skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>an open platform that respects user freedom, backed by a team that truly has the users' best interests in mind.

Until they begin introducing useless features no one has asked for, redesigning the interface - I'm sorry - "user experience" to be more "modern" (cough... chrome-like... cough) and then change the API without full backward compatibility rendering about a decade of extensions - cough... addons - cough... I think they back to calling them extensions - useless.

Not to mention the users, who had about a decade worth of muscle memory and their extensions configured just the way they like, who now have to start over.
Bitcoin tops $9000
Tricky puzzle game where your move is mirrored
Observation: Coffee studies often report (in headlines and abstract and body) consumption in terms of cups.

At best, this refers to a standardized 250 ml or 8 oz measuring cup (unfortunately, still rarely what "a cup of coffee" generally means to those who read these headlines and adjust behaviour as a result).

At worst, the term is used to allow for ambiguity and variance expected in self-reporting.

I recognize there are many other variables that are even harder to measure than beverage volume, like mg of caffeine or diterpenes or antioxidants. But "cups" just seems so loose.

Related question: Is there a somewhat accurate amateur method of measuring caffeine content? I vary my beans and roasts and method a fair bit for fun and taste. e.g. various beans, light vs medium vs dark roasts, varying apparatus, mass of beans per "cup", filter types, and brewing time. I would like to have insight into how much caffeine I'm consuming.
It sticks. It's just different industries.

Democrats are beholden to Wall St, Hollywood/music (see: RIAA), and special-interest groups. Silicon Valley also seems to be getting better at influencing Democrats.

It definitely is lopsided, and Republicans are clearly more anti-consumer, but no national politician survives by betraying big donors.
Serious question: who is mining bitcoin still, and how are we seeing such growth lately?

Last I read up on it there were some data farms crunching away barely covering their expenses, and it’s only getting harder. How can we even see see such growth?
16 Blog Posts Ideas
Change the tmux key binding from ctrl-b to ctrl-a and you are most of the way there. Just do it.
This is something I've also had in mind for a while. I'd be interested in working on this.
Why don't you use LastPass mobile app, it seems to work for me.
Not an issue: Big thank you only #39
Do you use any websites located in the US? What if they close down?
Should i invest in Bitcoion as i don't have enough knowledge reagarding this it would be better if you suggest me. thanks
A friend of mine emailed me yesterday. He had just been shopping at the Aldi. He used his phone to pay with Android Pay and the checkout person asked him if he was paying with Bitcoin. A little more discussion it turns out that the checkout clerk owned some Bitcoin but didn't really know enough about it to know that you couldn't pay with Bitcoin at Aldi or that because of the high fees and full blocks it would have been impractical to use to pay for $30 of groceries even if they did accept it as payment.

Point is; this rally is being driven by a bunch of people who don't know what they are buying but are excited about the prospect of it "going to the moon" and getting rich. No way this ends well. Bitcoin Core was a rational investment at $1,000 when it looked like there would be comprise on the block size but now it is just a ponzi scheme which will be remembered as the MySpace of Crypto.

edit: Another interesting data point is Coinbase user growth. Their growth has recently been doubling month over month and they are on track to add 2 million users in November up from 1 Million added in Oct.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NgvD2kFT69mSXuJPzPDu...

Compare that to actual transactions on the Bitcoin network. They peaked in May after sustained multi-year growth and have been flat or down since because the transaction limit as hit and Bitcoin Core is shedding users to any of the numerous alternatives.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactions.ht...
Given the vast distances involved, I've always thought first contact would be much closer to this short story by @qntm:

https://qntm.org/retrospective

It's a fantastic read, set aside a few minutes to go through it, you won't regret it.
Do we really think they'll be using radio communication? We're already dabbling with quantum comm ourselves. And if they can travel the stars, they'd have been incentivized to develop something better long ago. One would think...

Hell, maybe the whole galaxy has quantum wifi.
> it makes German government dependent

The home country of Microsoft still has big and active military bases in Germany and spies even on Germany's highest politicians. If they wanted they could pulverize Germany withhin minutes. You can't honestly say that the German government is really independent under these circumstances.
A quick internet search should sort this out for you. It's been articulated ad nauseum
Democrats have their own corporate patrons, like the healthcare companies.

They were just as happy to sell you out when they voted for the ACA (which is working for now, but will eventually fuck over a lot of middle class Americans who aren't getting insurance through their employer).
That's the classic "we can't solve all problems at once, so we shouldn't do anything at all" argument.
Personally, I don't think there's ever been a better time to start building an extension for Firefox. Some might disagree with me here.

So, Mozilla did drop old extension APIs, but I think you're misunderstanding things here. They didn't just drop, I don't know, the tab renaming API or something like that, instead they dropped the entire extension API. So, the entirety of how you used to write extensions for Firefox does not work anymore.

And they had two of those entire extension APIs (XUL/XPCOM extensions and Jetpack extensions), so yeah, they did drop extension APIs in the plural.

But there's now a new way to write extensions for Firefox, a new entire extension API, called WebExtensions. It's based on Chrome's extension API, so most Chrome extensions can now be ported to Firefox without much hassle. This also means that offering your extension for both Chrome and Firefox is now essentially half the work as before.

The new extension API is also just a lot simpler to work with and your extension will not anymore break with new Firefox releases, like they often used to in the past.

The new extension API is more limited than the old one, which basically is necessary to achieve the two previously mentioned points, so that's why some people might think that it's worse and that it's now not anymore worth to write an extension for Firefox at all and whatnot. They're sometimes a tad overly dramatic there...

Also, the new extension API isn't yet quite stable. The core of it, which was taken from Chrome, obviously is, but Mozilla is still working on more APIs to add to WebExtensions, so depending on what you're wanting to build, it might be a better to do that in a few months from now. But if you're just starting out with writing extensions, it's unlikely that you'll hit your head there right away.

Lastly, because of this deprecation of old extensions, there is a demand now for new extensions. There's gonna be a good number of niches that one can build extensions for and have people actually use them. It's not like we're starting out from zero, many extensions have already been ported (either rewritten or from Chrome), but yeah, still plenty of room, too.
> Businesses are never at equilibrium

Many small businesses are. It's a key insight to serving that community as a b2b provider that growth and new business aren't the selling points they are to larger businesses. What most small businesses we talked to wanted was quality customers who will bring dependable, repeat business. They want to operate as close to capacity as possible with as little uncertainty as possible. Too much business overwhelms them. Too little starves them. Helping them keep to the sweet spot at the upper end of their capacity made them much happier than just trying to drive as much business to them as possible.
I don’t even know where to start with the bitcoiners anymore. I don’t really want to complain about them here, because I don’t think it’s productive but I worry that a bunch of people who have no clue what they’re “investing” in are getting exploited by barely-more-competent shills and fanatics. It’s both fascinating and scary to watch.
Nothing? Even ignoring the fact that humans can't generate a powerful enough signal to respond, it's probably going to be several thousand years for them to get the response. They'll likely be far more interested in claiming the achievement of discovering the signal, than concocting a response.
Munich should have switched to ChromeOS/ChromiumOS or Android or RedHat/CentOS or Ubuntu on thin clients, as the software is anyway usually web based in the cloud/intranet. But neither Google nor RedHat or Ubuntu are known to lobby.

@sz4kerto:

> ChromeOS proprietary

Why you pick this one of a list of many? ChromiumOS is open source, as is Android, as is RedHat or Ubuntu. But Windows is proprietary.

> Google spends a lot on lobbying, by the way, afaik more than what Microsoft is spending.

Really? Source please. The question is how much do they all spend lobbying for an OS? How much do they spend lobbying in Munich? (hint German HQ got relocated to Munich) You read like a employee.
Absolutely but for some reason American are more interested in "keeping the markets regulation free".

Natural monopolies like telecom need to be heavily regulated.
Pharsalus (48 BCE)
Yep, I love bropages!
Would it be wrong to say that Microsoft is "too big to fail", similar to some banks? I'd expect governments to actually try and save Microsoft precisely because of this situation.
92-Year-Old South Kitsap Woman Doing Half-Marathon 'Because I Can'
I understand CE to basically be self certified. It’s good but mostly meaningless when compared to bring UL listed or higher, which require equipment tests as well as frequent drop in visits from UL people to your manufacturing fascilies.
6 ways the world would improve if Uber died today
Baseball fail compilation
Think it's time I tried switching back to Firefox it sounds like. Adblock on my mobile browser is probably what's going to do it for me.
I'm not convinced it will continue rising. I think it will be eventually replaced by a currency that solves all of its problems.
Imagine a world where all German city governments use FOSS software. Every tax Euro spent on adding critical features automatically benefits hundreds of municipalities. Some of those features might even benefit the general public that can also use the same free office software.

Compare this to money spent on licensing fee going straight to Microsoft.
## confusing indeed
... || croak "Wrong language!";
This sort of assumes that the suckers eventually realize they were suckered. I don't have that much confidence in people's ability to do that.
Open for massive fraud as an elective system which might be very damaging for the endeavor itself and could completely discredit it.
It's really so great to see Firefox actually competing with Chrome on performance. I had to stop using Firefox a few years ago, when visiting most websites would spin up my fans, use all my battery and still be slow.

I've been using Firefox now for about a month, and it's become my main browser. I'm really loving Firefox again, and hope they keep this up.

Maybe time for a donations?
https://donate.mozilla.org/
Evidence that collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity
What if we are the first/only intelligent beings in the universe and it is upon us to spread to other galaxies and stars?

Probabilistically unlikely for us to be the only ones, but just a thought.
is this a scam or Ponzi scheme? a lot of people say that. But if we look who are the person behind it, I think it's real.
The switch now announced does not include switching back from LibreOffice to MS Office. They have a lot of existing LO templates which would cost too much (work/money) to migrate.
Yes, thanks! It's hard to describe, but this page nails it including the screenshots!

Love your own

There are two kinds of objects and functions - those that
are part of the standard DOM, and those that are from your
own JavaScript code. Firebug can tell the difference, and
shows you your own script-created objects and functions in
bold at the top of the list.

To be even more discriminating, use the options menu to
completely hide different kinds of objects. For instance:
Show Own Properties Only hides derived properties from the
prototype chain, Show Enumerable Properties Only hides non-
enumerable properties and Show Inline Event Handler shows
inline event handlers that are not associated with functions.

With "your own JS code" it means the JS libraries, the JS code of your website. Also any changes to DOM made by JS code is also highlighted in bold and different colors like green and red. Try it out yourself, you will see it's very useful undo you will ask yourself, why haven't I used it in the past.

I fear as it's now hard to impossible to try out Firebug with current Firefox, and the WebDevTools have long forgotten the past functionality of Firebug, we may never again get this valuable features back. :(

But to try it out yourself, either download FF48 portable and install an older Firebug revision (the last two Firebug revisions are "fake" meaning the basically remove Firebug, so use an older Firebug from 2015, you have to install it manually, or downgrade it)

Despite the downvotes by people who don't got it, it's a very valuable feature that made a Firebug so special and useful.

Please Mozilla devs, try it out, and you will get it in 1min how useful it is, and please add it to DevTools. (@Chrome devs: please also add it)
I've integrated TLDR content into online man pages if you'd like to see both in one place. For example: https://www.mankier.com/1/grep
ISP censorship seen as trend (1997)
It wasn't originally that way it was only in 2015 that it morphed into what it is today.
And really, this is just to say we need to encourage better open source solutions. Open source will never win when closed source is better: Everywhere open source solutions have won is when the quality and user experience has beaten the closed source offering. Consumers, and largely, most businesses, will never choose open for open's sake.
So did C++. But you can't program C++ or Java in a functional manner the way you can an actual FP language. Largely due to lack of proper data structures for FP.
Performance is relative easy to test: open a CSV with 100k rows in Excel, Calc and Google Spreadsheets.
Shadowsocks + VPS still worked in September, not sure if it still does.

It will just be a cat and mouse game though.

Ending with people not taking the risk due to penalties. (ie. ISP blacklist of users who tried to circumvent the system)
Doesn't seem true. For example, the Frank Dod Act was passed by Democrats and Wall St. hates that law. Another example, the Consumer Protection Bureau. Another agency that Wall St. hates which was passed by Democrats. If anything, it seems that again Republicans are happy to pass laws that lowers taxes for Wall St. and removes regulation.

To your point, Wall St. donates to Democrats but it seems to have very limited effect compared to Republicans.
I disagree. man pages are optimized for time spent. The cryptic synopsis at the top is enough if I’m checking a frequently used command. The examples are at the bottom for newbies, which need to spend some time reading anyway.

man pages are not «good documentation», they are there for people who need to quickly figure out how to run a command. Good projects should have tutorials and complete references online in addition to man pages.
Bitmain, a Chinese startup is the biggest player in the space in terms of selling the equipment to mine. Miners that operate at scale are quite profitable. It's only little guys that were doing it at home who weren't making money at it any more.
I try to shift from Ruby (on Rails) to to Clojure. But I feel hard to rewrite mountains of RoR convieniece and habits into Clojure (1.day.ago, named routes, ActiveMailer, encrypted cookie etc).

This seems like a bad idea from a business value perspective. What value is delivered by translating mountains of code? Probably none, being honest.

As I am also partially Java guy, I came to conclusion that migration of project into JRuby and then embedding Clojure parts gradually might ease the transition.

Don't transition everything, giant waste of time. Run ruby/rails on jruby, then package the core Clojure logic up as a library, and call into it from rails where needed. Clojure is your core logic, ruby/rails is the web front end to that core.
How's ChromeOS better than Windows? It's proprietary, and on the top of that, it directly relies on an external service.

Google spends a lot on lobbying, by the way, afaik more than what Microsoft is spending.
Dumb packet flood is easy.

L7 DoS requires more sophistication, because the attack code needs to stateful (iow. establish sessions) and craft requests that are better targeted. These in turn require either real effort or tools that reduce the effort.

All of this implies one thing: packet flood mitigation has finally become so ubiquitious that dumb flooding is no longer lucrative. So one could say that due to lack of low-hanging fruit the attackers are now moving up in the value chain.
You can always VPN to a box you control over port 443 (the same as https). Sucks that you have to do that, but it's very easy to set up.

I guess you could theoretically eventually get them using the same stuff China uses to block VPNs via more advanced heuristics, though.
In a lot of ways, yes, Firefox had a lot of technical cruft that they got rid of with this release and in those respects have now mainly just caught up with Chrome.

But Mozilla has been optimizing around this technical cruft for so long now that not having this technical cruft anymore leaves them with the architecture of Chrome plus those optimizations.

And they are innovating on top of it as well. They packed in a written-from-scratch CSS engine into this release, which utilizes parallelism. That's something we haven't yet seen in other browsers.

In a few releases from now, we should also get WebRender, which essentially makes it so that Firefox renders webpages in the way that video games render things. So, if you've ever wondered why your graphics card can pump out cinematic space battles at 60 FPS, but your browsers stutters when playing a flimsy CSS animation, this will mostly fix that.
Would you have any sources on that?

I casually looked into that claim in the past and read that coffee is as strong a diuretic as pure water.
> BSDs tend to have excellent documentation as do some individual projects (git)

Should we really point to git as an example of great documentation? I mean, this exists and has to have a giant banner at the top saying "these are NOT REAL": https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/
A Dark Web Version of Wikipedia
> And you know what? People do make mistakes establishing those preconditions and postconditions all the time, and the tool is not going to be of any help. You've proven your code, but it may not do what you actually wanted it to do.

This always comes up when formal methods are discussed, and I've never been able to understand this. The goal isn't really to create a 100% correct program, but to significantly reduce the chance of bugs.

And while writing pre- and post-condition is one way, another is to write global correctness propositions for the entire program that are easy to inspect for correctness (e.g, a two-line formula saying "the database is always consistent", or "no data is lost even if a node crashes"). Usually, these properties are verified not against the program itself, but against some high-level spec serving as a blueprint, and while there is no formal proof that the code follows the blueprint, the same is true for buildings, and blueprints can help a lot. Use those blue-prints alongside code-level pre-/post-conditions, and you have yourself a highly reliable piece of software.

The vision is to be able to verify those global correctness properties all the way down to the code (and even to machine code). This is called end-to-end verification, and has only been accomplished for programs of (very) modest size and complexity, and even then with great effort. But even without end-to-end verification, you can greatly increase your confidence in your program, at a cost that is not only affordable, but may even save you some money.
If you have Windows 10 Enterprise edition, all telemetry can be disabled. Most people don't talk about that much because at $500 a seat... well, most people don't buy Enterprise edition. (Of course, organizations of certain sizes, government institutions, etc. may have better pricing options available to them as well.)

Also, bear in mind, if you're an organization with a proper modern firewall solution, you can detect and block unwanted network traffic at the edges of your network as well.
Rhodesia is a powder-keg but I'll tread carefully and try to give my angle.

I know ex-Rhodesians, they still call themselves that since they left up until March / April 1980 when it became Zimbabwe. Their passports say Rhodesia or, from 1978, the transitional Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. Why would they call it by any other name?

https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/peek_01/15570965/39590/39590...

I would be careful about invoking the term 'colonial' when speaking with them. Many Rhodesians felt stabbed in the back by the 'colonial' power, the UK.

Outside former residents, there is an apparent romanticism amongst some demographics about Rhodesia in much the same way as the Wild West; tough pioneers taming the environment and making a previously barren land wealthy. Like the Wild West, I haven't seen that being based on a notion of supremacism; certainly Rhodesians of whom I've heard that went to South Africa were shocked at the much greater degree of discrimination in that country.
Is this being passef through you think? It seems totally crazy for me, but I am also northern europe where this would not happen.
> I fail to see how their giving away licences has anything to do with reducing those ongoing operational costs? Not only that then, "first one's free" certainly applies: I would hate to see the renewal costs they charge!

Your parent comment is referring to the following model:

1. Microsoft provides free or nearly-free licenses to schools. They don't charge the schools for software now, and they won't charge the schools for software later, because that would defeat the purpose of giving the software away. Renewal fees are not an issue anyone sane would worry about.

2. Incoming government workers already know how to use Microsoft software, because that's what they used at school. They complain if they're supposed to use something else.
I'm definitely an amateur at understanding biology, but having studied engineering; the inputs and outputs of the human body vary so widely that I have a hard time narrowing down one input to corresponding to one result.

When you think about the air you breathe, to the variety of things you ate (plus the additional microbiomes that inhabit the food, your skin, your gut, etc) it seems like we are just barely really understanding what the intakes to the body are.

Edit: here's a great point to start to think about it: https://youtu.be/bYOIhmZ0Osg?t=41m49s -watch for 10m