skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a lot of bad studies with meaningless conclusions.
Just this May their CEO was singing a different tune:

"We have carefully studied the most significant alternatives to the Bitcoin Blockchain and have concluded that none of them are compelling" [1]

He's been a bitcoin maximalist for a while, so it's notable to see him finally cave due to the mining fees.

[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitpay-ceo-we-studied-bitcoin...
Practically everything has a Prop 65 warning to the point where it's meaningless and everyone I know ignores it.

[0] https://oehha.ca.gov/proposition-65/general-info/proposition...
I wish there was some hefty tax on people buying houses just to rent them that don't actually live here.

So, you want to pay quite a bit more on your rent?

I don't get the aversion to rentals. Not everyone wants to purchase a house everywhere they might live.
For a middle-aged person, what % of my money should be in that index fund?
I was wondering this; is a control unnecessary here as we assume an equal distribution, or is that assumption false?
I, along with many others, have several criticisms (https://sopython.com/wiki/LPTHW_Complaints) of LPTHW.
Agree! Thank you! What a terrible way to compare, shows a complete lack of basic scientific literacy to compare based on mass, very deceiving.

To compare the states properly they would need to do a risk assessment essentially, which is difficult and complex to say the least...

Also most of the 'toxins'from mining are probably heavy metals which are pretty easy to treat and contain in that context.
Here are the numbers for their latest 20-qubit device. CNOT error rates are a bit lower. I don't know if they plan on making this publicly accessible.

https://youtu.be/T-8uuq7Izl8?t=26m36s
Anthony Weiner is another example, albeit more "stupid" than "matter of course" given today's casual "life online" du jour.
Robots are being used to deter homeless encampments in San Francisco
I'm a developer well away from Silicon Valley, so when I saw this story I laughed. Then I remembered my most recent paycheck, and I cried.
Fair question. Reason I don't discuss these things publicly is that I get many emails for digital marketing help and I can't answer them all.

I used to own/run a digital media shop and am now focusing on using my skills and experiences to help open source projects grow.
Lightweight in terms of new code on top of existing codecs: we kept it compact, meaning small binary, fast execution, and easier to add to a mobile app for instance. (ffmpeg gets big very quickly).
Also, there aren't any extra memory management system, buffer pools etc: it's all done through C++11.
We basically thinly rearchitectured around the media technologies used today in 99% of cases: mp4, mpeg ts, jpg, GIFs, VPX/WebM, WebP, ...
Bitpay is owned by bitmain, the miner that controls bcash. You will have every one of your transactions tracked if you use this alt. I'm sure the chinese government will appreciate your compliance.

This is nothing more than self promotional spam.
It’s unfortunate that I’m clearly biased when I read the title and source, and William Morris immediately comes to mind. I sincerely wish them well with this and I’ll hold-off making rash, ill-considered and abrupt judgements.
We have cellphones now no need to know when someone is online. AIM and AOL before it were great when you don’t have text. No one needs that now when you have texts app or snap chat.

The one thing I do miss are times when you could just find a random classmates username and message them. When you do this with text it can be a little more awkward if you don’t know each other.

Why do you need to know if a freind is only if you can text, iMessage or WhatsApp anyone in the world almost?
It still uses x264, vpx etc to do decode & encode. It's lightweight in the sense that it's a shallow wrapper around these libraries and it doesn't consume unnecessary memory or CPU cycles on it's own.
>> Tech is sick with "us" vs "them" mentality and its spreading.

>Perhaps in your case, a little introspection will reveal an "us" vs "them" attitude which you already hold.

Lol, Just because I can see the trees in the forest, doesn't make me want to chop them down.
right MySpace, was a technology?, I think they were build on php or so, was a slow site, Google is not a technology either, golang it is, and is somehow revolutionary through simplicity and first-ish.
After I played MGSV first time, I was stunned by it's graphics. Everything is so perfect: materials, lighting, camera movement, character animation.

Looking forward for next Kojima's game - Death Stranding.
Bitcoin is the long term store of value for the cryptocurrency ecosystem. It's poor for small transactions, but works well for storing large amounts of value as it is significantly more secure in terms of PoW than anything else out there.

The small transaction issue may be overcome by something like the Lightning Network, but in the short term, you can just use other cryptocurrencies with lower fees or other features that are important to you.
The science says: do what works for you. The biggest problem with so many studies is that, while people seem to believe running is something everyone can do (and do well, since it's the "easiest" of sports), that's not remotely true. People constantly hurt themselves by being terrible runners, and that almost never has a direct connection with their footwear of choice.
I can't imagine a future where some form of cryptocurrency technology isn't in widespread use.
Don't Make Me Think - Steve Krug
He 'caved in' because bitpay was bought by bitmain, the largest centralized chinese miner.
I support building more housing, but we can't have much more housing without completing significant upgrades first. Our roads, schools, and popular public transit routes are now operating beyond design capacity in much of the Bay Area. We can complain about how urban planners should have foreseen the need for higher density decades ago but that doesn't change our reality today. Any major new housing developments need to be coupled with simultaneous infrastructure upgrades; if we can't find funding and political will for infrastructure then the housing will have to wait.
Bin packing is the actual academic term for this class of problems so the intended snark in using quotes is a bit misplaced.

Furthermore, running k8s to pack containers into AWS instances that are are themselves actually full blown VMs running on a hypervisor is of course one way to do computing. It is perhaps worth considering that there are others, more direct ways that can be achieved more economically.
Not sure if you include it under information, but education is another I would add.
wow, this is a work of art
I've only realized now how odd this is: Boulder, co is one of the safest places in the United States (crime and natural disasters), but they test the super loud warning system every monday during the summer.
How is this any different from a 2 hr train commute, which many people endure? Not saying it's great, but if it saves over $1M in purchase price (plus another $10k/yr in property tax), I think some people would take the bargain.
Trump used and continues to use racial dog whistles in his speeches and official tweets. It's part of the reason 90-95 percent of African Americans vote for anyone else over a GOP candidate given the opportunity - if you hear it, it's hard to accept anything else from that speaker. Trump got close to the same vote percentages as historical GOP presidential candidates, Trump is not special in that people departed from their normal behavior to vote for him in some large silent wave.
and it isn't ionizing radiation
None of these technologies are dominant enough. Not a single one is a usable product.

All cannot support a large number of transactions, not even those that do not have proof of work. There's research-level problems being solved (like bulletproofs for compact private transaction - hides amounts). After research is done there's engineering. Then testing until it is ready to use.

People really don't realize how early this is.

Lightning network, a proposed solution for Bitcoin scaling problem, was announced 2 years ago, and they identified many issues with it since then. There's talks of layer number 3 etc.

This is way too early and there's no winner. Bunch of cryptocurrencies are riding on the research-wave behind Bitcoin.
A Beginners Guide to Understanding the Agile Method
Where is your second internet?
The documentary ("Wiener" IIRC) about his run for mayor is pretty good.

Like a train crash in slow motion - good.
In general, the law is capable of dealing with this kind of issue - it can look at the intent of the owner of the service.

cf. for example the law on trade secrets. If you take "reasonable steps" to safeguard the secret, and impose NDAs on the people you do grant access, then courts will punish competitors who steal them, even if your security happens to suck.
Yeah, maybee they choose rather to have it the other way. Maybee they prefered real, honest - even though stupid opinions between cooperative work on whatever topic over a eggshell walking culture that prevents any meaningfull discussion by turning the public stage into a constant social drama bedlam stage. Because those people you did hang out with, where more interested in modding quake, doing whatever it is you did- then milking society for what its got.
>End of discussion.

Science is not a static. Believing absolutely in a specific scientific result and refusing to accept that it may be wrong is as harmful to our advancement as those who refused to acknowledge that the earth isn't flat (they also used their limited understanding to justify their position).

To reuse your opening statement, you'd also win a Nobel Prize if you could conclusively prove that "your cell phone cannot cause cancer" and "any radio signal from a cell phone [doesn't]."
At a certain point, other people's ideas just don't matter that much.

For someone who has years of expertise, or who has spent decades fine-tuning his or her worldview based on real evidence and life experience... what need to they have of uninformed opinions or debate.

At some point, it only slows you down.

All that matters is what you can or can't achieve, and that comes down more to persuasion.
whew it's not about crypto. Getting fatigued by the btc talk.
I suspect that a very important part of it is that in the life of an entrepreneur capital is a very important tool in the toolbox and to know how some of the providers of capital think and are organized can help maximize the use of that tool. Knowing what the other party is looking for is a very important bit of knowledge during any kind of negotiation.
It's perfectly useful, because the vast majority of people using treadmills are moving closer to 4mph than 8mph.
High praise! Thank you very much.
Danish Bitcoin billionaire sponsors and renames major ice rink 'Bitcoin Arena'
The Mountain View city council recently approved Google's proposal for additional housing and office space.

http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/12/12/googles-massive-housin...
> So, if you restrict the domain of inquiry to the things that science best studies (causes and their origins) then science is the best to study it.

I didn't restrict anything, I just pointed out that your analogy is irrelevant to the topic at hand. The topic of the discussion was what methods can be used to reliably obtain knowledge about the external world, and being aware of individual personal experience just isn't.

> The point was that there are other domains.

OK, so what other domains of knowledge about the external world are there?
Sure, we could go back oxen and agriculture without fertilizer or pesticides. How many billion people are you willing to see starve to make that happen?
You just emailed them to tell them that the best selling MBPs they've ever made aren't good enough for you? I'm sorry, but I doubt they are going to change what's worked so well.
Is it possible to attack an SHA-256 hash seeded with PHP’s mt_rand function?
This is great, thx
TD Ameritrade to allow Bitcoin futures trading on its platform starting Monday
The problem comes when packages have architecture-dependent build steps at the time of running, e.g. `npm install`. For example many packages depend on binaries that are compiled at build time. If you check dependencies into version control, then you’re checking in scripts that depend on binaries compiled for the architecture of your machine. This can easily cause problems when deploying to a server.
Exactly, so perhaps civilization is the problem.
Well, I agree that a game needs to have more than luck. But something like blackjack is a horrible example because there's a lot of skill that can be applied even without counting cards. Not only that, but blackjack still has a large amount of luck involved with it even when you are highly skilled.

Personally, I find that the best games are ones that have a good balance of luck and skill. Too much luck and there is no skill, you might as well play a slot machine (some people enjoy games candy land). Too much skill, and winning distributions become too low. A highly skilled player will ALWAYS win, and creates too high of a barrier to entry (connect 4 or dots and squares are an example here). There are (a few) exceptions to the latter like Go, which has so many possible moves that you might as well have an element of randomness, but there is still a steep learning curve.

Catan is one of my favorite games introduction to Euro Games, because the learning curve is low, and there is enough luck that an intelligent novice can win. I don't actually believe the dice are unfair, but the low number of rolls makes each game different. This means the skilled player needs to be highly adaptive to the changing environment.

Dice create a nice normal distribution that are independent. While over a large number of games, 6 and 8 are great choices, there will be games where you just don't do well (they are rare). By not shuffling the cards, you are creating a flat distribution and really removing the vast majority of luck in the game (you still have luck in the order of the cards, order of placement, and order of turn). You now have a dependent probability function, and I think you could make great arguments that you remove all the things that (I believe, and laid out above) make the game great. I think you could also make arguments that the setup is the most important part of the game (when your cards are dependent events). But it is a game, and these are just opinions.
How are Chinese miners dubious characters? Also, Roger Ver got convicted of selling varmint-grade firecrackers on eBay. Who cares.
I wonder if it will be true in this century. 20th century was exceptional for US economy, allowing for huge growth and hence great returns on stocks. The playing field looks very different now, though. Personally, given the circumstances, I’d be happy with 2% return over inflation.
You're assuming people trust firefox or mozilla.

I do not trust mozilla, they've repeatedly proven they cannot be trusted.
I do not trust firefox, because a piece of software is open source software does not mean it should be trusted.
The difference between good and bad Facebooking
I wonder how true that is.

One thing engineers and scientists suffer from in spades is the Illusion of Control. Venture Capitalists are strange creatures that can make you rich or lay you off seemingly on a whim. Trying to manage them makes us feel like we have some say in the outcome.

Thing is, VCs are making money off of information asymmetry, just like most of us. As soon as you think you've figured out one thing they just move the goal posts and you're in the dark again.

Letting some of us win the lottery once in a while is how they keep the rest of us docile. I'm pretty done with it. I already leaned this way anyway, but if I work for a startup again it'll only be because I believe in what they're doing, not because there will be a payday. The execs will see almost all of the upside of you moving heaven and earth. What trickles down to you isn't that much.
Your own design or someone else's?

Schematics :) ?
I am a Python (Django) and CoffeeScript (with Ember) fan who really wants to learn TypeScript. I already use VSCode.

This project looks very promising for building full-stack apps spanning Node and the browser. One thing I would love to see eventually is a reduction in the need for manually pulling attributes from the request body and parsing query params. Does this provide a foundation for building a frictionless end-to-end experience via data adapters (which have served me well in Django/Ember projects, despite some mismatches)?
Trump would have lost if he lost 80,000 votes in three states that could swing the electoral college. That doesn't sound as big a swing as 25 points.
XMPP still supports this - mobile clients can self-report as such (most do), and desktop clients usually display whether someone's logged in from a mobile client or not.
The more people I meet, the more I realize there is no "them", only us, us, and more of us.
Kojima was forced out of his old company and lost access to the engine described here. Death Stranding will be using the game engine from Horizon: Zero Dawn.
I think you're asking the wrong questions. If there's a pause in speech that reaches a culturally- and situationally-defined length of time, that's basically a signal that someone is done talking, especially if what they've said seems to constitute a complete thought. Imagine that they start talking toward the middle of that pause-period, but the 1/2 second delay on the line stretches the silence past the time where it would be reasonable for you to respond...so you start your response, just in time for the rest of their response to start, then stop 1 second later, when they hear that you started talking. It's not a matter of rudeness or a lack of consideration, it's a misunderstanding partially brought about by the technology in use.

Conversation is a fluent flow. It isn't always quick, but it's often constant. There's a rhythm. Break the rhythm, and you're breaking the expectations of your conversational partner.

> An honest question: listening what the person has to say from start to finish is so tightly correlated (in my mind) with respect for that person, that I never considered that you can get interrupted, possibly many times in a row, and not feel offended. What do you think about this notion?

I was taught that avoiding interruption was a sign of respect, as well. Do you actually get offended if someone interrupts you without meaning to?

> Do you think that it's a speaker fault if he's out of words for a few seconds, and is responsible for maintaining a steady stream of speech from start to finish?

Usually being the one at a loss for words myself, my answer is "yes". If you don't make some signal that you're working on formulating a response, you can reasonably expect someone else to jump in and fill the space. I don't feel that it's something that needs justified; one can't really "justify" social norms.
Maybe its missing bacteria, fungi and other important life, this is one of the biggest reason of the rise of vitamin b12 deficiency in the world, even cattle and sheep need to take shots in some places. But if we focus on build soil instead of the plant we end up working far less in the future and without any need to buy or import things to grow food
The price to rent ratio in Manhattan is worse than San Francisco.
Not hard at all, given a long enough timeline.
no, xmpp is not aim
Not only was MGSV5 great graphically, it also was very performant. I always wondered if they where using rendering tricks like the ones known in Just Cause (loading in 2d assets when very far away and than swapping them with 3d assets as you get close) or similar.
Designers on Design Thinking
I guess we'll have to revert to controlling our HVACs via Amiga:

http://woodtv.com/2015/06/11/1980s-computer-controls-grps-he...
Sam Altman ignites debate on Silicon Valley culture makes it tough to innovate
When I was a wee lad just out of college I worked in a relatively shitty job that was basically 1/2 tech support consulting and 1/2 software development. My boss insisted that every single server we managed have the same 7 character root password (both our own and for clients) and that those machines be exposed to the open internet (with root ssh and other remote access protocols enabled!) accessible via that password.

Since a number of those machines were inevitably pwned, and had to be cleaned up by none other than yours truly, I learned the extremely painful lesson of what happens when you sacrifice security in the name of usability (it was so easy - you only need to remember one short password!)

As an aside - he was just as bad a boss on the software development side of the job.

On the bright side it was interesting observing how various automated attacks succeeded in installing botnet C&C software, and how it worked to conceal itself.

Edit: Of course I'll never know about the most sophisticated versions that escaped my detection :) Fortunately that was more than a decade ago.
It would be relatively easy for mischief-makers to switch off the heaters... The risk is limited because ... it should be possible for building managers to notice what is happening and manually override

If you really wanted to be malicious, you would curtail fresh air, rather than cut off heat. It would be harder to notice, and would give you an attack that didn't depend on cold weather.

And arguably the long-term consequences would be greater. The kids who got cold would bundle up and complain, leading to a (possibly energy-wasting) fix. The kids who got a low-grade headache and fatigue every afternoon might conclude "I'm just not cut out for learning."
You heard it here first, folks: We're in a crypto bubble.
I think for the most part it's the two party system that causes us to see the separate solutions as opposite rather than the other way around. It's hard to think of the trump tax plan as the exact opposite of a democratic solution because it has some measures democrats originally liked and some they originally proposed (although the core thrust of it is quite republican). We also still have it be the case that the majority of motions in house or senate get bi-partisan up-down votes.
> It is surprising to walk into a bike shop and want some shorts only to find they don't stock anything under $80--you really have to work hard to find $80 shorts at the mall. So maybe the problem is they need to do better at picking what their customers want.

Funny that you put it that way because I wouldn't buy any shorts under $100 (haven't found any at that price that will be comfy on a 100-mile ride). I suppose that's what bike shops are up against: customers whose wants and needs are all over the place, which is what suits big online retailers.
If it worked on linux I would consider working with the device. Windows is a non-starter.
> Wasting half your energy-budget on spoon feeding the compiler is just as bad as spending it on managing memory manually in C.

This isn't quite a fair comparison. Manual memory management increases the risk of producing incorrect or buggy programs. Satisfying a strict compiler increases the chance that your program is written correctly.

And for what it's worth, this boilerplate dance for "type erasure" will be solved with what the Swift team calls generalized existentials, where you'll be able to use nominal types like Any<Sequence where .Iterator.Element == String>. "Type erasure" isn't the result of "aiming so hard for perfection" as you say, but because Swift is still a young language and there is only so much the creators can work on at any one time. Most Swift devs (think iOS apps) aren't running up against this problem much, and I haven't seen a single situation in an app where implementing a "type erased" generic type was necessary. At this point in the Swift timeline, just making Swift code compile faster would make devs much happier.

> it's still a mine field of exceptions

Unlike languages that actually use exceptions, which really are mine fields of exceptions in a different sense :P