skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you are in a position to add something to this discussion: have they found added value in the distributed ledger ecosystem?
Would this be as controversial if they money went to a third-party (i.e., not a Wal-Mart-run) charity?

The idea is something good—keeping low-level, non-violent offenders out of the legal system and saving taxpayer dollars. But it does seem to fit the bill for extortion: Wal-Mart protecting the shoplifter from the government in exchange for money.

I wonder if there's a way to get the best of both worlds?
Probably the most efficient is to ask your guests to bring some extra things?
Can you explain how having shares/coins in the blockchain increases transparency/authenticity? Easily audit-able records would exist just the same if you bought your shares via wire transfer.
What about a blockchain/distributed ledger improves supply chains in ways that a standard centralized database could not? Explain like I'm five.
My setup script starts by making a backup of the registry, then configuring Python. I use Python for most of the rest and Powershell only where necessary. Contrary to what my comment may suggest, I am actually a software minimalist. A large part of my setup involves removing clutter from the desktop environment. I have avoided cygwin partially just so I'm not scared of native windows command line, which I find not quite as bad as Powershell to work with, but more limited in interacting with the OS of course. I am familiar with basic linux Bash already and that's what I'm comparing all of this to. Maybe now is a good time to adopt cygwin because, well, better late than never.
Holiday delivery isn't really "hard" to scale in the sense that it's some challenge nobody knows how to solve. It's just basic economics. If UPS had 2x the number of drivers they'd have no issues during the holidays.

Why don't the have 2x the number of drivers? Because the delivery market is hyper-competitive and stuck in a Nash Equilibrium where if any one delivery company would raise their prices, customers wouldn't favor them.

"Why should I need to pay double to deliver goods with 3 days notice on December 20th? I don't need to do that on any other time of the year!" They'll say.

Instead there's a much simpler explanation. Customers want to pay lower prices for delivery, even to the extent that the reliability of delivery around busy dates will slip. Of course delivery companies will attempt to perform some heroics to make it happen, but their margins will only allow them to go so far, and those are driven by how much customers actually care about prompt delivery.
Hence.. the "not everyone can" bit still applies.. but not everyone will. So that's not even relevant.
agree. I seen the same comparison between the internet and AI/Data science/ML. a big bubble, everyone is 'doing it' but most are doing it wrong, and then a big collapse. When the smoke clears, the ones that 'got it right' are the big future titans, and the whole sector grows again.
The hype reminds me more of Second Life. People put everything on Second Life, but no-one could ever say quite what it was for. It never "crashed" as such, it just gradually faded away.
I’d hate to trust in the mercy of WalMart.
The problem will be solved by having company outings, but simply declare them privat and no longer invite colleagues with 'trouble' potential. You cant lawsuit people for there private lifes. Works for politicians already. Result of this will be a even more closed club.
Searching for Bitcoins in GitHub Repositories with Google BigQuery [video]
Big Telecom Got a Massive Break from the GOP Tax Bill, and It's Raising Prices
Thanks for the details! Could I ask you about your query patterns and the kind of data loads you're pushing into those?
Yes, it is easy to fall into this pit. I did this too and it was a huge mistake. I'm 1 year into looking for a job since I too have no network. Cold applications are not working :(

So there is a lesson here... :)
Its sad, that people found this kind of living as "normal" these days. Question is, why do you live for in this lifetime ? .. are you living to work only ? Is your value as human measured in work ? ... oh my this is sad to read.

People, lets make something together.. lets make sure, that we do not have to be sleeping in streets, while megabillion companies are using and abusing people much as possible.. then they put you out without any warnings.. oh my how sad life is today.

Also, can you say technology sector is your favourite work ??
I am starting to thing little by little, manual job and services are going to keep you still in business after 10 years also.

This technology job and industrial sector is waaaaay to hyped.
The annoying thing is that, if they change the key_share extension to another number (and mark the current one as "reserved"), they'll have to run the TLS 1.3 experiments all over again (to see if there's anything on the new number), delaying TLS 1.3 even more.
That doesn't seem to me like a fundamental law. Certainly with "internal blockchains" or other cases where at least a majority of the operators are trusted, mining and tokens are completely unnecessary.
Yes! There's many ways to learn. One way is essentially the brute force method: Google every Single thing until you get it. That's how I learned Nimoy when doing some basic image analysis.
It's hard to write a good counterargument to this. The article goes in so many directions that it could never cover all his points.

Any counterargument I can construct boils down to a difference of opinion & values. The author trusts his bank and his government to (a) handle his money in the way that he thinks is responsible and (b) handle disputes in a way that benefits him. On the other hand, I trust myself to handle my money responsibly, and I view my government as a great uncertainty because I don't understand the limits of their power (in the least nefarious, but relevant point, who can predict by how much my government will increase the monetary supply and deflate my purchasing power over the next decades? More nefarious, if I dissent, government can trivially lock most of my digital assets that aren't cryptocurrencies - e.g. bank account or investment funds).
IANAL but threat of filing a lawsuit and threat of reporting criminal activity to authorities are not equivalent.
> 5 years is a lot, many times the average.

This is incorrect as a general statement. I have reviewed several hundred resumes over the last 2 years on which software developers stayed at a company between 4 and 6 years as the median. In the Bay area 4 years is often the vesting schedule for people's first stock option (and it can be the biggest one people get) and I think that contributes.

When I see a resume with a bunch of 1 or 2 year engagements without that person being a contractor it always raises a flag for me to investigate that during the interview.
Another MASSIVE Data Leak: 123M American Households Exposed Online
Your target audience is c programmers right? Which c programmer knows Object Oriented Programming so poorly that you have to link to the Wikipedia article about it?
I would say that living in the middle of nowhere has certainly harmed me, which is somewhat related if the reason you want to work remotely is to say, relocate from a tech city to a rural area.

I am slowly figuring out that the onus is on me to do things like, say, flying out to conferences so I can make up the difference. My advice would be to have a plan in place for dealing with geographic and self isolation before you accept the remote job offer.
Just to be clear, failure to meet the requirements of Mandatory Deposit has not historically affected your copyright status.

> any copyrighted work (including software) distributed in the US needs to be deposited with the Library of Congress.

This is overstating things. It's unlikely that the LOC really wants your stuff, and if it does, it will let you know by sending you a Notice of Mandatory Deposit. Until then, "Mandatory" doesn't really mean mandatory.

Also, you don't need to register the work to receive copyright protection. If you write some code put it up on Github without a license, that's your code and you have the right to deny people the right to use it (among other
rights). It's probably going to be difficult to prove that some random person is using your code, but that doesn't affect your rights in the code, because you fulfilled all the requirements to create those rights: you (1) created something and (2) fixed it in a tangible form.

As I mentioned, registration isn't necessary, though it does get you some presumptions that would be helpful if you ever end up in court.

Disclaimer: IANAL (anymore)
> told not to get too close with them

Well, I don't think that's true really. Nobody cares if you're close friends with your co-workers. Many co-workers are close friends.

But, I get that you meant romantic relationships.

The problem of course being that there's so much negative baggage that often accompanies unsuccessful or unrequited romantic interest, all of it detrimental to the company. For example: If a subordinate rejects a superior's advances, and there's even a whiff of unfair treatment (being passed over for promotion, for example), the subordinate has a legitimate grievance that they didn't before.

The woman in the article, for example, that rejected her boss's advances and then was later let go for "poor performance": Maybe she really was performing extremely poorly! And maybe the boss really was totally over it immediately. But she now has a pretty solid case that it was retaliation, forever.

It just puts the company in a position where they have to be hyper-vigilant about monitoring things like this, and it's a huge waste of resources. Regardless of how valuable you are to the company, you're almost certainly not worth the huge headache that you just caused.
I’m worth 13 million dollars because of crypto and I’ve diversified half... tell me more about how Bitcoin is a scam. :)
Perhaps other people here shared the same assumption that I did - that this essay was about moving from tech development as a contractor/employee to tech (development) consulting. It's not.

It's about moving from developing to marketing. There's nothing wrong with that, but it was a let-down to me to discover that the path to riches meant mingling with the group of people I tend to like the least in a company.

Also, I think it's fair to say that amongst departments in companies, marketing is much more likely to pay (and pay a lot) for a consultant, whereas IT is only likely to pay a lot for outside help when things are really, really desperate.

Marketing is seen as revenue generating, and at many places, IT and (ironically) product development are seen as cost centers.

This might as well have been an article about how to 100x your income by moving from your current job into a similar job in a fintech company. That's a bit like moving from serving tables at Denny's to Del Frisco's steakhouse. Most Denny's waiters are not prepared nor capable of making that transition.
Ask HN: Which futuristic companies are you excited about?
I'll list down some of the futuristic companies I'm excited about:
- https://kernel.co/
- https://www.ff.com/
Apparently some believe only prosecutors are allowed to have such discretion. They guard their power jealously.

I wonder of the prosecutor who was talking about using his discretion understood the irony of what he was saying or the hypocrisy of his position.
Only if you believe that developing and maintaining specialized programs somehow increases the bug count "geometrically".

I think if a program developed with one version of n components might have x bugs, a program with two versions of n components may have (n^2)x bugs; that is, for every new version of any given component you add to the system, you multiply the number of possible configurations of the program.

Again, if it's all loose coupling, it'll work (but won't be very interesting). But if you have lots of random calendars, different mapping components, different messaging subsystems - it all becomes much, much more complex. Abstractions leak, break down. They have different ordering semantics, different performance, different failure modes, different concurrency support; there's no end to the number of problems introduced by trying to be flexible about what dependencies you plug in.
> Your dismissal of the importance of not wasting the time of men doesn't work if higher quality men have more of their time wasted. That is, if the men who write detailed messages get worse results than the men who write a thousand identical one-liners (or who swipe right on everything, etc.), then the former type of men will leave the site and women will be left with the latter type.

Exactly.

And this change makes the value of a "like" and the value of sending an interesting message the same when it comes to the prospect of getting someone's attention. Incentives matter, people who get it will shift attention to improving their profile pictures and deploying likes over messages.

Or shift their attention outside the service, as both you and the GP have said, either to another service or IRL activity.
Can you be more specific? What places are a lot less welcoming in your many travels?
I delivered pizza way, way, way back in the day, and every now and then I think that if I didn't have a fuel-hogging unreliable vehicle, I'd go deliver again for a manager I've gotten to know. Not a terrible way to spend an evening every now and then.
I don’t know about marriages, but this source says 10% of heterosexual couples met at work (dropping sharply): http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0003122412448050
That sounds like a crime. Maybe prosecute that instead of get rid of a program that appears to have some demonstrable up sides.
I'm worth way more than 13 million, and you will most likely lose your million because you can't read :)
This. I wrote a crypto arb bot in 2014 and decided to stop working on it / open-source it for the same reason after a couple exchanges that I had cryptos in mysteriously vanished.
Sorry, I misunderstood your original comment as referring to the the US.
However I don’t think that the system in China is like what happened with slavery (it is China you refer to?). People aren’t kidnapped, chained and transported in conditions that kill large numbers.
They aren’t traded in degrading markets and are not routinely beaten to death or mutilated by masters. They aren’t branded.
As bad as conditions currently are it doesn’t seem like slavery to me.
It sounds very company specific. I worked remotely for the very first startup job I had an advanced very quickly in promotions in the company, and eventually landing a 40% higher paying job somewhere else, also remote.
Settlements are for civil cases, not criminal. This was demanding money in exchange for not revealing evidence of a crime to authorities, which is extortion. It would be perfectly legal for Walmart to settle with the shoplifter under an agreement to not sue them.

Criminal cases are the state vs. the citizen, whereas civil cases are citizen vs. citizen. (The same action can result in both types of cases.) You're not supposed to profit by inhibiting the state from prosecuting.
You don’t need to short BTC/USD you just need to be able to short. You can always convert to USD after your arbitrage gains in BTC, which I do and have done.
Be careful of Survival Bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
The last part of the article made me think: Are there any printers whose software is open?

Printers where always a blackbox for me that wasted ink and did not work when I needed it...
ill chime in and say across all shipping options this year it seems that things have gone much smoother than in the past regarding delivery times and other hiccups.
Indeed it does. Try feeding the homeless with cooked food about to be thrown out in most states.
A blockchain is a decentralized trustless ledger. If the operators are trusted, you can just use a database. It’s much more efficient. It’s pretty clear from the comment that you don’t understand Bitcoin or why, when people say “we like blockchain but not bitcoin”, that they’re talking nonsense.
Right, and there's truth in what you say - especially wrt extremism. Your argument brings to mind the argument that "capitalism isn't the problem, crony capitalism is". Like, if only powerful people wouldn't lie, cheat, steal and write the rules to apply differently for them.

I will concede that, on a limited basis, government - specifically in the regulatory (and law enforcement) capacity - can do some good.

I'm more pessimistic than you though and believe that the vast majority of new laws are not written for my benefit, and most of the time we - the society as a whole - would be better off without more rules. It's not about my trusting my fellow citizen more than the ruling class, my position is about my distrust of and opposition to busybodies and cronies.

If you believe - for whatever reasons - that laws are not written nor enforced for your benefit, then maybe libertarianism isn't the worst thing. And that's all I was driving at.
The main difference is what threat is being used. It's fine to threaten to sue someone (within reason). It is not ok to threaten to report someone to the police if they don't pay you. It is even worse to hold someone in a room, pressure them into signing a confession and then to threaten to turn that confession over to the police if the agreed payment is not delivered, as Walmart is accused of doing here.
Understanding an algorithm or concept is not a world-class talent.
> many people trip over the idea of one hash being "less" than another, and it's just easier to go with the "number of zeros" explanation rather than spend time explaining how a hash just represents a bigass number.

Aha! I knew there was a reason people prefer the leading zeros explanation. Thanks for pointing it out.
Nice Legs, Shame About the Face (and the Legs)
Distributed Ledgers have real application, blockchains are one way of solving them. DLT 2.0 like hash graphs and DAGs are interesting, but Blockchain is the whats in "production" thus far.
Sure they can - put you in prison with no internet access.
but isn't that just taking advantage of a (temporary) loop hole? The real problem there imho is that for some reason the government has decided that oh we need to step in and protect the unwise. Strangely this is by the same people that say government shouldn't be involved in the financial markets. There is no guarantee that having an ICO makes the investment any more bullet proof.
"Blockchain tech" is not the Internet, though. It's like a different kind of Internet, one that is slower, more expensive and has less capacity, which was invented after the real thing has already been created. And then people would ask why you would need this if the real Internet can already do almost all of what this worse version does.
Google DeepMind and healthcare in an age of algorithms
Well they issue timestamps/signatures at a rate up to 2^64/second without PKI to provide tamper evident guarantees for data integrity. Their ledger is public and based on universally accepted proofs/primitives. Is it distributed, I suppose no, is it a good use for blockchain I’d say yes.
It's about impact, and impact (in a short time) is about influencing big decisions made by upper management. Consultants are specifically hired to guide upper management to theoretically better decisions.

Here's an example from a data analytics company I worked at. (I was crunching data and analyzing it, and my company was delivering "simple", actionable guidance).

Our deliverable would be a tidy presentation showing that telco X was running all these different marketing campaigns, but that a few of them were generating lots of billing errors but few increases in sales. Cutting some of the messy, under-performing campaigns would save money (which was a lot of money at the scale these companies were operating).

The company would pay us 20-50k for that advice, and I would personally earn a typical hourly wage...
As a consultant, point out to your sponsor that access is not ready and it will take a few days (of the one week contract). That's all you are required to do.

I wouldn't advise to participate in the blame game or to point fingers. You are not here to cause troubles and trouble is bad for repeat business.

P.S. Organizations are dysfunctional and the majority of consulting time is wasted. Lesson one of being a consultant is to live with it. :D
That brings back memories. I was involved in trying to build webapps on Illustra in the mid/late 90s. We (a small dev shop) ended up with it because it was sold to our non-technical manager on the basis that it was the future for the web and it was ridiculously expensive for the kind of bottom-feeder projects we were doing - which was kind of galling given we were being paid peanuts.

But even I was initially excited - the feature list looked cool - multimedia, rich/extensible data types (called blades?), OO/table inheritance, built-in dynamic web page generation, etc. But the performance was absolutely terrible and all the advanced features turned out to be less than useful or slightly broken. I remember my disapointment when I first tried out the "search for images LIKE a reference image" feature and it matched a butterfly with a racing car. We struggled for a few months with the general flakiness and horrible performance of Illustra and eventually convinced them to allow us to use Informix instead and went back to storing images as files served by HTTP and using PHP or Perl for the dynamic HTML generation. The Informix sales dudes seemed convinced that Illustra was the future.

The performance was much better but for the web apps we were writing, we could have just stuck with mSQL or MySQl and saved a lot of time and effort.
Your explanation seems far more plausible to me.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Reviewed by Adam Roberts
Yeah, government is sure first to get on a hyper new tech. In the US alone you got like XYZ ways to count votes on elections in different counties, most of which are decades or more old.
Do the simple calculations yourself and see what they need to explain.
Marzipan
It's for reference...
> In Python it isn't implicit, but it's still shared state, and so still hard to test and maintain. You can't test the `f` in your example without having to pass in the whole big bundle of state that self tends to be, even if you do so explicitly.

cies said structs were ok, what's the difference in this regard? 'Shared state' doesn't usually refer to explicitly passing a data structure into a function as an argument; it's operating on shared state only in the same way that any function which takes for example a string or a hash does.
That looks like a pretty good house... what level of income would one need to buy such a house? Like an office worker or manager, etc?
"Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsof" by G. Pascal Zachary is great, about an interesting period of Microsoft's life.
Electric Car Timeline
The problem isn't the technology but the problems around legality and implementation and who it disrupts.

The immediate problem is that an "automatic" contract circumvents the regular legal system and thus is going to be ... not-legal. The larger problem is that this is how things should be.

That the regular system isn't automatic but rather includes considerations of intentions and individuals involves is not a bug but a feature, an extremely important feature (the non-enforceability of unconscionable contracts is pretty important today [1]). Unbreakable contracts open the door for unlimited abuses (how does an automatic contract system prevent contracts for illegal activity? Given legality is going to continue to depend on intentions, etc).

The Etherium Fork illustrated all this and essentially discredited the approach.

Also, it can take a while for successful tech to be successful. But there's also the tech that people spend years trying to get going without success.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscionability