skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, but that sidesteps the question: why does that matter?

The answer isn't inherently obvious. Bitcoin seems to be doing just fine without a leader and with competing factions. The November issue will probably resolve itself just like all the issues that came before.

And there are a lot of advantages to Bitcoin's model. Having a face means tying the fate of the currency to that face, one way or another. Their word starts to matter much more.
"As a society we have always outlawed drugs that can drastically alter perception"

Actually, in America nationwide drug laws began in the 20th century, and it had nothing to do with health or unknown effects. Opium was outlawed as part of a general effort to "protect America" from Chinese immigrants. Heroin was outlawed because a German company held a patent on it. Cocaine was outlawed because, according to the people in Congress at the time, it drove black men crazy and made it impossible to kill them with standard police-issue sidearms (also, according to an article from the New York Times just before cocaine was banned, Jews were selling it). Marijuana prohibition was principally driven by racism and as a form of regulatory capture by industries that competed with hemp.

LSD was discovered decades before it was outlawed and the effects were well understood before it was banned. LSD happens to be one of the safest recreational drugs; in fact, the biggest danger is the poorly regulated supply chain i.e. most "LSD" on the market today is not actually LSD (as with most drugs, the ban poses a greater health risk than the drug itself). The government conducted its own extremely unethical LSD study to determine if it could be used as a mind control drug (it cannot) and knew the safety profile long before the ban. LSD was banned because of concerns that it was contributing to the moral corruption of American youth (i.e. think of all those white teenagers out partying with hippies); in other words, it was viewed as a threat to the prevailing social order (probably not a coincidence that this coincided with the civil rights movement, which was a direct challenge to that social order).
Indeed there was a number of previous generation virtual worlds using VRML. Lets say they left a lot to be desired.
"Git" in British slang roughly means "jerk". See also Linus's joke about naming software after himself, mentioned elsewhere in thread.

The Monkees had a song called "Randy Scouse Git" (after a catchphrase from the britcom 'Til Death Do Us Part) the title of which was considered so vulgar in the UK that they had to release the song there under an alternative title (I think they actually used "Alternative Title").
> There are many exciting developments in compiler technology but they do seem to me to be fragmentary and not yet put together

I think the same thing could have been said back in 1977, and the dragon book pulled all of these things together. What's needed is someone today doing the same kind of thing with current technology. (Publishers, if you are reading and think there's a market contact me ;-)
There's still over a month to go until this one happens. I think the press about it will build up in the coming weeks like it did with the last one. I think it will be fine, personally. So many people support it now, even if it decreases a bit in value there will still be the community even if they have different opinions. The market will decide.
The Bell System work strikes me as very valuable, in that a) they had a big opportunity to make a lasting, universal change, and b) the number keypad was a very frequently used element.

Here, though, I'm very suspicious. I worry that this is in the same category as the designers who come up with yet another novel way of making a hotel shower work. Is it really better? Probably not. And if it were, it's still different than every other shower out there, meaning that most people are very unlikely to gain the level of proficiency at which the benefits would kick in.

Pre-smartphone, I used the dial pad a lot, from 3 to dozens of times per day. Now, I might use it a few times per week. So is it really worth the effort to rework all these interfaces and retrain everybody? I'm skeptical.
We started using Swift on new projects. I don't hate it per-se, but as with most new languages like Rust, or Kotlin, they have some neat, modern ideas, but mostly they help solving none of the problems you have on a day-to-day basis, and instead make common coding tasks harder.

Using Swift feels like i'm back in college writing C++ code while following all the newest design patterns, and best practices, thinking about whether i should make two classes friends or not, instead of solving actual problems.
I would have been surprised if this wasn't the case, I think people need a reality check!
To truly explain concepts to another, you have to be able to think like them or at least imagine what it would be like to think like them; you have to listen to them, observe them and react accordingly. In addition you need to be a subject matter expert to such a degree that you can invent or recall appropriate analogies and metaphors which suit your audience. All told this is a rare find, requiring either instinct, or long experience.
Outlook.com offers aliases too:
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Add-or-remove-an-em...
Are the old measurement method still being used today? What a wonderful oddity it would be if those measurements changed as well.
Very true, people often point out that Litecoin will suffer the same growing pains as Bitcoin as volume increases, and there is definitely an element of true to this. I trusted Gavin to help guide Bitcoin and since his departure I have not felt reassured of anyones true intentions in the Bitcoin community. With Litecoin, Charlie wanted it to be as fair as possible from the beginning. He refused to pre-mine the coin and repeatedly encourage critical thinking of coins in general and even advocated for Bitcoin above the coin he created!!! With the recent events in the Bitcoin community you can understand why people have flocked to Litecoin. His leadership is direct and highly visible.
That has no effect on Bitcoin.
New Search Engine – check out this Demo
The nice thing about Objective-C is that it combines two excellent distinct languages - C and Smalltalk. Swift, on the other hand, introduces a completely new universe. Which many swear is a good thing.
I feel like sours are the new IPAs. Most bars around me carry as many sours as IPAs. Being somewhat of a hophead, this annoyed me initially. But dammit, now I'm starting to like sours. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In Seattle we're starting to see more "Juicy" IPAs and fresh hop IPAs, which aren't nearly as sour and hoppy.
I was wondering that too. I think they're the designated scapegoat. If anything goes wrong, they get the blame.

Pretty smart. It sidesteps some of the moral questions by punting.
Writing great commit messages for better code review
Livepython: Visually trace your Python code in real time
Probably symlinked for backward compatibility while they modify their RFC to make it consistent.
"He also said that these stars [that “have not really earned their status”] have boasted to him that they almost never send their articles to “anywhere but Nature, Cell, or Science“—among the three most prestigious science journals. “And they are nearly always published in one of those magazines—where, when you see something you know about, you realize that it’s not always so great,” he continued."

I subscribed to Science for a while (the only benefit I can see of AAAS membership), and I was surprised by the work published there. I'm a computer jockey, and not into the biology that Science mostly publishes, but I had expected it to be major, ground-breaking papers. Instead, it seemed like the same kind of minimum publishable unit that goes on everywhere.
>and I believe both do it in an end-to-end encrypted way.

in chrome, the end-to-end part is opt-in. https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/1181035?hl=en
> Because neither group has all the power

> About 45 years ago there was a chance that they might

There was no chance. In the 1972 election, Nixon was re-elected winning 49 states (not a typo - he won 49 of 50 states) and won the popular vote by 23%.

And that was while the Watergate scandal was exploding. Per Wikipedia, not long before the November election, "On October 10, the FBI reported the Watergate break-in was part of a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of the Nixon re-election committee."[0]

There was no chance that the Democrats or anyone on the left was going to take "all the power".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal#Cover-up_and...
> ... the less the web is semantic.

Yes, predating this and .well-known, the principle exists as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_URL

There was a website way back in the 90s which encouraged a standardisation of paths such as /about, /products, /services etc.
Presumably, he did that expenditure and revenue math before he decided to start hiring for the role.
I'm not so concerned about "yearly debt" anymore. Swift 2->3 was baaaad, but Swift 3->4 was painless. I don't expect it will be worse next year.
I agree that there are parallels
of this phenomena in other fields. It’s part of human nature. The people good at self marketing procure more resources even if they are technically worse.
On the contrary I've had a lot of problems with the ObjC-Swift interop, to the point where I've mostly given up on integrating Swift into existing ObjC projects. Like most of the other problems with Swift, this comes down to tooling issues. Xcode's "jump to definition" taking me to auto-generated interop header files, "AppName-Swift.h missing" errors, the debugger losing track of a stacktrace in the transition between languages...
"opium, cocaine, and other drugs had been made illegal"

FYI, opium and cocaine were banned for overtly racist reasons:

https://www.thenation.com/article/how-myth-negro-cocaine-fie...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/15/long-o...

So I am not sure those are the best examples to prove the point that banning drug research is a greater crime than banning recreational drugs.
I'm a physics major, and still in science 20 years later, cancer research. I originally came here to ask, in general, why would anyone care about this result?

Since you asserted an answer to the question before I managed to ask, I'm happy to subordinate my question. But I will also suggest your specific answer, cure cancer, won't work. I need to kill cells, which requires a cascade of large molecules interacting at energies on the order of a fraction of an eV, or massive amounts of high energy radiation.

I can kill cells directly with high energy radiation, however, the energies for this investigation, the hydrogen 2s-4p transition, (1,2) are trivial (486 nm is visible light). Also, radiotherapy isn't really good at interrogating cell type, the current standard for new cancer therapies (immunotherapy).

(1) http://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6359/79

(2) https://indico.mitp.uni-mainz.de/event/14/contribution/11/ma...
In the days of Sears, you got a big catalog every so often. It had everything. You could go to the Sears store and it would probably have it in stock. I remember that's where you bought Boy Scout uniforms some 30 years ago... and the necessary basic patches.

Last time I went to Sears, I was looking for some good working outside pants. The store had an odor of perfume. Most of the clothes were for women. The size of pants I wanted was sold out with no idea of when it would be in stock.

So I went over to Target. They didn't have any good working pants. They might get some in the next shipment in a week or so. I went over to REI... and the pants were a bit too expensive for what I was after. I ended up at Duluth trading... the outlet a good half hour drive away from where I am now.

If I was living back up in the north woods where it was more than a half hour drive? I probably would have ordered online and probably from Amazon. Sure, Cabela's has same day shipping to a store, but at my previous residence, the nearest store was an hour and a half away... and shipping on one pair is %20 of the cost of the pants.

There was a sears in the town where I lived up north... but Amazon hasn't killed Sears. Sears has been committing a slow suicide for decades with poor availability and service. Other stores with an online presence still have what I would consider exorbitant shipping costs.

Don't blame Amazon for picking up the customers of the once mighty Sears mail-order empire - they didn't get their catalog online fast enough and ignored that silly Seattle company selling books for far too long.

I don't see it as Amazon being aggressive at undercutting competitors or vaporware them in the way that Microsoft was in its day (Competitor A announces a product... Microsoft announces they're going to do it too - everyone waits for Microsoft to come out with it while Competitor A's product withers on the vine). Amazon has a product and a focus, and they're doing a better job of it than other companies are.
It's ... more complicated than that.

I've just recently run across a reference to a metric for military force and capability, though I can't recall at the moment what it is based on. Though I believe it related to the capacity to project force.

The size of an army, its relation to the total population size, the distance / range at which it can act, the quantity, accuracy, and efficacy of force project, and much else.

Just by way of example, I've been looking at WWII history, particularly the fall of France. On base specifications, French armour was actually more capable than German, with one critical exception: German tanks had radios. The ability to act in concert and respond in realtime to changing battle circumstances proved critical. Against a relatively numerically-balanced French force, the German military was tremendously more effective. Blitzkreig tactics didn't work against numerically-superiour, and largely technically-matched, US and British forces on and after D-Day, though.

Quantifying fitness metrics is complicated.
This is my thought exactly. I've written a few open source Swift components to learn the language, but it's just not ready to work on the scale that mobile software is reaching.

Mobile software development isn't about a developer or two building "apps" anymore, it's grown much bigger than that.
I don't want to diminish your experience at all. But here's my story:

I learned to read and write by playing Sierra games. I played them with my dad. And I guess I wanted to be able to play them alone.

So the crappy text parsing forced me to learn written English. "Get knife" -> "What is a knife?", "Get sword" -> "I don't see a sword", "Get dagger" -> "You have the dagger". Over and over with many different circumstances. So I also learned to type.

I entered pre-school already knowing how to read and write, much to the chagrin of some teachers.

I am not saying this style of gaming was overall good. But it hard a weird unique impact on my development.
I agree with your general sentiment for sure, why should any of this matter?

On a personal basis I feel much more secure knowing a respected member of the community has enough faith in their product to tie their identity to it. Litecoin also has features that bitcoin doesn't. Faster block generation time, different hashing algorithms, larger supply. Charlie gives me confidence that the leadership of Bitcoin has not.
Or maybe it is to get people more familiar with the tech, and more "used to" it.
HQ – Live Trivia Game (iOS)
Segwit wasn't a hardfork, which makes it very different from this situation.
may I ask why you liquidated, especially with PoS approaching?
Well, that would be quite slow :D

You’re right in a most technical sense, it’s a lisp programmable browser
> Steve Hoober has done studies on how we hold the phone. He suggests that most of us hold the phone from the bottom such that the base of our thumb is at the bottom right of the screen (considering 90% of population is right handed).

And then I referenced the graphical representation [1] of the study's results.

Y'all. 49% is not "most". 49% * 90% ~= 45%, so even less than that.

[1] https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*RoVzWTb90D3fiEjlZ...
Take a look at NERDTree.
Don't forget that the civil rights movement actually was shaking things up in the 60s. I suspect that influenced political decisions by magnifying perceived threats to the prevailing social order.
Such an independent research firm could grant Ph.D.s. Getting a Ph.D. in US universities like where I went is primarily a matter of satisfying a committee of existing Ph.D.s that the student has done suitably creditable work.

A firm with good researchers, whose newly minted students also did good work, would soon have the suitable reputation. And those letters after your name are only as valuable as the reputation of the institution.
> reading Objective-C made me angry

Yet, many programmers love Smalltalk, which is where this "new" syntax came from.
Opt-in replay protection was merged in a few days ago. https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin/commit/a3c41256984bf11d95a56...

In any case, if you believe Bitcoin's main value proposition is as a great store of value, then replay protection simply doesn't matter that much. You wouldn't be transacting enough to matter.
Altho TBH most of the objections I've heard against ObjC from non-ObjC developers usually are just as shallow and revolve around how weird or ugly the bracket syntax for messages is.
Like this: https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/photos/uncategorized/2007...

But real ;)

I haven't been able to find a picture of him, and this was about 15 years ago...
Considering the amount of work it would take to write an HTML rendering engine from scratch, this is a perfectly reasonable way to go.
Quarterly Capitalism.
An efficient solution to TSP would require an efficient solution to all instances of the problem, not an efficient solution for some instances. Most problems are easy in the small cases. And if you are solving special cases, you are solving a decidedly different problem.

>They can be solved to optimality given enough time.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. TSP is infeasible in the sense that it cannot be solved in an efficient amount of time. Naturally, it is solvable if you're given "enough time". It's not an impossible problem.
Jobs, along with Gates are the Entrepreneurs.
Engelbart and Kay are the Academics.
Please - tell me that's not something one might actually encounter in practice (and yes I know, it'll feel clever to respond with up votes and down votes but please don't as I'll not have any idea what they mean: good point! Or stupid comment! Or you would totally see this! Or you wouldn't! And for the last two which vote is which?)
Yes to scrypt, but these days, Argon2[1] is the best.

"better" means "cannot be calculated much faster on GPU or even FPGA because it requires a lot of RAM".

"materially better" probably means "less than a million of hashes per second on eight Nvidia GTX 1080 running hashcat"[2], so Django and scrypt are both good (adjust work factor as needed, of course).

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argon2

2 - https://gist.github.com/epixoip/a83d38f412b4737e99bbef804a27...
I think the Swift language is great, but the tool chain (specifically `/usr/bin/swift` and `/usr/bin/swiftc`) is absolute garbage. The documentation is almost non-existent, its preferred method of 'handling' errors is to just segfault, when it does give you an actual error message it's completely nonsensical, and as mentioned it's very very slow.

I think i'm a version or two behind the latest, so maybe it's better now, but that's been my experience so far.

Anyway, in spite of the above i still prefer it to ObjC.
As a Bitcoin fan (and someone who owns a little), I think it's a pretty good article.

Some more tidbits of information from my perspective:

>The anti-2Xers argue that the NYA should not be binding because it was negotiated behind closed doors, and that a change of this magnitude needs to be more carefully considered before it is adopted.

No active developers were part of the NYA. Some in the NYA have said that they agreed because they believed Core was party to the NYA.

>But there is another school of thought, which is that Bitcoin is (or should be) a currency rather than a commodity, primarily a medium of exchange rather than a store of value. These are the folks who want you to be able to buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks with Bitcoins.

I don't think anyone, including Core, is against that (higher transaction throughput). But on-chain scaling alone can't get you very far, and it has large costs that need to be carefully considered. The (backward-compatible) Segwit capacity upgrade just happened, and it takes time for people to update their software to make the newer more-efficient transactions. (... If the consensus was that Bitcoin really was urgently hurting for transaction capacity, you'd expect people to be updating to Segwit transactions faster than they are now.) The idea that another capacity upgrade should be rushed so soon immediately after Segwit is kind of silly. The idea that it should be decided so soon behind closed doors by a few CEOs is sillier.

>The 2X advocates have refused, citing the NYA, and secure (at least apparently) in their belief that enough people will update their code that there will be no doubt that 2X is the One True Chain.

Let's be clear about the word "update": it means to switch their software to a fork that none of the active community Bitcoin developers contribute to and that none plan on contributing to. Many have said that if Bitcoin "fails" after the fork, they have no interest in contributing to the Segwit2x fork's software. (The big-blocker anti-segwit movement stalled work for years, politicized the Bitcoin space, and contributed to making many of the core devs be the target of harassment; imagining that unpaid volunteers are going to switch to working on a project made by the latest iteration of that is ... to call it wishful thinking seems too kind.)
Yes it is. They didn't get the job done, so other firms stepped in and did it better.

Contrast this with communism, be where we'd all just be forced by law to use whatever AOL gave us, forever.
To avoid namespace collisions. It's not discoverable in any case because no one has a directory listing as their homepage.
Does your DNA change day to day?
Ultimately a cryptocurrency needs a functional governance model to survive - it has to be possible to update the code, and so people have to decide somehow on which version is valid, and this creates the opportunity for a power structure to exist, and where there is such an opportunity, someone will fill it. Having a "hero" in charge is not the best way but Bitcoin is a fucking mess right now.
Call me old-fashioned, but I think that type of institutional money going into inflated tech stocks is a completely different ball game than that kind of money going into something like bitcoin, that weird "internet money" thing most people don't really grok, or understand how to use or indeed what exactly the use is.

dot com stocks themselves may have been a lot of hype but at least they had the precedence of several hundred years of capital market infrastructure around them to lend some credence.
The current price of Bitcoin is mostly driven by the fraud taking place within the Ethereum ecosystem. Let's see where the price is after a few rounds of SEC crackdowns.
Probably complacency, and people refusing to sell because they think Bitcoin always recovers. The same happens in stocks.
Right...if we're interested in UX, why are we still using numbers as a proxy for who we want to call. Shouldn't we start typing letters and have previous call recipients show up on top and suggestions from some search service show up below? Computers are good with numbers...let them handle that part and let us use language/words.