skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That should make you want to invest in the #1 company that manufactures satellite components.

I understand the idea, and I might agree. I just wanted to point out that in the book "The Intelligent Investor", there was the idea that you could think about investing into the second best player in a certain space.

I think the reasoning was that there is more opportunity for growth for a second-grade company than a first grade company. Maybe the first-grade company is not looking at the problem in an innovative way. I think it probably depends on the case.

I tried to look into "second-grade" in my copy but that's a term relating to stocks, and not the leaders of an industry.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting that book or misremembering it

Edit: By the way, good job on the successful investments! I wish I was as confident about my observations of different businesses.
Yeah, it's too much risk and time. Maybe putting together really scrappy MVP's and taking a decent chunk, but I don't know too many good founders who would do that.
Walt Mossberg‏
@waltmossberg
Perspective: Mac revenues alone in Apple’s qtr just released were $7+ billion. At an annual rate, that would put the Mac in the Fortune 100.

Is Walt correct on this?
Still, if an audio driver wanted root access that wouldn't shock me.

I trust my distro vendor, but on Windows this likely remain the wild west for years to come.
old, but relevant http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
It's not too late. I wouldn't place a huge buy at $7000 right now, but it doesn't hurt to set up a monthly buy of $50-200 on Coinbase and take advantage of some dollar cost averaging.
see link I posted above. not quite simple.
Because he used block quote syntax. It's designed for code on HN's implementation, so it preserves newlines, instead making you scroll.

It's a poor choice for quoting non computer languages.
Well definitely a small small fraction of how I was affected by the 2008 financial crisis or even the recent refugee wave.

GW will happen slowly over many decades... Not suddenly like either of those. I think people forget that. In fact, we're already living through the speed of these changes! Cities are already flooding more and more and refugees are already leaving, it's just such a slow process that it's barely noticeable and not even a daily concern. And this is predicted to be the same speed for the rest of GW.

A city slowly flooding more and more over 50 years is not too different than the emigration from Detroit over a smaller timespan.

Same goes for agricultural shifts. Markets are already adjusting.

There will be no crisis.
I strongly believe that if you want it bad enough, you'll make time/effort for it. If not, then it simply isn't important enough for you - and that's perfectly ok.
"the only known option for countering it requires government (or world) regulation."

Disagree.
The regulation is only neccesary, if the common people/companys don't acknowledge the problem.

And even then, I don't think regulation helps much. More likely the opposite. Because if it is just ordered from above, then many just get childish rebellish and do the opposite. This is in my opinion the main problem.

Conservative people also like unpolluted citys I believe (side effect of electric cars) - most of them just taken a anti position to the leftish-green-hippi-liberal pro-enviroment stand.

So if people wants it, then it will happen. But I believe, we are allready on a good way. It just takes time to change the core of our industry and transport ... it is a huge effort.
And will it be too late? That depends.
I don't think it will be the end of the world, if the polar bear goes distinct or the netherlands get flooded. And we are allready causing great distruction to nature and people are starving by the millions. And this might get worse, but it is all connected, as the global population numbers are still greatly increasing who all want more things.
So I don't see how regulating things down in Europe or US can help with that on a global scale.

So we as humanity have big problems, yes, but climate change is only one of them. And the solution to most, in my opinion, is better technology which will supply humanity in a sustainable way. Once people are not hungry anymore and are educated and connected with the rest of the world, then they usually tend to think, before just making more babys - about wheter they really want to raise a child and into what world they want to raise that child ...

And back to the topic, if you don't tell the conservatives what to do and think, but just show them how it can be done differently, then they will change, too, I believe.
This is a bad metaphor. Religious belief is predicated on faith in the absence of evidence. Climate change science is based on acceptance of the best available body of evidence.
Compared to the rest of the developed world, the U.S. does have very poor working conditions. I'd also say a majority of U.S. workers doesn't have a clue and has little experience to make a comparison anyhow.

I actually like people outside my country reminding my fellow citizens that we do have it pretty bad and it is in our power to change it if we decide to do that one day. The message might eventually soak in after some decades have passed.
Also, this hedge became an extremely famous trade in the years to come, netting Mexico $8B in savings.

https://www.ft.com/content/ccd87f9e-9bd9-11de-b214-00144feab...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-04/uncoverin...
No worries. Socialism's coffin was nailed shut and buried long ago.
Looking for feedback on new venture
This is already how all digital content works, it's just a question of whether producers and lawmakers are ready to admit it yet.
The Beginner's Guide to Time Travel
Hi, it's Trent here, CTO at BigchainDB.

Summary: Python isn't the bottleneck yet, and if it becomes one, C will become the last 1%.

I've been working on production apps in Python since 2002, including ones doing large-scale compute running 1000+ machines at once. How: 99% python, 1% C. But the trick is, you only build in the C once you've worked out all the kinks and optimized the big-picture stuff elsewhere. Python is great for not only connecting things, but rapidly iterating on algorithms and building maintainable code.

The AI / ML community has discovered this too: Python is now the most popular language in that community. Despite the heavy compute. How: most of the popular libraries have efficient C (etc) implementations under the hood.

This is exactly the philosophy we've been following at BigchainDB, with success. Python to connect things, iterate quickly in improving algorithms, and ship maintainable code. We haven't got far enough to resort to building our own C libraries yet, though many 3rd party libraries we use are implemented in C.

[EDIT] Based on the comments below, I'll now mention here too: BigchainDB wraps MongoDB, which is written in C++. And, Python 3.5+ (which BDB uses) has gradual typing, which brings many benefits of static typing to Python.
There is a slightly more subtle point to be made here. Politics is too complicated to generalise, but here is the kernel of the idea for others to mull on.

In my view, the part of the government most mobilised to deal with climate change is likely to be aligned to the (hopefully small number of) political actors comfortable with the idea of people getting less energy/more expensive energy/no growth in available energy.

I don't want these people in the seat of power under any circumstances. They have views that are a direct threat to my comfort and standard of living. Cheap energy should always be a priority.

EDIT Just for reference, focusing only on electricity and ignoring the broader energy market, I have read that South Australia (where Elon Musk is building his big battery) is competitive for world's highest electricity prices. The German energiewende has driven them to top 2 or 3 in Europe for prices paid by consumers. France, who has some of the cheapest and cleanest electricity in the world, runs nuclear. Ironically, in Australia, the most pro-nuclear party is also the anti-climate-change party.
It's definitely due to network effects. Bitcoin Is the most popular cryptocurrency. Ask the average person about cryptocurrency and they will immediately think bitcoin. The technical subtleties between different cryptocurrencies aren't well known to the average non-technical crypto investor.
Personal anecdote: In late 2014 or early 2015 I was looking for work and I had an interview with DNAinfo. One of the first things I asked is what tech stack they were using. The guy told me their whole stack was based around Drupal.

I wasn't desperate for work, I had some freelance contracts, so I felt free to be completely honest with the guy. So I said, "I've got to tell you, the fact that you are using Drupal is a giant red flag to me. You're not going to re-invent journalism using Drupal."

Partly I was thinking of "Twilight of the CMS" which was written way back in 2011, and which should have been a warning to any startup focused on journalism:

http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/talking-points-memo-t...

Partly I was also thinking that whatever company reinvents journalism, it will be using a facts-over-time log as the starting point of the creation of their data, with all consumers of the data drawing from some downstream database where the data was already denormalized. This is the architecture that the New York Times later adopted:

Publishing with Apache Kafka at The New York Times

https://www.confluent.io/blog/publishing-apache-kafka-new-yo...

I briefly tried to sell the guy on this idea, just to see if they were open to changing their architecture. They were not. He very much gave the vibe "PHP programmers are cheap, and we want cheap programmers."

So, I gave DNAinfo a pass. And somehow, I am not surprised that they've run into trouble. I'm not saying that Drupal caused any problems for them, but I would say that the use of Drupal revealed flawed thinking which also affected other parts of the business.
Driver signing is not really about malware, but rather about Microsoft trying to enforce a bit of quality control on the shit-show that was driver development by noname hardware manufacturers. If a driver is signed I can look up the owner and bash him for his crap quality code. Similarly, any manufacturer caught doing this sort of trick would be blacklisted.
Pretty unlikely that they were completely bankrupt to the point where they couldn't afford the hosting bill for even another day.

Nevermind that leaving the archives up while not paying writers would generate ad revenue at very low cost in the short term. Instead now they have to refund advertisers with incomplete campaigns.
Apple Pay is also becoming an increasingly notable part of that too I believe.
Actually Apple does via the IBM partnership. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Mobile
See the comment "Why use Python rather than..." and my response to it. Cheers,
Show HN: Interviewing MIT Faculty about their personal lives
Bitcoin is a high risk investment. If you buy some today it could go to $1 next month (although as it's years of track record continues to grow this becomes less and less likely).

Make bitcoin 1% of your portfolio. If you lose all of it, it's not really a big deal. If one year from now it has grown to 10% of your portfolio, you'll be more comfortable with it and you can sell half and maintain it as 5% knowing that if you ever lose that you are still ahead.
Wait, you think people shouldn't negotiate their salary?
Hopefully the certificate transparency effort will cleanup some of this misuse.
Wikipedia has Chinese internet usage at 50.3%, so to be accurate a majority of Chinese people now have internet access: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
Not really.

I could never figure out how the hell do they make money. Their ads were crap. They begged for interns to come to work for them for free in both publishing (writing) and sales. Sponsored content posts were garbage. If you looked at the comments you realized that the active user base would have problem paying $12 for lunch. Tech stack was garbage. And it had way too many people who were drawing salaries.
I went into serious depression for a month after that. That was not all money. I've more in saving which I don't touch. Honestly, I don't know what 2M buys because I've never spent any significant amount of money on anything. I don't know how much 2M is, all I know is that I had worked 2 years for that money. Whenever I remember that 2 years worth of my efforts has been flushed down the drain, it makes me sad.
Google to the rescue:

https://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+city+local+news&oq=...
Leave it to HN to uncover the real cause.
I love electric cars but I do not think it is fair for my money to be taken to subsidize a car for someone else. I had no say in the matter. The same goes with solar subsidies. If you want an electric car or solar, you should pay for it, not the taxpayer.
Including the various browser-based javascript malwares?
We've asked you not to post like this before, and it seems as though you're going to continue to violate the guidelines, so we've banned the account.

We're happy to unban accounts if you email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll post civilly and substantively in the future.
Coordination-Free Consistent Transactions Using In-Net Concurrency Control [pdf]
What kind of anarchists do you know? They stick to gold??? LOL
DNAinfo was never profitable in its 8 year existence. With the union taking root it was probably never going to see a return.
In my opinion the only unethical thing here was taking down the archives. Total severance seemed fine.
There’s a pretty big difference from a city doing it, and dozens (hundreds?) all doing it at once.
A decentralized p2p search engine exists, though really nobody uses it.

https://yacy.net/en/index.html

Perhaps a bare bones donation-supported search engine could exist if it implemented the same protocol using WebRTC and served a single JavaScript-powered webpage from S3.
you know, I never noticed the number labels, but I did notice all the fig leaves ...

https://realhousewifeadventures.wordpress.com/2014/06/04/fig...
Did you do a segwit transaction? My fees were in the pennies range...
> Doing this right after your employees unionize makes you an asshole.

No, it doesn't.

Gothamist is not a small coal mining town where workers have all but one choice of an employer. There unions made sense. You don't bunch together, you and your family starve. Here, unionization is an attempt to squeeze more perks and money from their existing employer, simply because it's easier and more comfortable to do than to look for another job.
Seriously, this says more about you and the crowd you keep than about bitcoin or crypto currencies.
TransferWise reserve the right to cancel out transaction if the market moved too far.

I think you're right they would eat a fairly big loss to avoid the bad press this would generate, but there is ultimately a limit.

It bugs me this aspect of their business model is never cited, so most people assume they are selling the same product as the banks. They're not: banks take the risk; TransferWise leave it with the customer.
Remember how everyone went ape over UAC? They get criticized for too few and too many permissions dialogs.
The article has a certain bias and tone. A lot of points are just kind of swept under with this quote "the biological processes unleashed by physical activity are still relatively mysterious. For all the known benefits of a short loop around the park, scientists are, for the most part, incapable of explaining how exercise does what it does."

The biological process in the human body that depend on upright motion include far more than just simple muscle stimulation and growth. The circular system is meant to work against gravity in concert with muscle contraction. It should be relatively obvious that there's indeed far more to exercise and basic bodily functions than this pill covers.
Wasn’t Russia responsible for spending $100k or so on ads on Facebook?

Didn’t Hillary spend $1B on her media buy?

This reads like clickbait to me.

I didn’t vote for Trump but he’s demonstrably reducing government size and put a strict constitutionalist on the Supreme Court.

The media needs to stop with sensationalist headlines like Russia alone caused Hillary to lose.
Thanks, dad. In the meantime, the GP’s not “alt-facts” remain the apolitical reality of the rich vs. poor.
Did Twitter Ban Trump? (no, he's back)
Could totally relate to that . My introductory language was C and god I hated the language. I failed every programming test until I picked up python and felt like I could understand what programming is . Later I worked in school in C and loved it too. But python would be my first love.
Wow, please don't post like this ever again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I can imagine the requirements doc that led to that, where some Pentagon wonk was thinking "What happens if the helmsman is shot? If there's engine damage? If the helmsman is shot and there's engine damage?" and wrote all of those cases in, and completely forgot about the case where the bridge crew gets super confused because they triggered an edge case in the software and have no idea how to regain control of the ship.
It makes more sense if you ask: "what economic interest group would be significantly impacted if consensus was achieved?"

Basically, follow the money.
How is this different from Mysql with sharding+encryption?
$269 billion in cash. Insane to think about that.
More importantly, in mobile the code block's width is only 200 pixels.
I don't see any reason you couldn't take the pill and exercise. In many cases people who aren't doing any sort of exercise are held back by being so out of shape that they can't really get into the habit, in which case having a pharmaceutical head start might be reasonable.
Hi, traditional "blockchains" have full replication which of course doesn't scale as you mention. Replication factor of 5000 is overkill (basically what Bitcoin has). Full replication isn't a prerequisite to building something useful. Instead, replicate less, use the extra nodes to store other shards of data, and make sure you have the right guarantees. That's the path.
This is great etc.

But the problem is the user interface and programming environment is shit for anything past basic stabby finger novelty apps and no one trusts them enough to invest heavily in it. Oh and the store is a desert of turdblossoms.
> I'm more curious, why would you run a DB in a container?

I develop different PHP apps - some are, uh, fossilized and don't work with MySQL 5.7 or later, some are on a more modern stack and can work with the latest and greatest stuff. Other apps I am working on run on pgsql. Also, I am on OS X.

All of this means it's either a Vagrant VM which I always forget to shut down and breaks every couple of months instead of Docker where I can do a simple docker ps -aq|xargs docker stop, and everything is pretty much reproducible.

And no, running the DBs native on OS X is a pure PITA - good luck getting different versions of MySQL and PHP to peacefully coexist.

On production servers the story is different but I can tailor a production server environment to the exact specs the software requires.
The content is still in their CMS somewhere. They just redirected the index to a different page. Could have even been someone who didn't work directly at DNAInfo. Ricketts employs a lot of people.
Well, people misidentify others when viewing conditions are poor or when they dont' know the other person well. For instance, say my mother was standing in front of me in broad daylight and I was given half a second to look at her face; I really don't see how I'd fail to identify here, unless her face had changed drastically for some reason.

So, to be fair, this too is a different thing than what we're talking about.
Won't anyone think of all those poor oil company profits? They would be at risk in your clean-tech "paradise".
If the units have only gone up 10% but revenue has gone up 25% then absolutely, yes, profit per unit has gone up, across the board.
Don't tell it to people who don't keep copies of what they write.
RealDonaldTrump account no longer active on Twitter
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump does not resolve anymore
https://twitter.com/potus still in operation
I know. I think if I read "scalable" and "blockchain" in the same sentence again I'll scream.

Once bitcoin can handle Visa's transaction volume (250M transactions/day) we can talk scale.

EDIT: after reading the comments more, seems the project operates without PoW, which allows it to scale more. I'm curious, then, what differentiates it from something like cockroachdb. It seems to be an append-only, distributed database. How does the bockchain fit in?
Let's not join in with rantings of our own?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
1. Owning bitcoin doesn't encourage illicit trade. Cash is used for illicit trade, but it's not immoral to own cash.

2. Owning bitcoin incurs only the environmental toll for the initial transfer into your wallet. If the $0.50 of electricity used to validate your initial transfer bothers you, buy some carbon emissions to offset that. But you probably waste much more electricity leaving Halo on pause for 10 minutes while you grab a snack.

3. If you think Chinese enterprises are immoral (which I would love to hear your reasoning on if true), then don't buy bitcoin from a Chinese enterprise. They don't have a monopoly on the currency.

Also, what do you mean by "low-class investment"? Do you mean high risk? The definition of investment is: "a thing that is worth buying because it may be profitable or useful in the future."

Given the track record of Bitcoin, I would say that so far it has proven to be a very good investment for any who have bought it so far. It's hard to argue with history.

Or maybe you are claiming to have knowledge about why the years-long trend of bitcoin growth will cease soon? Has something fundamentally changed about it recently?
Hi, Trent here, CTO of BigchainDB.

Correct, traditional blockchains like Bitcoin aren't scalable.

The whole point of BigchainDB is to bring scale to (the database part) of the blockchain space, using the learnings from distributed databases which do scale.

More info at www.bigchaindb.com, I encourage you to have a read:)
What, exactly, do you want to do about it?

What, exactly, do you want to do about it, that's politically viable?

Should we tell a billion people in China, and another billion in India to shut down their coal-fired plants? Back to the farms and rural poverty?

Do you want to convince rich westerners to stop eating meat in such large quantities? Tell them to stop driving so much?

Both sets of suggestions are politically unpopular positions and forcing them on their respective populations would lead to strife and lives lost far beyond what we'll see with climate change.

We push for incremental changes in the US, but even their proponents admit they won't make much of a difference in a global context.

The Earth is warming. Almost everyone is on board with that now. Absent a global totalitarian government that can constrain carbon emissions by fiat, what can we do that will make a difference?

It seems like the answer is "not much," so the revealed preference of most of the world's citizens seems to be rolling the dice that the change won't be catastrophic, hope for a tech breakthrough that obviates the problem, and assume that we'll deal with the disruptions as they come. It's not an inspiring message, but it's where we're at.