skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As somebody who has held cryptocurrency for years and codes Solidity, never before have I seen a dumber market than this. Every time valid criticisms come forward, they're met with articles like this. The articles are usually convincing to people with limited understanding of economics or technology, so they keep quiet. "Open source money" and "blockchain is the future" sound like very convincing arguments to justify these ludicrous sums of money. What they neglect to address is that...

A) Bitcoin is congested with transactions and takes hours to process some of them

B) Bitcoin fees are through the roof, it sometimes costs as much as 25% of the value of a transaction to send it

C) The upgrades to fix these problems are extremely slow - scaling hasn't been solved for years, because different parties keep fighting for control over the currency codebase and shooting down each others' attempts to upgrade it

D) Bitcoin is still, objectively, centralized. Almost all of the miners are based in industrial regions like China, and belong to a small monopoly of mining pools. All of the exchanges are centralized, and are well-known for losing clients' money. The big banks are replaced by big whales, who will do anything in their power to manipulate markets for their gain.

E) Bitcoin addresses the technology perspective of sending money, but doesn't address any of the macroeconomic problems that arise from a deflationary, uncontrolled currency.

F) Bitcoin is not actually anonymous. Data science techniques can parse the blockchain and see sending patterns between different accounts. They map these patterns to various identities. If those identities can be mapped to a real person, say, when they cash out of an exchange, then it's known exactly how much Bitcoin they have.

If someone could write an article addressing these facts, rather than throwing out slogans like 'open source money', that would be nice.
It’s absolutely not fine if your customers are already paying you specifically to connect to Netflix, which is an extremely common use and why we have the bottleneck in the first place.

The imbalance of the traffic has little to do with what we have here, since the telco is specifically paid to deliver that traffic by consumers. Charging on both ends is very profitable, but is definitely double-dipping.

Your phone provider doesn’t charge you more to receive calls from large customer care call centers when you have a problem and request a call back. The call center may get charged more by their provider if their call pattern is problematic, but your provider doesn’t stop the call from going through. It is really not any different with internet networks and why common carrier rules make a lot of sense.

These same rules also provide a lot of liability protection for the carriers, which I’m guessing they have negotiated to keep somehow.
> Both tools are useful; both are necessary

Maybe a nitpick, but given that most other programming languages don't distinguish named vs default, it's probably not necessary. You can do all your programming where every module is something (like in Java) or where every module only has things (like in Python), but there's certainly value in being able to express one or the other in the same language. The downside is that the named/default distinction adds language complexity and learning curve, makes tooling support a little harder, and makes things like CommonJS interop more of a pain.
I would expect higher hapiness, because you have better idea of what you are going into and parents likely shown you their strategies how to deal with disadvantages of that job.

Unless you was foerced to pick up that job or did it to make parents happy.
>There's some discussion of this above, but I think it's interesting that the alternative to software development is seemingly always construction, or delivering food, or being a waiter.

My guess is that the popularity of these professions is that they are all relatively low-qualified ones suitable to people working while studying or "filling gaps" before getting a "good job" in IT.

>Wouldn't the more apt comparison be something like law? Or medicine?

It could be, but I doubt that there are many people that after having invested in an education in either law or medicine and actually had a suitable job in those professions left them to become a full-time programmer, particularly an employed full-time programmer.

Not that it cannot happen or that never happened, but surely it is less common, and the probabilities that additionally these people will be commenting on HN are even smaller.

>Or has software development truly reached blue-collar status and we're essentially plumbers/electricians?

Since every other guy here seems to be well in the hundred of thousands US$/year or more, I would say, if this is the case, "exceptionally well paid plumbers/electricians".
Steemit and Bitshares aren't decentralized cryptocurrencies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15766583
Last I looked at the reference implementation ("synapse"), the authors hadn't started to optimize its memory usage yet, so it was pretty thrashy on the 512MB ram droplet I ran it on.
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> I see no value to cryptocurrencies besides black market transactions and hacking around with financial instruments

It costs a small fortune to send money internationally not to mention the friction of needing to have a bank account - almost 40% of the people on the planet do not have one[1]. Something like Bitcoin et al (not necessarily BTC itself!), where you can get an address immediately that can send and receive a balance from anywhere & anyone in the world without impediment has the potential to be huge. I appreciate I am being a bit starry-eyed here but I can see a real value to it globally if such a vision can continue.

That's not to condone what might now be happening with institutional investors and Wall St getting in on the action in a big way, or the state of the tech
(transaction fees at present, verification delays, snake oil ICOs). The core concept of a currency like this is valuable societally IMO. It might not be bitcoin in the end but the idea, like the internet and publishing, is a powerful one.

[1] http://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/globalfindex
10k! That's awesome. Keep going!

If it helps motivation, try inviting a few friends and sharing your word counts with them.

I spent two years working on my first book, barely hitting 5k/week during the first draft. My experience definitely affirms that as long as you don't stop, you'll finish it! ;)
I don't get this.

No one forces you to upgrade your perfectly functional es5 code to es2015, es2017, or typescript.

Yes, node moves fast and new features are introduced, but everything is largely backwards-compatible. You don't have to incorporate every shiny new feature, framework, or tooling.

If you do so by choice, this rant is rendered meaningless.
I'm not against offering to work on the problem in exchange for money. I'm against outright responding to a feature request with an estimate.

If you don't want to work on the feature (i.e. you're uninterested), it's better to be honest about it.

If you do want to work on it, but your time would be better spent on anything else, and you're willing to work on it for money, first ask if the requester is interested in paying for it and then give your estimate.

The difference between a feature request and a client approaching a freelancer/company is that in the latter case, the other party initiates the conversation with a clear expectation of paying — they only have to decide if they like the terms and price.
I'm pretty sure at some point I used a Rhapsody Kaleidoscope theme on my PowerMac G4...
The higher you charge, the more horrible your consultancy job will be generally ;-) I've found €200 to be the sweet spot between actually doing useful tech work and being in nonsense meetings all day.
Hurray! That's fantastic!
This sounds like a very one-sided perspective. Because while we devs might not want to admit it, incremental improvements in product quality don't have a huge business impact. There are 3 states of a product -- Not Working, Works OK, and AMAZING. Not working --> Works OK is the initial dev of a product, so you are likely already past that. Now, if your improvements don't move the product from OK to Amazing, or if your product is already amazing, but the business has other problems... then your organization is at a point where devs simply don't have the business impact that a refactoring of sales/marketing/strategy can have. This is not a bad thing -- it means the devs did their job, and everyone else needs to step up.

But unless you understand the bigger picture of the business, it can seem like they are ignoring you. The truth is, they aren't rejecting your idea... they just think it isn't making the leap to amazing.
The IOTA network sustained >1.1 million TX over the last 24h as well (a bit more because there's a gap in my stats) - most without value however.

The selection of protocols is indeed quite selective.

Disclaimer: I work on IOTA.
See my comment (in my history). I'm literally doing the same thing. Piece of advice: Max out your 401k every year and use a ROBS (rollover for business startup) to fund it tax free. It's complicated but totally worth it.
Is it really a cryptocurrency though? It seems more like a paypal alternative (i.e. the ripple foundation can roll back any transaction at will and has done so in the past)
This is the conventional "textbook" wisdom. It is obviously desirable, but in real life completely impossible. And the gap between reality and this kind of "on-high" prescription is why so many people/families have no savings and have no real way to get out of their current situation.
Fascinating. I feel like every year or so a new book is written along the topic of something like this though: Fish, Salt, Grain, Money, Paper, etc and how that thing was responsible for modern civilization. I commend the author for bringing this idea to the forefront but its likely disingenuous to think that Fish and Fishing has as the author says, "created the modern world" more so than any of these other things.
I very much agree with your first point, largely because, would you fancy that, that's the original *nix philosophy.
For those who don't follow the markets, ETH just cleared its all-time-high of $420 about twenty minutes ago. This is a big deal because such numbers weren't seen since June.
Thanks for a nice writeup. Now please add some open graph sugar to your markup so I can share it with a nice preview. :)
Samsung adds backlit keyboard to the Chromebook Profinally
Why does the author refer to the site as an NGO? Is this in the sense of "Non-governmental Organization?" If so, it seems like an odd thing to emphasize. If not, what is the correct expansion of that TLA?
Typo or intentionally funny? Good either way.
Using Wi-Fi? You can be ‘KRACKed’. Not Safe till you read and act on this
That is correct and I should not have conflated the two. Personal opinion, media should be moved to FTC in the context of internet.
If only we'd have required line owners to wholesale access to other service providers. We wouldn't have had to made packages illegal because there'd have been actual competition.
The new tube stock is designed for it to be retrofitted, but replacing all of the signalling equipment is expensive (and likely to require some closures, both of segments of the line being upgraded and of the whole line).

The subsurface lines have interworking with normal mainline services, in some places sharing platforms with them, which makes fitting platform-edge doors very difficult if not impossible.
> (...) developing new parts with current best practices (...)

I sincerely suggest that you stop doing this. If JS folks had 10% of the "don't fix what isn't broken" philosophy of the Python developers who were presented with v3 as the future, we wouldn't have any of those "js fatigue" posts.
The author suggests a malicious attacker might typosquat common packages and embed the exploit in a readme.

But if the user is already downloading your package, why bother with an exploit? You’ve got all the permissions allocated to packages (which I imagine are most permissions). You can just execute the malicious code directly from the package.

Edit: nvm
I count three goroutines per connection: One for ChatHandler.Loop (when invoked from ChatService), one for ChatHandler.socketReaderLoop and one for socketWriterLoop.

Each ChatHandler has three (buffered) channels: outgoingInfo.channel, sockChannel, readErrorChannel (not buffered)

There are some things that could cause bottle necks that are not related to goroutines and channels: Every published message calls GroupInfoManager.GetUsers to get a list of all the users in a group. That can be expensive (I don't know if it is or isn't). And then for every user in a channel, their userOutGoingInfo is retrieved.

I would suggest profiling before switching languages.

EDIT: changed "benchmarking" to "profiling"
EDIT2: changed "are likely to" to "could" (... cause bottle necks) since I don't know
Yeah, I wasn't clear. I meant running the VPN on a TLS connection to those ports, so that it looks like an HTTPS or IMAPS or whatever connection.

I suspect that the direction the web has been moving for the last few years is making traffic analysis harder. More and more things that used to only done locally with desktop applications are now also being done over the web, and so we now have many more traffic patterns that are not unusual for an HTTPS connection. That means more and more chance that some non-web traffic pattern will be similar to a web traffic pattern.

The problem ISPs face if they try to block things is that what they want to block will be specific sites, not specific protocols or specific types of use. For example, an ISP might want to block or slow subscription video streaming services other than one that it owns, but it probably does not want to block video from news sites, sports sites, company tech support sites, and many others.

If they just go by detecting that a site has video, perhaps by traffic analysis, they won't be able to tell which are the ones they want to block and which they don't.

As far as IP addresses go, perhaps IPv6 could help. Most of the major sites that support net neutrality have way more IPv6 addresses than they will ever use. Perhaps some of them could get together and offer a service where they run a VPN forwarding service on some of those IP addresses. So when Alice signs up for VPN service from Bob's Budget VPNs, she also goes to her Google account configuration, and enables Google's VPN forwarder and points it to Bob's Budget VPNs. Google dedicates an IPv6 address to this and tells it to Alice.

Actually, if major sites like Google wanted to provide a VPN forwarding service, they could just run it on the same addresses as their other services and provide a way for clients to signal they want to use the connection for VPN forwarding instead of whatever it is normally used for. For example, make it so you can start the VPN forwarder via HTTPS by having their HTTP server recognize "GET /vpn_forward HTTP/1.0" as meaning the client wants to use the VPN forwarding service, not the web service.

China could get away with blocking all of Google (and any other major site that might also do this) because China is an authoritarian government that takes a hands on approach to censoring and restricting what people there can see, and can bring its major propaganda machine to bear to trying to convince people that its approved alternatives are better.

I don't think that would work for private ISPs in the US.
Bitcoin declared illegal in Zimbabwe
What law is it you are suggesting they would break, and how?

If you cut his cable, unless you're his ISP you're either carrying out criminal damage and/or trespassing, and if you're his ISP it boils down to what your contract allows.

But Cloudflare has no contract with Ajit Pai. So how is it anywhere remotely comparable?

There may be other issues, such as Cloudflare's contracts with their customers, but nothing that compares to physically cutting his cable.
the EU market isn't exactly small, either. it is smaller, but not small.
What your comment misses is the commitment to the principle of liberty as set forth by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations and its influence on the U.S. Constitution. I would suggest reading all 71 Anti-Federalist Papers. Here is a good collection that was put together:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Anti-Federalist
What sort of tech work do you do, though? Nobody is going to pay 200 EUR for frontend development, say.
Small stores and local retail are dying out due to the cheapness, convenience, and selection of online retail. As a consumer, the online stores are more convenient and save me money. If a local store can't offer anything preferable to some faceless multinational, what is it really doing other than giving some of my money to someone who doesn't add any value?
Not really comparable, since IOTA is centralized in its current form.
Upvote for justnomil!
Jon, there are many here who would very much like to hear what you have to say. If you think it'll get buried, please leave it as a comment to the main thread.

BTW, Jon Blow is the creator of Braid and The Witness. He is also working on Jai, a programming language.
I know very little about both Node and Go (currently learning the latter but haven't done anything really interesting so far :) - but, really it's hard to believe that Elixir/Phoenix would be disregarded so quickly if the crux of the problem is to have good pub/sub support.
So the idea is to force all countries with welfare to dismiss it. Good to know.
The commenter you replied to asked for public blockchains. Until the coordinator is turned off IOTA is a permissioned blockchain.
I've found typescript an invaluable tool.

Having worked on large backend codebases in both TS and JS, the difference is stark. The TS API in my case had something like 90% less errors, and those were all subtle bugs in business logic.

On the other hand, the large JS API over time had all sorts of unexpected type errors and undefined behavior. I'm aware that this is anecdotal evidence, but TS is pretty much a no-brainer now on backend.
I think in craft beer their is definitely a taste race going on. In the beginning every American ipa tastes like Sierra Nevada.... now you get multiple styles and hoppiness. I’ve found myself unhappy with the maltiness of some craft beers now.
I received a lot of help when I was implementing mailman from Mark Shapiro a few years back. I asked what I could do in thanks and he pointed me to his public Amazon wish list. I purchased something off of that for him. I try to make sure I am thanking people for their work that I am benefitting from.
I work 20 hours a day and I don't even feel like I am working. This involves coding 10-15 hours a day with 5-6 hours of sales pitch and customer service. I know plenty of folks who really enjoy working all time.
It's still the case, and it requires quite a lot of CPU time too.

There is no way Synapse is a good fit for something like RPi. Maybe when Dendrite is ready, it will make this possible.
Any company trying to make it's name in the Linux market has to field stuff at lower pricepoints. I can buy a perfectly good Acer netbook for 300$ and install Ubuntu in a matter of minutes. If you cannot do small and cheap, the thing that Linux can do better than anyone else, you aren't going to win over many people.
following your passion may not be the best advice for anybody. See Cal Newport's perspective on why. One of his examples is Steve Jobs. http://calnewport.com/blog/2015/04/05/what-steve-jobs-meant-...
Running Redis for 8 years (by Salvatore Sanfilippo Codemotion 2017) [pdf]
I don't know much about Canadian law, so I cannot say that you did a criminal act.

But I would wager that the receiver (accidentally!) did tax fraud, since the legal situation around taxation of Bitcoin payments in Germany is not really clear. I can nearly say for sure that if he is not a professional who specializes in international taxation laws (or at least has access to an expert in this area) he probably did a criminal act (which does not imply that he will be prosecuted etc.).

Also I would bet he did something wrong in the accounting of these donation (which can easily happen, since there are so many formal details to consider - do something wrong and you are in trouble). Again a source for big legal trouble. This will rarely be prosecuted, but is nearly always a sword of Damocles.
Thanks! I didn't want to force people in to the "money shredder" mode, but I think that it works really well and provides an effective uninstall/force quit protection for users who try to take shortcuts to dismiss the alarm in the morning.
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the whole reason "net neutrality" is even a thing in the United States is because how one is able to access internet bandwidth. it's an duopoly at best and the majority have exactly ONE option for broadband internet access.

without an access network (be that copper, fiber, or radio) internet bandwidth can't be delivered. the choke point is the modem.

access networks are a natural monopoly and infrastructure to support an access network MUST be regulated like one in order for "market solutions" to prevail.

but ATT, it's descendants, and the CableCo's have spent tens of millions on lobbying efforts to make sure that never, ever happens.
Or the onion website: http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/
Even if I'm with you on the gold. We have the choice to not create and use new insane systems.
Sort of. You are missing the ephemeral of containers, which has a net security advantage. Ephemeral containers mean that its harder for an attacker to obtain persistence, and easier to cycle out and swap bad containers than it is to patching servers.

I would argue that container orchestration infrastructure is objectively more secure than plain old servers;
I get where you are coming from, but this tech is solving real problems, the cool aid is good
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"zero rating" is not conducive to neutral treatment of network traffic.
from the article:

> So a malicious attacker would just have to register a bunch of malicious packages for every letter or offer a few packages with similar names to existing ones. As soon as someone clicked on the name to see the full entry (not installing it!), the malicious code would already be executed.
Somewhat off-topic, but I had not discovered this site before. This is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for to jumpstart my reading list. (I finished school a few years ago, and I’m finally past forced-reading burnout and ready to start diving deep in books again.)
One big reason we lack Internet competition: Starting an ISP is hard (2014)
Thank you, I knew I wasn't the only one. Really like Bx too
Tulips were open source too.
Ripple is a permissioned blockchain.
The barriers to entry in the ISP market right now are the large corporations, which keep doing adorable things like suing would-be municipal competitors out of existence. The claim that regulation is the problem here, rather than a matter of mere ideological opposition, is a claim desperately in need of some kind of substantiation. And the idea of empowering oligopolists even further, by relaxing restrictions designed to prevent them engaging in rentiership, is an idea in desperate need of anything concrete to show it's worth implementing.
> Honestly, this exudes arrogance, even if the intention is completely free of ill will.

I would rather say that asking to "implement <Feature that takes a month of work>" for free exudes several more magnitudes of arrogance.
It'a the same as buying shares for a company