skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think patreon should be way more precise to how much is going to the creator and how much they take when you make a pledge.

When I pledge 1$ to some creator, I was unsure whether the creator would get the whole money and I would pay fees in addition, or if patreon would take the fee on those 1$.
not an expert by any means, but from reading the article it looks like people are buying in anticipation of price increases after BTC futures launch on major exchanges (supposed to be 12/10 launch for the first one, tho i think thats coming into doubt now)
Yea. I work as a software engineer at a company that sees huge swings in traffic on our product (by nature of the product). It's not uncommon for us to see 20x swings in traffic day-to-day. It's taken us a long time to be able to handle that and even then shit still goes wrong.

I'm much more inclined to believe the downtime is caused by scaling issues rather than some big conspiracy,

EDIT: Just to give some insight, one of the problems we run into is that usually only one issue is exposed during an outage. For example, lets say we have 10 functions (or services or whatever) in a row that all call each other. All the odd numbered ones have issues where they fail at scale. During the first downtime, function one will fail and start to throw errors, but this means the full traffic load isn't reaching the rest of the functions. By the time the problem is solved, traffic has usually died down, so function 1 is fixed, but 3,5,7,9 still have issues that haven't been exposed.

Additionally, at a quickly growing company like Coinbase, the code isn't going to stay the same for very long, so even once those functions are fixed, new issues are introduced.

It's easy to say they should be load testing at 10x their expected load to prevent these type of issues, but it's really hard to replicate production traffic. Users do weird and unexpected shit that can cause problems.
How Rational ClearCase Stole My Innocence and Nearly Ruined My Life
US stock exchanges don't run websites on which you can trade. However, during the flash crash in 2015 I was unable to place trades on either of the two brokerage sites I used at the time (USAA and Vanguard), probably due to other people rushing in to trade like myself.
Reminds me of this: https://xkcd.com/1172/
If Sam believes the merge has already begun, then his, Musk’s, and other’s predictions about superhuman AI are really just describing a rather boring fact about the world.

His examples of the merge in progress are social media determining how we feel and search engines deciding what we think. The problem here is the anthropomorphizing that humans have done throughout history to understand things they can’t fully explain. Gods don’t get angry and cause rain and search engines don’t make decisions about what we think. A search engine is just a complex math formula that can’t make a decision anymore than a calculator “decides” to output 4 when someone types 2 + 2.

Bostrom and others in this camp always have a hard time describing what “superhuman” will look like or mean. But I will guess in 2075 that the goal posts will be moved and it will be said that in 2017 we hadn’t realized that there was already superhuman AI, as evidenced by calculators that could already do math faster than a human.
I did a wire transfer to bitstamp from my girlfriend's French bank account. Wouldn't work from my british bank account for whatever reason.

(This was in 2013. I bought my first bitcoin at $55 a piece, annoyingly I only invested ~$100 at the time :/)
CA Fire:The LAPD has advised drivers to be wary of following navigation apps
I wonder how apt the comparison to a bank run is, given that AIUI Coinbase holds the Bitcoin of the exchange participants. Is there any legal form of sequestration of those assets?
Yeah, it's also one of my big gripes about Java or any managed language. You never know if some jerk library grabbed a reference to your object when you passed it to a function and decides to leak it via holding a ref.

It's also why I really like that Rust decided to go RAII/single-ownership and add a ton of friction(via RefCell) to make sure that you really want shared ownership. It forces you to get your house in order up-front which I've found almost always leads to a better design overall.
Fatigue? Half a dozen blockchain related posts hit the front-page every day, more than any other individual topic, and most of the discussions are not that great.
No, No, No! Don't pay attention to that thing! Look over there!

Seriously though, it's worth considering that this kind of thing could be possible even if we don't know whether or not it has anything to do with these specific outages.
>In other words, you never need the blockchain, unless you can't use the power of the law to enforce your contracts. Every. Single. Other. supposed use-case of the blockchain could be done by using a regular database and real-world contracts. Yes, even money (cf PayPal, Western Union, etc...).

Sure you don't "need" the blockchain to accomplish legacy X (LX), but what if blockchain X (BX) is 90% cheaper than LX (anything that avoids going to court will lead to massive cost savings)? A lot of the "known" use cases for blockchain tech involve squeezing out inefficiencies from the status quo. As with any new technology there could be additional applications unknown at this time unlocked as well.
Did you manage to enable scrolling of the mouse wheel to switch tabs?
So patrons will now be responsible for covering the Stripe fees, and Patreon is still taking an additional 5% for their services.

The Stripe fees were previously taken out of the creators' portion, so it made a big difference to a creator whether they had one patron for $100/month or 100 patrons for $1/month. But that was hidden from patrons, who could easily and happily pledge $1 to a dozen creators.

Can I now pledge 63 cents, so that the cost to me is $1?

Also, I'd be shocked if me pledging $1 to a dozen creators resulted in a dozen Stripe charges. Clearly Patreon should run those charge once, so my $12 costs only 70 cents from Stripe.
I frequent several Korean websites (that used to have nothing to do with cryptocurrencies) and the number of bitcoin-related posts in the past few days has reached an insane level.

Half of them are saying it's a bubble. The other half say they're getting rich. Nobody's talking about blockchains, fiat currency, built-in deflation, monetary policies of nations, or any of that stuff, because nobody's interested in these topics. To these people, it's a get-rich-quick scheme, pure and simple. The only difference in viewpoint is whether they're in the scheme or not.

I don't know how far it will go, but a new economic order it is not. The players themselves (who are pumping up the price) don't give a damn about economic orders.
I'm fine with them taking 2.9% (although I'm sure their volume lets them get a discount below that), but $0.35 per PLEDGE is lunacy. They don't make individual charges for each pledge.
I can confirm my Patreon pledges to multiple people were charged to PayPal as a single transaction.
About once every 6 months I remember to start taking my vit D supplements again. I've always taken more than the recommended dose because vitamin D is not extremely bioavailable in pill-form, and I notice amazing improvements in mood, mostly. Usually I am sad in the mornings. I have a cup of coffee, browse around on HN, and then convince myself to do work, and the sadness goes away with the distraction, and by the evening I feel pretty good for "doing so much work". When I take vitamin D, after about a week I begin to wake up and set to work immediately, leaving time in the evening for fucking around. I really should do that now, before finals.
I have entertained using cryptocurrency for game betting at some point, while running some typical web stack. When I started looking into security and scaling, I realized there was a expensive and complicated overhead. When security is of very high concern, traditional performance seems to really suffer.
You can download them directly to your desktop after you sign up. Or read them without our app.

No we are not just another Scribd. We allow readers to upload, read, sync and share their eBooks across all devices while also being able to purchase eBooks from our store. Think about us as a modern calibre ebook alternative. More at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library

Additional startups and other organizations can easily create their own private digital library to distribute and share eBooks with their members securely. https://www.bookfusion.com/business

A few of the organizations that selected to list their libraries can be seen here https://www.bookfusion.com/libraries
So, I like this line of reasoning. I'll extend it, on the ridiculously generous assumption that 10% of gold holdings will shift into BTC.

$300tn * 0.005 * 0.1 = $150bn.

That's my stab at a fair upper limit for a supportable market cap for BTC.

EDIT so I guess that makes me a short. I'd better sell.
As of now it is back up. If you take a look at the GDAX or Coinbase charts over the past 1-2 hours on a short timescale though (i.e. 1 || 5 minute candles on GDAX, or Past hour on coinbase app), you'll notice after the big dump, there was a large flat period where no trades were occuring, even though the site and app appeared to be up for a lot of people.
Ask HN: Christmas gift ideas?
What is the gift you're most excited about this year?

Whether tech gadgetry for myself or meaningful gifts for my significant other I would appreciate anyone willing to share their research this year.
Not really. While most exchanges went down during the Nov 29th rally, most others didn't during today's, nor did they during the four June rallies where Coinbase also went down.
You are coming off as very emotional/desperate in your attempt to convince people to act cool and logical. It's not very persuasive, and if I could downvote you I would.
I can't really make sense of that article:

>That changes on December 18, when patrons will start paying 2.9% plus 35 cents for each individual pledge

Then:

>With this update, creators will now take home exactly 95% of each pledge with no additional fees

Suppose you're donating $1, the .35 fixed "service fee" alone is 35% of the pledge, not even counting the 2.9% variable amount. I don't understand how they end up with the 95% figure.
F1 should work by default.
Patreon wants us to think they're Stripe fees, but they're not.

When I pay $17 for my monthly pledges, that comes out of my card as one single transaction, with one single $0.30 Stripe per-transaction fee.

Stripe also offers high-volume clients a discount on the 2.9% rate, which Patreon must be big enough to get.
This is such a clear and obvious solution I'm surprised this is even a story.
In my capacity as an infrastructure/scaling consultant I've spoken to multiple exchanges. Without disclosing anything I'm prohibited from, my strong expectation is that almost every exchange can't handle traffic spikes.

They're not all shitty me-too Rails apps built by junior engineers who figured "how hard can it be?". But most of the ones I've seen are.
Don’t Visa/MC frown on pushing CC fees on to consumers? And why now? Is it simply a cash grab or did their payment processor ask Patreon to change their tune?
It seems that will depend on their payment processor and the bargaining power of Patreon. If no processor wants to lower their charges there is not much Patreon can do. Similarly, if Patreon are not a big ticket fees generating customer they don't have much leverage.

How to do a profitable micro transaction is still a mystery.
heh you're falling prey to FUD.
24 Hour Volume is north of 17 Billion.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/
That and there's almost never any new discussion.
90% of the posts degenerate into "how do I get rich off of this?" or "it's a bubble" comments.
Why website redirects keep plaguing publishers
If you don't trust the banks and the government (and their monetary policies) that doesn't mean that you are doing something illegal.

Of coure, it could turn into something illegal at some later point in time (like owning gold did).

Also the banks love blockchain technology because they don't like having to trust each other.
The title here is a non-sequitur from the article.
All the salty people down voting them.

16K baby!
Instagram is testing a standalone app for direct messaging
For Europeans, Tipeee which is a french startup. The fee depends on the amount you pledge.
https://www.tipeee.com/about/fees
No, it's not. There are an infinite number of conspiracy theories. There is no value in considering them.
> Ooops... now I have a double-free!

not in this case: when you call delete on field_ptr, it removes itself from the list of children of windows_ptr. The other case would have crashed though.

But generally you don't even need to have new / delete / make_unique / whatever:

class MyWidget : public QWidget {
QFormLayout lay;
QPushButton button;
QLineEdit edit;

public:
MyWidget(QWidget* parent)
: QWidget{parent}
, lay{this}
{
button.setText("Hello world");
lay.addRow("Button", &button);
lay.addRow("Some text", &edit);
}
};

these cases will work just fine since everything will be deleted in the correct order.

Likewise, you can just store a std::vector<std::unique_ptr<QObject>> if it makes you sleep better at night, if the objects are child of the class in, which you're storing them.

> Even if they don't want to use `std::unique_ptr` or `std::shared_ptr`, they can create their own (hopefully easily compatible) `QInstance` and `QSharedInstance` or something similar.

There are already various smart pointer types in Qt. But would you really like them to add unique_ptr overloads everywhere ? I'd hate to have to do

auto my_widg_ptr = std::make_unique<MyWidget>();
auto my_widg = my_widg_ptr.get();

parent_layout->addWidget(std::move(my_widg_ptr));
connect(whatever, &foo::bar,
[=] { my_widg->do_stuff(); });

vs today's

auto my_widg = new MyWidget;

parent_layout->addWidget(my_widg);
connect(whatever, &foo::bar,
[=] { my_widg->do_stuff(); });
Depends on how/when you're getting/spending your electricity. If you're just running your mining operation out of your home, during daylight hours then you'd probably be about right. Presumably mining successfully has a lot to do with getting your electricity at a steep discount. The way we generate electricity, that's entirely possible at certain times.

We're not going to stay in that relatively narrow band for long though, with the growth of this thing. There's only so much "spare" on the grid, off-peak, and this whole thing relies on wasteful means of energy production, storage and transmission.

So on one hand (hopefully) the opportunity to scavenge for cheap CPU cycles is going to contract, while the market for bitcoin expands? Yikes.
I really thought this is a space where crypto currencies should shine. Is there an established base of people that take a crypto currency. BTC is no longer useful for this, but something must be.
They already do. I only get one charge on my account for like half a dozen patreon pledges.
$33M seems like really light volume.

for reference just one midcap biotech stock i looked at has like $700M in volume in just the first half of the trading day. thats just exectued trade volume; the order book would be much larger
Usually when a large company relies heavily on a cloud provider, they have an additional contract that specifies, among other things, advanced warning of any pending shutdown, often measured in years, to give them enough time to adjust and also to appease their shareholders and auditors.
If your nation state fails and you die in the resulting chaos what good will the encryption key in your head do anyone? Saying that bitcoin is a better gold because it solves the nation-state failure risk is missing the forest for the bacteria in the ants crawling on the leaves of the trees.

> You can take your bitcoin ...

Perhaps you could, but people generally don't. So in terms of actual risk and carrying costs and how that relates to potential market cap, your foolproof system is rather irrelevant.
Coinbase runs on Ruby and their devops aren't good enough to make up for it.
I mean... something like a battle over fulfilling your life's purpose, according to certain religious/philosophical points of view. Most religions have a concept of internal struggle, and most cults are just slight retellings of previous religions.
It's difficult to compare. A child learning chess invariably has an adult around to comment on their game and improve it, and frankly after 10 games if they still remember the rules that's an achievement (if the child is young).

If you did the same approach with a child that could fully comprehend the rules from the start, playing another child, both of whom had never played before, I really don't think they would have learned as much as the computer would have done. It would be an interesting experiment - my bet would be that the children had invented another game and were playing that instead.
This does't seem to work I get: Cannot GET /articles/http(s)://m.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fa-tour-of-david-rockefellers-rolodex-contacts-for-the-worlds-rich-and-powerful-1512488919

Is there another workaround? I'm curious to see the slide show. I like index cards myself. Can anyone post just the slideshow?
The advantage of the scientific method over humanities is that the problem domain is narrower and therefore the rules that you can use to verify statements are simpler to understand for an individual.

If you look at mathematics, an individual who understands the basic rules can prove a statement to themselves without having to defer any judgement to a higher intellectual authority.

In most aspects of life, people tend to defer the majority of their thinking to intellectual authorities; 'thought leaders'.

>> Do you really think people are so transparent that you can not only judge whether they are intrinsically rational or irrational but also that quality is hereditary and also that there is a mysterious force that makes us idiots via natural selection?

It's probably both genetic and environmental. I think that there is an evolutionary reason why humans are so bad at making the distinction between cause and effect (and nature vs nurture) - There is often a self-reinforcing feedback loop between the two.
If someone pledges $1, the pledger gets charged $1.40 (edit: sorry, $1.38), and the pledgee gets paid $0.95.
It's also a common theme of those complaining about R that it starts with 1 rather than 0 like a "real" programming language: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3135325/why-do-vector-in.... Now that you've outed yourself as an insidious traitor, Hadley will be by shortly to take back your copy of the book. At least, that's how I read the smiley.
Under their new model? I wasn't sure if it's already gone through.
For those considering an alternative to Patreon, I have a self-hosted, open source payment platform that takes one-time and recurring donations via Stripe:

https://github.com/sircmpwn/fosspay

I offer this to my supporters in addition to my Patreon page.

https://drewdevault.com/donate

https://patreon.com/sircmpwn
I'm a paid subscriber to NYT (so it's not free) but I'm still to prone to this issue
Which ETF?
> handle volume

But what levels of volume? 100 quadrillion trades per nanosecond? Sure they could scale their infrastructure to those levels, but why? You overprovision, get estimate your worst-case scenario and work towards that. But in the end, if there is a huge rush, like a 10000% increase or more, even the largest exchanges would break down.
Sorry, I meant I want to change it from F1 to something else.

'Ctrl + Shift + E' to be specific. Thanks!
That being said, does price matter or does volume matter, in terms of Coinbase? Their infrastructure should be indifferent to price. I understand there's a correlation there, but daily trading volume would be the ultimate determinant of Coinbase's performance.
Sure, here's the ones I know of:

Quest-only: DirectLabs, Personalabs

Choice of Quest or DirectLabs: Walk-in Lab (switch the radio button to Quest on the category pages, and make sure a "QD" icon shows up next to it in your cart), TrueHealthLabs (make sure the tests you look at say Quest is an option), HealthTestsDirect (make sure the test list page is toggled to Quest at the top)

DirectLabs and Walk-in are generally cheaper than the others I mentioned.
$138 is unreasonable to me for one simple reason: When I pledge to 20 creators, Patreon batches my pledges based on arbitrary server-side criteria, such that they cannot guarantee how many charges will be made to cover my pledges.

So typically I see two charges per month. They can't charge me $0.35 per charge because the # of charges varies without any ability for the customer to predict and cannot be defended reasonably to customers.

Instead of revamping their billing groupings to ensure that each patron is charged once per month, they are charging $0.35 per creator, which is the absolute worst case scenario here.

So to me, the ripoff is that they charge me for two credit card transactions, but instead of $0.35 per transaction, they charge $0.35 per creator within a single credit transaction - when that $0.35 is not charged to them by their merchant processor for those individual creators.

I would have been fine if they'd simply tell me "X creators = Y transactions @ $0.35 each + 2.9% of amount", where Y is virtually always some tiny fraction of X, but that they instead say "X creators = X transactions @ $0.35 each + 2.9% of amount" to avoid regrouping their billing is a misuse of the word 'transaction' as they implement it.

EDIT: If Patreon has been charging $0.35 per patreon to their creators, then this is not new profit for them, but is instead the same profit now collected from patreons instead of creators. It's still unacceptable to me, because they're charging the worst-case scenario (one transaction, per patreon, per creator) and then optimizing for less than that and not crediting the excess (Y-X) x $0.35 back somehow. If their 5% take isn't enough to cover transaction costs, hiding a profit in (Y-X) x $0.35 is not the correct way to solve that.

EDIT: It's possible that Patreon was censured by Stripe somehow and is going to stop batching charges period full stop come January, and so then Y=X for all cases, at which point this all starts to make a lot more sense.
Why? Because when a used car needs $1000 in repairs, it may need another $1000 very soon. You don't necessarily get a year after the first $1000.

So you have to try to figure out, is this car still solid except for the thing that needs $1000 to fix, or is it starting to fall off a metaphorical cliff? And you never know. But sometimes the car feels less and less solid, and you can tell that it's time to get out.

Is that time the first $1000 repair? Not necessarily. (I've spent $1000 on the 100,000 mile maintenance on a Honda Odyssey twice, and not regretted it. I've also spent closer to $3000 on an unexpected transmission rebuild, and I haven't regretted it... so far.) But it's not a completely stupid rule of thumb that, if most repairs are $200 or $500, the first $1000 repair is a time to at least seriously re-evaluate the vehicle.
Kraken has never been very user friendly, imo.
Personally pretty excited about buying a bunch of sub-$30 drones and giving them as stocking-stuffers. Should make for a great family and friends holiday party.
Why not? It would freeze between the spinning lens and the LED units. It would require maintenance or break down.

You could just use a small heating element to reproduce some of the heat of the old bulb.
How's about: the ability to research an answer or whole topic without asking a question is rather essential to join any high stakes, highly competitive, technologically demanding project.

I'm being sarcastic, sorry. Sometimes just formulating the right question can help to see the answer. Good luck to you.