skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An anecdote from 1990s continental Europe.

A friend of mine, upon reaching a status of a "high-net worth individual", was invited to invest in a hedge fund associated with a bank of regional importance (major for that small country). They demonstrated the best of the tech of the time, and then shifted the tone to, "but we also use more traditional approaches".

Unusually large portion of their "consulting research staff" was female and spread Europe-wide. Not because they were progressive or pursuing diversity agenda; these were call girls. The call girls were paid for timely tips. Even if they only report that a particular top executive stayed overnight far away from home, was in a foul mood, and a couple of top-ranking colleagues were present, this can be used to detect an significant internal event not reported publicly. If the girl was crafty enough to extract more information, even better.
Point is that the distribution of bitcoin wealth is wholly dependent on distribution of fiat currency wealth.
Blast from the past that. I feel like I heard about them in The Industry Standard or Wired at the time.
Could you explain briefly why? I don't see how it can be deflationary and used as a currency, period, be it the whole system or part of it.
I love this one:

How confident are you that you're building a billion dollar company?

18.6% I'm certain we will
41.8% I'm confident we have a decent shot
23.2% It's possible, but I'm not so sure
10.1% I doubt it
6.4% Definitely not

They interviewed 869 venture-backed founders to get the data.

As of December 2017, WSJ lists 168 VC-backed private companies valued at over $1B in the entire world.

Meanwhile, how many years until you think you'll be profitable?

14.4% Already profitable
18.3% <1
50.2% 1-2
13.7% 3-5
3.5% >5
Clojure as a data-oriented language is great in itself, but I can see why someone would choose say R or Python for BI/data science due to the ecosystem. Clojure can of course freeride on the Java or JS ecosystems, but I don't think those ecosystems offer the same breadth as R or Python either.
If the 99% don't have any power why would manipulating their opinions be worthwhile?
Surely in one that gives developers the ultimate amount of freedom.

I have seen enough C and Java code to see how creative developers and architects get to workaround the limitations of a restrictive language.

A convoluted code base full of design patterns, indirection layers, DSL and UI tooling for code generation, libraries to simulate language features.
I think it's better referred to as a toolkit for building more correct software.

One of the things it can be used for is to check variable types at dev time, just as static type systems check a type compile time. It can also be used for runtime validation, randomized generative testing, more advanced checks/rules than current type systems can specify(eg checking outputs are correctly related to inputs).

Also an important philosophical difference with type systems is an open approach to data structure, where types are generally closed. The concept is that it allows more flexible systems that are easier to adapt to new needs.

Here's the best intro to spec I've seen, it's long and sound is terrible, but it's a great talk. https://vimeo.com/195711510
WHY NIGERIA RISKS ONE MILLION DEATHS IN FIVE YEARS BY HIV-AIDS
even better than a Public Benefit Corporation, could be run as open-source project like Librepay, Gratipay, or FOSSPay:

https://github.com/liberapay
https://github.com/gratipay
https://github.com/SirCmpwn/fosspay
That’s fine, and makes sense, but without hacks, it is not possible to turn on ret checking in your tests that are not generative tests - so no post condition checks in the rest of your test suite.

I believe this is a missed opportunity to find bugs.
Comments with one-word ‘no’ sentences are always the snobbiest, most patronising and most miserable comments.
> Push notifications require an app

An app isn't required if you use a browser that supports push notifications.

https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/
https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/codelabs/push...
I'm a heavy podcast listener and have been happily using iCatcher for three years. With so many customisable options it feels like it's targeted to developers.
The author is likely not confused, given that Axel turned "knowing JavaScript" into a fairly decent career.

(Besides: Doesn't telling people that they aren't real programmers get really boring quickly? Shouldn't we all be over this by now?)

[1] http://www.oreilly.com/pub/au/5474
But as the article states, compile time is (or can be) at runtime.. so it's a bit difficult for me to wrap my head around its practical effect :)
Login with Google Account Using JavaScript
Jony Ive is retaking control of Apple’s design team after two years
The good thing about Clojure is not that it's not married to the JVM. I think the JS implementation has been carrying the torch for the past year because of the many excellent front-end frameworks based on React, which are oddly faster than just using React in JS due to the code-optimisations performed by the ClojureScript compiler and Google Closure. It also has one of the best front-end dev experience in the shape of figwheel, which has become the default for all front-end dev in the language.
So net neutrality ends with everyone laughing at the ISP puppet.
He didn't give the strategy as a requirement for light wallets to actually work. He gave it as an example of making the security trade off better. Light wallets do work. To fool them you have to have to be able to 51% the network and sybil my node. Not likely, especially if my spv wallet is checking multiple sources, even over https.
Here in Phnom Penh, for all intents and purposes there are no rules of the road. So there are no sidewalks. Sidewalks are for rich people to park their monster second-hand imported American gas guzzlers. Going up the wrong side in the wrong direction of the road? No problem. Do you want to do a U turn from slow lane on a 4 lane highway -- stopping all traffic to do so is the way to do it. What you find is that it's the 3% of assholes who make a mess for everyone else.

In Thailand people follow the rules a bit more, but they drive recklessly at insane speeds. If you're a teenager, it's not cool to use headlights at night and the first thing you do is remove your mirrors, which no one uses anyway....

But if you go over the border into Laos there are no rules there either, but traffic is completely different from Thailand or Cambodia. People drive slowly, patiently and politely. Lao drivers even put the Japanese to shame and that's a pretty high bar. Laos is a very laid back place. It's too much effort for most people to not do otherwise.

Over the last twenty years I've seen things changing in both mainland China and in Thailand. People are slowly internalizing the rules of the road and following them more with each new generation. You stay in your lane, and your side of the road. You don't run stop signs. You wait for the traffic light to chain to green (or blue in Japan) before you cross a road.

What it comes down to is that rules of the road and road behavior is a collective body of knowledge that takes time to develop in a society. Once that knowledge has been internalized and becomes the cultural norm, then getting rid of traffic signs can work. But there is a learning curve to master that body of knowledge and a correspondingly greater responsibility that goes with it.
I believe one reason they do it this way is that they want to ensure that they stay firmly in the realm of donations and might not inadvertently move to selling stuff (by creators starting to provide benefits to people who donate). This is a key difference from Patreon. Selling stuff comes with lots of different legal requirements, which is why e.g. Patreon will deduct VAT for European patrons.

Similarly, having a (relatively low) limit on maximum donations I imagine is done to avoid running into anti-money laundering regulations (which are particularly strict in France).
I did, but during the years I certainly delayed the purchase of many technological goods because I assumed that waiting for their price to decrease or their performances to improve was a wise thing to do. Didn't you? Imagine how companies loved that, and imagine extending it to just everything, from food to housing.

However, with technological items there was always another side: the new ones were so much better than our current ones, ours were actually getting old faster, and we were driven to buy. The same won't happen with the other goods on the market.

The interest of gov bonds or of any other financial instrument afaik represents (and is proportional to) a risk of not getting repaid.
CryptoCurrency Market Making Bot Test Run
You can turn on write to Siri in the options
Yes, that's why it highly irritates me when people repeat the Tulip bulb analogy. Bitcoin may be in a bubble, and it scares me. But it amazes me how little people think, before that kind of pattern matching.

I read the paper about 2 years back, after reading Nathaniel Popper's book 'Digital Gold...' which presents the history of cypherpunks, leading upto Satoshi's white paper. The book was enjoyable to read. And the paper's brilliance was stunning.

That said, when I think of it deeply, it does seem to me similar to pyramid schemes. The early adopters have a unfair advantage.

Also, its better that an alternative to proof-of-work is found. Although the argument is support of that, is that, it perhaps takes more energy to sustain the present financial system, the base of which Bitcoin intends to replace.

So I find myself in a curious position of being in the Blockchain camp, and unwillingly though. Which is because people who typically are in that camp, say the tech is good, but Bitcoin is not. But I believe Bitcoin by itself is a fantastic and disruptive thing. Without that app there is no platform (blockchain) evolution.

But of course Bitcoin has flaws, and we could be in a big bubble. But no half baked Tulip bulbs analogy please+.

Another flaw which I find with Bitcoin is the ownership is very fragile, compared to real world ownership. In these days of phone cameras, all it takes is an accidental photo of my secret 12 words, for my satoshis to get compromised. Or there is no alternative, if I lose my private key. Real world banks have ample ways of addressing the identity and tend to offer more robust possession safety.

+ - I have not seen that analogy on HN, thankfully, but its there every where. Yesterday, I saw a respected VC making it on LinkedIn.

Edit: minor
> I have a bitcoin debit card. I use it to pay all of these things. Your argument is akin to a person in the US saying that a person from Europe using their visa card, isn't using real money, because you don't control it.

If the person from Europe comes to US, goes to McDonald's, buys a meal whose price is denominated in USD with his European credit card and tells me he made the purchase with Euro, I would consider that a false statement. To me, he made the purchase in USD, his credit card company just will make the FX conversion for him and accept EUR from him when he pays his credit card bill.
What do you mean few people know how to step through programs nowadays? Is it uncommon to open up dev tools and step through code? I step through code whenever I get lazy or tired and don’t want to think and am using a platform with a nice debugger. I’d think this was very common but I live in a hole.
The sad part is that Ruby and Python could have taken some lessons from Lisp, how to have a dynamic language that has a good toolchain to generate native code.

Thankfully we have now Julia, as yet another Algol-Lisp attempt.
Android too :) It holds up really well considering its age.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.atari.mobi...
The main "unpure" parts of Clojure is that

* it doesn't do tail call optimisation unless you explicitly mark the self-call using by using recur (the lack of implicit TCO is a JVM limitation)
* it doesn't use macros as much, although they are they're there and still used pretty often
* it has language literals for the built-in data structures that look odd to other LISP'ers, e.g. {...} #{...} [...]
* it's error messages are ecosystem dependent, e.g. Java stack traces for Clojure or and JS ones for ClojureScript
OpenCollective is pretty expensive: 10% fees for them plus 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction for Stripe. (See https://opencollective.com/faq)

Of course, they also provide a lot more services - in a way, they manage bookkeeping etc. for you. So if you want or need those services, they can be very interesting, but if you are just looking for a cheaper alternative to Patreon they are not.
Bitcoin can be used for transactions? And here I thought it was just used as free money!
OK well every time I'm in Walgreens all I hear is Phil Collins.
The best time of day to get things done
It depends on what you're doing, but I'm here to tell you that unless you're doing Visual Design, you can live without Sketch altogether.

Where I'm employed at the moment we use Sketch for Visual Design. For pretty much all stages before that, we use Google Slides - this includes everything, from information architecture, through UX, sometimes right up until the point where we really should be asking some hard Visual Design questions.

If your primary concern is UX or prototyping - you can do it with pen and paper just as well. To be honest, I generally find that it's best to start lo-fi. Sketch invites you to try to make your wireframes pixel perfect, which you probably don't want. Sketch also entices you to start using symbols which can lock down your designs too early. Slides will not draw you into selecting fonts, or dealing with exactly what color you want to use.

So, if your goal is to do wireframing, my tip is to go lo-fi.

However, for VD, I'm not sure you can do better than Sketch at the moment... It is a sad reality. I would have seriously considered ditching macOS for a GNU/Linux alternative if it had been possible for me.
im currently doing something similar but with the ps2. it really amazes me that there are so few people interested in picking apart the ps2 and its games, and so few people interested in writing demos and games for the ps2. this lack of interest means that finding good documentation has been a little hard, but recently i hit a goldmine with official sony documentation on many of the important processors and coprocessors of the ps2 and it has been fascinating to read them. messing around with old game consoles is definitely a lot of fun.
Simulating named parameters with object literal destructing in the signature is pretty great IMO. In fact I love it. You can destructure deep into an object. It’s lovely. Kind of adds GC burn I imagine but that’s not where the latency in my programs lie.
Not sure. I'm not too much into it I just find the ads hilarious.

For what I know it might be a similar agreement as the one Mozilla uses but I don’t know.
Jury Finds Salt Lake Comic Con Violated San Diego Comic Con's Trademark
I don't know what you mean by "prove". People have known about the block size limit for years. It's been increased, but most haven't updated their software to make use of it yet. Lightning now works on mainnet, but no one is using that either.

Maybe it's more proof that no one cares?
IMHO (because to claim to "know" anything about how this is all going to turn out is to be a fraud), Bitcoin is the proof of concept for this whole crypto thing.

It was the first. It was the genesis idea. But good lord, do we think it's the actual solution? What would be the odds?

I imagine that Bitcoin will play its part as the public face of the blockchain revolution, but something else - or many other somethings - will be the successors that we actually use in the future. (Pick your own alt-coin as the successor; good luck.)

If I had a large holding in Bitcoin now I would be cashing out or I'd be nervous. I'm not saying it won't go higher, I'm saying that at some point its demise is inevitable. Might be quick, might be slow, but it'll happen because Bitcoin is not the technically best solution in this incredibly exciting field. It's not even close.
Meyers Briggs is fantasy and doesn't mean sh*t. Do Big 5 or HEXACO, they're built from reliable statistics not made up stuff. Do a little research on 'em, you'll see.
Could you elaborate on what you feel is currently grunt work? Do you mean the difficulty in building and debugging complex models or something more abstract?
Liberapay is NOT only for people doing open-source projects. There is no requirement for you to release the source code of your comics.

However, from their FAQ: "Liberapay is only for donations, meaning that transactions must not be linked to a contract nor a promise of recompense." So you can't provide things specifically only to your patrons.
It's not really designed to handle every little transaction. I would expect it to be used by exchanges and banks as a settlement layer, with most transactions happening off-chain.

It's a mistake to look at recent news, because this has been known since the very beginning.
You may place too much value in the transactions of fiat currency.
You can still do an in-person trade.

Credit payments may seem instantaneous but they are not.
Research the gold standard and who actually stores the gold not the paper receipts for it.

The endgame for bitcoin...Transaction fees? Popup currencies ala private currency?

I hope we are solving some fun math problems with all this distributed hash power.
Why would you expect bitcoin to stabilize? I see no mechanism that would do that. Gold has had thousands of years of use as money-like instrument, and only periods of relative (nominal) stability during the last century or so have been when there have been organizations (central banks) to keep that stable.

http://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-y...

(be sure to play around with the "inflation adjusted" checkbox)
https://lad.js.org
My understanding is... There is a scaling problem. It could be help by increasing the block size (like segwit2x) But the miners don't want to fix it because they like the high transaction fees.
tl;dr Not really.
I canceled all my pledges too! Sure they were only $1/month each, but there were quite a few of them!
But you are not paying the European merchant with USD.
Moving out of SF proper if one works in SF would be adding at least 45 minutes to the commute. I sincerely wish I could move to Oakland without tripling my commute. I guess every startup has to establish themselves in the already packed-to-the-brim city of SF?
“A Fast and Scalable Payment Network with Bitcoin Duplex Micropayment Channels”

https://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/716b955c130e6c703fac336ea17b...
When I cofounded my first startup, I had to participate in the sales calls (most of them). It was a very illuminating experience. Now, in my second one, I often lead the charge.

As an engineer, you start to understand why sales people overcommit, oversell, and overpromise. Why they can't produce a sale. It's not always their fault. But the good ones normally know what works and what doesn't. A good sales person:

* knows or takes time to learn the product to the point of a junior techie

* tries hard to work in tandem with the techies

* is NOT a frat boy / girl, but knows to talk to people of all walks of life, and in today's globalised world, of all backgrounds

* has the character to say "no" when it's better to walk away

* is at least in their late 30s or older

* a great listener trying to solve the customer's problem, not push a new shiny toy

* mature enough to lead a company.

While over-selling, "make-a-buck-now-lose-everything-later" idiots prevail, sales jobs are tough. It is hard for us engineers to grasp sometimes what is means to have your compensation ALWAYS be tied to some figures - so-called "performance", which is a combination of your ability to convince, the market, and the products you are selling. Imagine that, as an engineer, you'd get a deduction for every bug the customer discovers; feels different, doesn't it?

For a great fictional portrayal of a (pre-tech but enterprise) sales person's life, watch "The Big Kahuna".
No. They're all pump and dump and don't have the network/social edge.
It is an experiment.
We do have a good name for it: Six Sigma Green Belt.
Someone should take the word 'hacker' out of this sites name. I have never seen a discussion between highly competent experts on here before.
I use electrum wallet and never had a problem with the default settings - transactions appears after 20 mins.
Ask HN: Simple plain text email lists/newsletters?
I am involved with several charities than need a super basic email/notificaiton service for contacting members. Simple stuff like announcing upcoming events etc.

Currently we use gmail contact groups with BCC, but it's cumbersome and prone to mistakes. There is also the constant fear of passing google's permitted messages limits.

In looking for alternatives almost everything I search for is totally marketing focused with complicated 'campaigns'. I would much prefer an old style listserv/mailman service - craft your email locally, send it to list@mydoma.in and everyone receives a copy.

Does such a simple thing exist anyway in a form I don't have to manage myself?
If you look at the "root" issue last week, public shaming seems to be the only way to get Apple to work on problems in macOS.

They didn't even include it into the big bounty, did they?

It feels like they don't give a shit about non-iOS-devices.
> (optionally having to try several times and store the sample for later when I have more network).

Weird you brought that up since in the pixel implementation you'd just lose the song forever.
> it'll happen because Bitcoin is not the technically best solution in this incredibly exciting field

Not only that, but it's shown that it doesn't have the ability to make the changes necessary to innovate and stay current.
And it worked surprisingly well.
Cars and the internal combustion engine coupled with easy finance is the problem. Cars as we have them today have to go and the new self-driving robot cars powered on electricity really do have to take over soon.

I can go out and spend £££ hiring a fancy car today and spend the next three years crawling around town looking for somewhere to park the thing, spewing fumes into the faces of the kids going to school. So long as I pay the taxes nobody is going to complain about the noise and pollution.

Is it not possible for at least one country on planet earth to restrict the total number of ICE cars? If you had to scrap a car to buy a new car then the total number of cars would not go up, the roads would not get any heavier for people who already have a car so there is self interest for everyone. New electric self-driving options could cater for young people who do not already own cars.

Coupled with this there could be a reduction in on-street parking, so you can then have roads that can be safe for cyclists and not lined with tin boxes on each side.
You clearly failed to understand what 'hacker' means in this site's context, which is here a general term for a tech-savvy, overall outside-of-the-box thinker that desires to read a variety of interesting things (and maybe discuss them).
Step 1: talk down bitcoin to stop buying
Step 2: buy up bitcoin
Step 3: wall street has all the wealth again