skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Bitcoin was a decent initial implementation of the idea, but there are better and more resilient technologies in 2017.

What are those "more resilient technologies" that you speak about? I want to know, because all the other shitcoins are either more centralized or a scam and not worth looking at in my opinion.

I dare you to tell me another cryptocurrency that is more decentralized than bitcoin.

> I am disgusted by the kind of people Bitcoin attracts today and I don't want to be associated with that crown in any possible way!

What I want to know is why you associate the technology with the people, or why even generalize the whole community because of a few bad actors.

I agree there are many toxic people in bitcoin, but you know what? I don't give a shit, just ignore them I'd say.

There are far worse people in the current financial system, but you don't seem to be talking about that, I wonder why.
I love wittgenstein and agree with your gist.

Being trite - Wittgenstein also said 'The world is all that is the case' ... a precept that a mission to mars for example certainly flexes, of course as soon as it came to pass, the meaning of 'the world' would reconfigure itself.

To the point though ... another maxim that I often find myself employing is: 'The road to hell is paved with good intentions'.
It looks like it was done by a customer support employee on their way out https://twitter.com/TwitterGov/status/926267806261407744
> I've ejected my fair share of clients

Thank you!

> a line employee who has to make rent every week

Some sort of software development guild or professional association could help. Like a PE's duty to disobey their boss when a project isn't safe, explicitly defined external obligations can give the employee some power (and organizational support).
Ask HN: Legacy code – tests first or setup CI?
I've been working on a project for a large IT department to automate all the things. It started out small but more people are starting to use it, and also starting to contribute, adding features; it's starting to get some traction. This is a web based app (Python) that runs scripts to automate various infrastructure tasks, like building and patching servers. It's backed by a database and is very tightly coupled (although it's fairly modular, organized into packages, kind of like MVC). We had to move fast and there were just 2-4 of us, server admins learning to be developers, so we've never had a formal testing or CI/CD process. We do use version control. We have a dev branch, which is everyone's upstream, and once we're happy we merge that to a master branch and that's considered "production".

We know we need to get to CI/CD, unit tests, all the DevOps/Agile/XP stuff. I'm thinking since we don't have any tests at all, before we refactor the code to support unit tests or start integrating with Jenkins (CI), we should start with at least adding some high level tests. Maybe integration or UI tests... just something to make sure we're not breaking things as we clean up the code base.

Some people have suggested we start with getting it into Jenkins and set up an automated build (CI) system first, then start adding tests. I'm thinking start with tests first.

People are using it now, but there are a few bugs. Most of them are integration related - race conditions, DB sessions overlapping, things that come up when it's running under Gunicorn and handling a lot of requests. What's the best roadmap to get a legacy code base up to snuff to be considered a real product?

[edit] I should mention, everyone who develops on this runs it on systems that are almost identical to production. We use a requirements.txt, and the OS is at the same patch level and everything. Giving contributors a way to run tests locally against their changes on their dev boxes, with a testing framework, would be almost as good as running the app in production. Nobody's running this on their laptop or anything like that.
does this mean the days of Noah actually did exist?
Twitter's brand is being public. As far as I can tell, Twitter survives on a revolving cycle of celebrity and news coverage. They almost went broke until the world's biggest celebrity (POTUS) brought their popularity back.

So when people express outrage about Twitter restricting speech, it's the same emotion as RadioShack selling their customer list - not as advertised.
So, not a citizen.
Of course they do check for profitability. There are quite a few interesting stories about that actually.

For instance, if a channel consumes the vast majority of the margin, that's still a valid channel. The advertiser could depend more on you than you depend on him.
> There is a certain desperation to capitalism that infects everything

I just quoted you on twitter as I think that expresses very well how I feel. Underlying capitalism is the thought that if you fail you'll starve.

But (and bringing this back to the original topic) the businesses behind the web have gone even further. It's not sufficient to make money, you must make ALL the money you can ALL of the time. This leads to the behaviour as discussed in the article - no regard for how you are treating your customers/fellow human beings, just get rich, and by winning you justify your shitty actions.
This is probably nothing new, robber barons have been around for a long time, but it now seems to be standard practice for all businesses, especially web-based ones who don't directly deal with people.
I found this to be a very clear and well-structured post. I was not surprised to read that the author is a historian. I especially liked the detail in their process where they automatically update the communal sheet to indicate that the data has already been processed.
I would love it if I had some help with something other than a straight up pain pill. My body hurts all the time with arthritis and from using a cane for the past several years. To be able to simply move around again without constant pain would be a Godsend.
The “Amazon Amendment” (It seems like Amazon wrote it)
that's clever, i've never thought of it, interesting considering how many while true;do ...;sleep X;done loops i've done
>Cheap energy should always be a priority.

Environmentalists agree with this statement. As an energy source, coal has a relatively low price sans regulations. However, the true cost is not captured by markets.

Burning coal causes smog, soot, acid rain, global warming, and toxic air emissions and produces ash, sludge, and other harmful pollutants as waste products, externalizing and diffusing the cost to society.

Your 'cheap energy price' strategy is like an apocryphal example of the tragedy of the commons
> My friend was countering that all the rich people escaping to Mars made them not care about Earth and their fellow citizens, and was just about the most abhorant act he could think of.

I'd argue that, far from being an escape, it's a great sacrifice to migrate from fertile earth to a sterile planet as an insurance policy against the possibility of the extinction of the human species (that is unlikely).
That's pretty common, and is one of the reasons for some of the third party exchange clients on Android devices. At least one of the early ones (Nitro?) maintained its own separate data store for email and possibly other things so that when policies were used to wipe data it could wipe only the data in that app instead of the entire device.

The counter to that is that now I believe there are a bunch of Exchange clients on Android that will simply ignore server policy or where handling of policy can be controlled in the settings, which kind of defeats the point.

The original point of all those policies was to be able to erase supposedly secure content if the device was lost or if someone left the company for whatever reason.

Edit: the Exchange client I was thinking of is TouchDown, now owned (and EOLed) by Symantec but I believe originally from NitroDesk.
> 11.2 billion and still climbing by 2100.

They really don't think any physical constraints are going to get in the way of that? There are only so many fish in the ocean.
Subreddits resemble IRC from that point of view - you just need to join the right one.
There is definitely a difficulty in using dumpfiles if your database is 50G in size.
We should build hybrid human/ai ranking systems to fight fake news
To me it still sounds like physically linked sticks would have been helpful here, if the fundamental problem was that the pilots did not understand the situation. At 11:38, when this first "fighting over the stick" episode happened, Bonin held his stick fully back to the nose-up limit stop, and Robert was not aware of that fact. If the sticks had been linked, he would presumably have noticed it, which might have helped him make sense of the stall warning etc.

I guess it's still a bit of random luck that he actually took the controls for a moment here. Like you say, this was already at a late stage.
It doesn't seem that hard to understand? In the context of a U.S. Congressional hearing, "hostile" probably means "hostile to the U.S."
You know you can reply to people directly, right? It makes conversations flow much better than reply-by-edit.

I would really like to see your explanation for (4) given the constitution explicitly only gives the authority for a declaration of war to Congress (Article I, Section 8 in case you need the reference).

Regarding (1), if the president continues to bluff, then no nation can accurately gauge his or the US's intention. Continuing to threaten, but not seek out approval for, war only encourages NK (and others) behavior because they are increasingly confident he's all bark and no bite.
> Netflix isn't using DRM for the customers, its using DRM for the content providers.

That doesn't for their own video. Whom are they using it for in that case?

> It isn't there job to fix the rest of the Internet

Apparently it's their job to break it though, by pushing this garbage into he standard.
> I've often thought spreadsheets should be more commonly used as the UI for software.

I've had this same thought! I've been working on [VisiData]
(Python+spreadsheet+terminal) for the past year, and I think the interface is more than sufficient for all kinds of applications. Besides the main VisiData app, I've made a git interface (vgit), a game (vdgalcon,
a remake of Galactic Conquest), a chat client, and I have designs for a unix shell and a python debugger, among other things.

If you want to try to fit something you're working on into a terminal spreadsheet interface, we could put something together really quickly. With vdtui (the core interface layer), you just have to collect your row objects, specify the columns, write the commands, et voila! We should be able to get a workable prototype going in an hour or two at most.
..Because crypto miners do not operate in buildings that have to be built & lit, right?
A smaller percentage of the world population than ever is fighting or suffering war these days than ever before.
> a lot of the large internet companies withhold or obscure functionality that users really want

For example, Google only lets you get a few results at the top of their search. What if you want to get the whole 100,000 of them? Sometimes it's important, for science.
"Through our investigation we have learned that this was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day. We are conducting a full internal review."

https://twitter.com/TwitterGov/status/926267806261407744
> In your first link, the court found that, for environmental reasons, the areas where the picketers were located should be considered public space, and therefore First Amendment protections apply. They're not claiming that the company must uphold people's 1A rights

Yes, that was my interpretation as well (and goes toward my comment about it at most justifying violating the TOS).

> the company does not actually have full legal control of that land.

No... I don't think that that is a fair statement of the conclusion. The conclusion is rather that given that they have chosen to let their property be used as a public space the state can't apply the law it's power (i.e. enforce laws) in a way that would violate their right to speak (picket).

While there may be acts specifically protecting picketing (I don't know) the opinion doesn't seem to be about any such acts.
Enter Wintry Gift Bundle Contest (valued at $2000+)
The issue I've always had with onion addresses is that you can't remember them, which means you need to keep a list of bookmarks saved locally somewhere, which–if you're using tor to avoid prosecution–is pretty incriminating. What's the solution?
Its hard to believe people actually think this shit.
I am not saddened by this event, but by the fact that such occurrences will only add momentum to the movement to lock down computing devices and take freedom away from their users:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12061320

Those worrying about security should remember that device drivers already run in ring 0 and can do anything they damn well please.

Thus I say: Good on Savitech for not being afraid to rebel against; and fuckings to the corporatocracy that is certificate authorities and the authoritarian security industry.
SVB also hiring a lot of engineers iirc.
Being a Startup Founder is a minimum wage job – Here’s the proof
CSS transforms work just fine without the GPU. We use it extensively for screenshot testing our CSS transform-based animations on https://oddslingers.com.
We're launching a 4-day Wintry Gift Bundle Contest (valued at >$2000+) ahead of our Indiegogo launch, where winners can win free Sound Huggle headphones, a Solar Powered Anti-Theft Backpack, a Pendleton Throw, Port of Mokha Coffee, and more!
Check us out and share with your friends for a chance to win!
Most money in Medallion is from employees with a bit from friends and family. You can't invest in it at all, because they don't need or want your money. If they're fooling anyone, they're just fooling themselves, or maybe using it as marketing for their other funds.

In absolute terms Renaissance isn't even spectacular. There are capacity constrained traders whose Sharpe Ratios and return on capital are multiples of RenTech's. What's impressive is that they manage to do it with a billion dollar AUM. That's small compared to some of the biggest HFs, but far more than a typical high turnover strategy can put to use.
I hold out hope for new microkernel OS's like Redox where drivers live in userland to solve this kind of thing.
Chrome headless does, just specify the --user-data-dir parameter to give it a profile to use (a profile where you're authenticated to the site you want to snapshot).

e.g.

chrome --disable-gpu --headless --user-data-dir=/Users/username/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default https://example.com/paywall/article.html

Alternatively, use puppeteer to script the auth process. https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer
What does it mean to be less scientific?

For instance, I believe that there are fewer experiments that confirm general relativity than there are that confirm quantum mechanics, so does that mean GR is less scientific than QM?

Does this mean GR-skeptics are on firm scientific ground? No, it does not. The evidence for GR is overwhelming. That QM may have even more evidence does not cast doubt on GR. Both GR and QM have overwhelming evidence, and there is no meaningful sense in which one can say that one is less scientific than the other.

> This shuts down the possibility for a reasonable discussion because one party (the activists) is overwhelmingly guilty of acting and arguing in bad faith

No, what shuts down the possibility for reasonable discussion is people discarding 90% of the experiments and measurements, and then claiming that there is no evidence. It's not the activists that are doing this.
The biggest natural constraint was nitrogen fixation which places a natural limit of around 4 billion people. But artificial fertilizers basically took the lid of that and the population has been exploding since been the process was first industrialized.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9ef1/254c1b7626ae1c70f0718c...
Those are all your stock picks in the last fifteen years? No losers at all?
because we can compare the energy usage for Bitcoin with that of the next comparable thing: credit card transactions. This is useful when judging whether Bitcoin is a good replacement for other payment networks.
Do you think this could really have any impact on the elections?

I don't see how any of those images or texts could change my opinion on who I want to be the president. Why would anyone take them into consideration?

P.S. I'm Russian. I'm no fan of propaganda and I just want to figure out whether our government really wanted Trump to be the president and if so, then why? I might have missed something, but I don't see that the decisions Trump making are any good for Russia. I see the opposite.

For example, Trump wanted to remove the oil production limit, which would have affected Russian economics.
So more "users" should be developers? And some idealized Chrome dev tools should be shown to everybody by default? That's the kind of techy, unix-y shit that turned off average people from the early web in the first place. Turning that stuff off and hiding it is what made things like the iPhone so popular.

Most people aren't interested in learning about HTTP, security certificates, javascript AJAX requests etc., no matter how "learnable" the browsers could make them. It's just irrelevant to chatting with your kids or reading about what happened in the Dodgers game. Geeky tech people will seek that stuff out, average people won't.
If you're interested in running your own personal Way-Back machine that uses Chrome headless for archiving (among other methods), check out Bookmark Archiver.

https://github.com/pirate/bookmark-archiver
"That's an opinion not a statement of fact."

That is not accurate. The MBP keyboard, for example, is objectively worse, both ergonomically and due to quality control issues.

https://9to5mac.com/2017/02/21/macbook-pro-keyboard-problems...

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/10/17/johnston-macboo...

"The fact is that Mac sales are growing which contradicts your opinion."

This is a non sequitur. Popularity is not a definitive measure of quality.

Beyond that, Mac sales are down from 2015 in every single quarter.

Q1 5519 5312 5374
Q2 4563 4034 4199
Q3 4796 4252 4292
Q4 5709 4886 5386

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263444/sales-of-apple-ma...

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/fy17-q4/Q4FY17DataSummar...
Fair enough, then. Is he subject to American laws? Does he have the protection of the same Constitutional and legal rights as any American, including presumption of innocence and a fair trial?
Maybe that was our great filter [1] and we’re off to Type III civilization?

[1] https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html
The article is mixing evidence for bottlenecks at different times. Your quote ...

> Because once in our history, the world-wide population of human beings skidded so sharply we were down to roughly a thousand reproductive adults.

... links to Hawks et al. (2000), with this in the abstract ...

> It is our conclusion that, at the moment, genetic data cannot disprove a simple model of exponential population growth following a bottleneck 2 MYA at the origin of our lineage and extending through the Pleistocene. Archaeological and paleontological data indicate that this model is too oversimplified to be an accurate reflection of detailed population history, and therefore we find that genetic data lack the resolution to validly reflect many details of Pleistocene human population change. However, there is one detail that these data are sufficient to address. Both genetic and anthropological data are incompatible with the hypothesis of a recent population size bottleneck. Such an event would be expected to leave a significant mark across numerous genetic loci and observable anatomical traits, but while some subsets of data are compatible with a recent population size bottleneck, there is no consistently expressed effect that can be found across the range where it should appear, and this absence disproves the hypothesis.

So yes, according to that study, the rest of the article is bullshit. But then, it was published in 2000.
Many projects are already using this for archiving purposes. Check out https://github.com/pirate/bookmark-archiver

It's robust because the modern web is pretty much built for Chrome, although it can be resource-intensive if you're archiving many sites.
The possible future of displaced workers
You can already get that through Google Trends.
I think what the GP means is that there are no discrete samples and the information stream is instead one continuous sample.
I don't think it was illegal to assemble computers at that time there. I did something like this in USSR at that time and don't think that it was too different in Romania.

And actually from the same parts - I see couple of chips there marked "сделано в СССР" (made in USSR).

USSR produced clone of i8080. Z80 clones were produced GDR (East Germany) and USSR too. The only problem was to buy those chips. You could buy them only on black market realistically speaking. Only that was kind of illegal.

Interesting that schematics of such hobby computers was published in state magazine "Radio", like this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio-86RK
Should we legislate against exercise too, which can cause death when done to extremes? We should also outlaw extreme dieting, due to similar health effects. We also might want to enforce a bit of overeating since somewhat overweight people live longer.
Jalopnik is a joke that shouldn't really be used as a source here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15615583
The Best Tool to Create Word Clouds
No, they would not be violating any "ideal of free speech", and if you think this, you still haven't understood what First Amendment rights are actually about.
There are quite a few of these Chrome headless-as-a-service already out there, this is the third time I've seen one posted on HN.
that's a mirror, not a reproducible build
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If I remember my old books correctly, they were not slaves, they were peasants who were paying tax as labour instead of money or produce. Like conscription, but for civilian work.

So there is still compulsion here, and the workers would often have had similar emotions and incentives as slaves. The fact that the workers had more freedom probably gave them more ability to act on that than if they had been proper slaves.
I'm sure there's a good reason for the "tradition". Similar to a group of monastic monks following some bizarre ritual which could be done in a more efficient way. Someone from westpoint or the naval academy probably knows..
Extensive discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15613101
Confessions of a long time remote worker: once I didn't bathe for two months (I was really depressed). The funny thing is, after a week or so my skin and hair seemed to dry up and stop producing oils/smells (confirmed by a neutral third party). When I started bathing again I got really bad acne for weeks. I'm better about it now, but I'm still working at home and still hate taking showers and brushing my teeth. Try not to think about this the next time you're on a conference call with one of your remote coworkers. :)