaction that I consume less fossil fuels. But I would do all these things more if I saved more money from it.

And taxing bad things is better than taxing good things (like income and investment).

I think this is one of the things we will look back from the future and think, what were people thinking--they taxed jobs when they could have taxed something like environmental destruction? What?

But American politics are what they are. Our public transport across the country varies, but generally it is laughably bad, and that's just another example of an extremely low hanging fruit to grab.
He was found to not have infringed on their IP.
> We saw the sales of any character that was diverse

That is not from voiced opinions, but sale statistics. You could jump to the conclusion that the people buying marvel content is "mostly on the socially conservative or reactionary part of the political spectrum", but going to cause-and-effect is difficult when there is so many unknown variables. For example, marketing effects sale statistics and sale statistics effects marketing.

Then we have manga (https://comicvine.gamespot.com/profile/foxxfireart/blog/chal...) where the top two selling manga series in Japan for 2012 had a majority female readership (with a small margin). It would be interesting to see the sale numbers for the US but it would not surprise me if it had similar that of japan.
well, no: unless the whole campus is also built without machinery, you're trading upfront energy (building with more insulation, building the additional power storage retrieval distribution system etc) with the ability to sustain the building with low energy later on

also, James May tried to plug gym machinery to an electric car, the human output is just too low for electrical appliances - think not laptops, but washing machines, vacuum cleaners etc.
You don't need to trust everyone to hold to hashrate limitations, you have a closed network, you just need the majority of participants on the network to agree kick out any violators.

Here's an article describing how the majority of hashrate was reversed once for Bitcoin itself:

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-network-shaken-...

The largest miners all agreed to switch to the 0.7 chain, even though the 0.8 chain had more CPU power. This could just as well have been done on a closed bank network by e.g. everyone agreeing that Deutsche Bank are being dicks and trying to take over the network, and simply manually ignoring what they're mining.

If you're one of 10 miners on a closed network and you know the other 9 will simply start ignoring you if you break the rules, you don't have any incentive to break the rules.

You also haven't come up with any plausible scenario for why one bank would even bother to do this. If you're using a private blockchain for e.g. a SWIFT replacement as discussed in this thread, what's Deutsche Bank going to do once they become dicks and acquire 99.9% of the mining power? Disproportionately pay for running the whole thing? They don't have any interest either in screwing up the network or approving double-spending or whatever, since they're also using this SWIFT-replacement just like everyone else is.

Claiming that this is "useless" in "a world with off-site replication of databases" is missing the point. You're just failing to imagine that there can be anything on the spectrum betweeen a 100% centralized system with 100% trust and a 100% decentralized system with 0% trust.

How is a group of 10 banks who needs a SWIFT-like system going to run a traditional DB with off-site replicas, say the primary fails, which replica run by the 10 banks does everyone agree to fail over to? You'll very quickly just need some centralized party to run the whole thing at a large cost, and you'll end up with SWIFT again.

This is the part that a private blockchain makes easy. You have banks or other private parties that all benefit from running a low-cost distributed ledger, they can firewall this off from the open internet, and all of them just have an interest in keeping the system going as-is at a low cost.

It's easy to monitor whether some party is breaking the basic rules of mining, and once you have that setup adding new banks becomes a much easier lower-trust operation than e.g. giving some random new bank read-write access to your traditional RDBMs SWIFT replacement.
iBeacon Solution for Shopping Malls, Art Galleries and Exhibitions
What about VueJs?
You mentioned var, let exists to fix those issues, hence the language just in that one area is better.
Not so fast, Mr Bond. You mean to tell us that the information in early manuscript such as the Bible and other religious tracts were not misleading? My point is that though they may have been culturally agreed to be true these few authoritative books suffered from a lack of open access to information. So I believe we need to separate out honest intention towards truth and actual empirically and theoretically truthful writings. Another way to put this is that it is not just the technology but the social relations that go with that technology that matter.
Careful with your terminology. "Successful" has different meanings for different people.

By my definition, for example, I run the most successful single-person business that I'm aware of. But it doesn't make millions, so it might not meet your definition at all.

My goal was to replace my day job with a software business that required as close to zero attention as possible, so that I could have time to spend on the things that actually matter to me.

The business brings in the equivalent of a nice Senior Developer salary, which is not what most people think of when they imagine a successful Startup. But it lets me work with a bunch of cool tech when I want to, and, more importantly, is automated to the point where Customer Service involves a quick 30 second - 10 minute email sweep over morning coffee. For me, that's a lot more valuable than a few more million dollars in the bank.

The cool thing about running your own business is that you get to decide on your own definition of success.

EDIT: I wrote a bit about how I got into this position, in case anybody is interested. It's not actually all that hard to do:

http://www.expatsoftware.com/Articles/guy-on-the-beach-with-...
All those businesses combined could easily fit on one $40 digitalocean instance. They are split for business reasons, but the costs are essentially $0.
Just saw this now, thanks, very informative.
FWIW it's trivial to install yarn already: https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/install

NPM currently doesn't provide a standalone distribution as far as I can tell, but presumably they would offer one if they no longer had the luxury of being bundled with Node.

Since changes generally don't happen overnight I would expect a transitional period where Node still bundles npm-cli but npm Inc has the time to prepare a standalone distribution before yarn replaces npm-cli. Additionally downstream channels could decide to provide legacy packages containing both.
Efficiency.

I want to make the universe more efficient. For me, this starts by making humans more efficient. My ideal would be the Borg.

I choose efficiency because it's inherently good. If you're more efficient, then you can reach other goals more efficiently, no matter what these goals are.

Concretely, I'm tackling the problem of inefficient communication and thinking. I believe that natural languages are one of humanity's main bottlenecks and must be replaced with something better by at least an order magnitude. A completely new and computer-aided communication paradigm.

I don't want anyone to ever have to communicate something that's already been communicated before. I don't want people to be able to express inconsistent ideas. I want to get rid of paradoxes and exceptions from language.

I also want to make the world completely transparent, make data free. This means getting rid of privacy, another one of humanity's main bottlenecks. Privacy is irrational and selfish.

My first step is to build a single application that aims to replace 80% of existing applications. To achieve this without bloat, a new interaction paradigm will need to be conceived. As I don't expect most adults to appreciate the value of the system (in my experience, they feel threatened) or have the ability to learn it, my targets are kids.

TL;DR: I'm building a next-generation communication app for kids.
a math degree with some CS is a way better background to have than being a CS major.
Stylo (Gecko port of Servo styling) now supports all Firefox properties
Yeah, assuming you mean this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35076 (ctrl + f: putnam)
Someone producing 400W for an hour is not a fit man, it's a star endurance athlete. It's the kind of power top performer in tour de France can provide.
Windows already has this, the Snipping tool! It even allows you to snip applications which aren't webpages!
Downvote why?
I've never heard of libgen but it's blocked by my ISP (in the UK)
Wedding, Baby, Bridal Shower Gifts Registry
I've worked solo for nine years. I think there's a bunch of us out there.

Also, customer support is a very valuable use of your time :-)
> In my experience developers don't really get better (as a cohort) at security, most of the improvements in security I've seen are due to better APIs and outsourcing of low level infrastructure to highly resourced entities.

And there is nothing wrong with that, IMO. (Disclosure: I've been immersed in the security field since early 1990's.)

Security is complex - stupefiengly complex. No other field in all of CS has to worry about catastrophic failure modes that can be both subtle and completely invisible. Unless you have teams(!) of professionals working on security full time, you have only marginally better chances of survical than a snowball in the tropics.

Add the fact that most of the time, security is seen as a lack of something. Mostly usability. People who have work to do will find ways to subvert any and all security measures if doing so makes their life easier.

We must accept the fact: it is impossible to sell security. But it IS possible to sell convenience. Make the secure option more convenient than the insecure one, and you can't keep people away.

In other words: improve the APIs. Make the underlying infrastructure secure and provide a convenient way of using it properly. Don't try to fight human nature. Make use of it instead.
Personally I get irritated ears if I use earplugs for a few nights in a row.
Rumor, AFAIK Nintendo didn't care.
You shouldn't. Tarsnap is a decade old; a million dollars over ten years is not a lot of money by the standards of tech salaries.
Newsweek 1995: Why the Internet Will Fai
I've had one for 2 years. I loved it.

Then it got stolen. I don't think I'll buy another one. It's heavy and abrasive.

Right now I'm looking at Tom Bihn's Synapse 19/25. I'm also considering the ubiquitous Jansport SuperBreak.
I built and run StoreSlider[1]. It made ~$700,000 in 2016, mainly in affiliate revenue from eBay. Costs are essentially hosting (between two and five $10 Linodes, depending on load).

Took me some effort to built, but it's on autopilot now.

[1] https://www.storeslider.com
Throwing a cup of water over barking dogs tends to shut them up.
The article itself mentions that many kids presenting psychopathic traits end up as normal adults. (or at least normal on the surface)
The tragedy of taxing bad things is that if the taxation works, and the bad things (e.g. pollution) start to go away, then the government loses tax revenue. And for the government, that's worse than any pollution.

So we see all governments going through loops and hoops to tax something bad, and at the same time regulate so that a sufficient amount of that bad thing still happens so they wouldn't lose the tax money.
Well, I would die of boredom not doing anything interesting for a whole hour.
Then I agree with them, but we were talking about a Starbucks latte with 11 shots
I did a while ago a simple implementation of k-means in Javascript, it shows how the process converges for cluster finding.
http://ktzar.github.io/js-k-means-clustering/
code: https://github.com/ktzar/js-k-means-clustering
And nobody of your enlightened politicians explained to your oh-so-clever nation, that Switzerland has already tried to negotiate passporting rights despite remaining outside of the EU, but failed? That's why you have had the swiss banks mostly operating from the UK. They sold you the immigrant-hatred propaganda, especially against the well-assimilated Polish, while it's the Muslims making most damage to your society, but spared for the sake of political correctness and you 'swallowed it like young Pelicans' as we say in Poland. Please..., you are a case study for a democracy failure.
Preserve file creation timestamps on Windows and Mac
You might be interested in learning about Monero. The amounts and transactions aren't public like Bitcoin.

Here is a pretty good infographic outlining the gist of it: https://www.monero.how/monero-infographic
Yep, backbone was just like 200-300 lines of code. It was incrementally better than JQuery alone but suffered from the same limitations when trying to build apps with lots of views. If you wanted performances, you had a separated creation and update path, and you were back to Jquery spaghetti and tight coupling between DOM and JS via CSS selectors.

Shaming shouldn't be a thing, but It's fair to say no one should start a backbone project in 2017, unless it was dead simple, in which case you can use pretty much any tech anyway.
lmao

picture of stirner
So? Just because you've got a cut doesn't mean getting another is fine.
Indeed. At a local nuclear power station there's a visitor center where one can experiment how to generate electricity with an exercise bike. With moderate power you can power a tablet computer or an incandescent light bulb, but the water kettle comes on only with actual athletes, and even then, the small light bulb goes off, and even a professional cyclist can't sustain that power for longer than a brief moment.

It's just pointless to generate electricity by human power. It's not pointless to ride a bike.