skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A neat (for lack of a better word) thing to look at is bride prices-this article briefly touches on it but it was something I discussed a lot with our exchange student from Turkmenistan last year. Prior to our conversation I had never spent much time thinking about how buying a bride would work in practice, but it turns out that it ends up being a fine (although horrible) example of capitalist endeavor.

So in Turkmenistan its expected that the grooms husband will provide a 'gift' to the parents of the bride. This 'gift' is negotiated between the parents and is for all intents and purposes a bride price. The bride's family obviously is looking for an adequate return on their investment, while the grooms family is looking to get the bride for as cheap as possible. My exchange student's parents are both well educated doctors and her older sister is a US trained economist with an excellent high paying (for Turkmenistan) job, who will in all likelihood inherit an apartment in the city core, and is in fine physical shape.

These are all fine qualities and ones that her parents have invested heavily in over the years with the assumption that her bride price will reflect the investments in her. However, the exact OPPOSITE thing happened. The men in Turkmenistan have no interest-like people the world around they want the best deal possible, so they instead go to the villages and buy a bride from there for a few goats and a handful of cash (our exchange student thought this was a shamefully small amount of money, but for the people in the villages its significant). The men don't expect their wives to work, and aren't looking for intellectual equals. Her parents have effectively improved them to such a point that they've now been priced out of the market.
I treat this similar to the way I treat giving a speech or presentation. I practice and practice. I build 'material' that I can refer to again and again. This is how standup comedians and people who give talks for a living do it!

For example if I know I need to explain Blockchain to someone I would sit down before-hand and write a simple explanation, rehearse it until I memorize it, then I would explain it to the person, the first time I explain it I might be slow and rusty, but if I have to explain it to another person I will be a bit better, etc. etc. so by the time someone else asks me to explain it, I sound like a genius :)

This can apply to Technical, Scientific, Personal, and any kind of content/concepts really. You can use this practice to improve your social skills too and tell interesting stories!
ALIEN ON COIN OR deformity
I think they only announced an early version of their prototype, and it's not clear if it's even implemented yet.

Google was supposed to announce their own 49-qubit quantum computer this year - one that actually works - but it seems they haven't had time to finish it, or maybe they weren't satisfied with its performance and didn't want to overhype it.

Also, I think IBM proving that 56-qubits can be simulated wasn't a simulation of a universal quantum computer, but a more specific simulation. The record in universal quantum computer simulation seems to be 46-qubits:

http://www.fz-juelich.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/UK/EN...

Also, interestingly enough, the number of qubits that can be simulated seems to increase by 1 every 2 years. I suppose this is because generally you need 2x the memory for your supercomputer to add an extra qubit to the simulation. Being able to double the memory every two years seems to make sense from Moore's Law perspective.

In that case, we should be able to simulate a 50-qubit quantum computer by 2025. So any real quantum computer that has 50 logical qubits and is built by 2025 should be able to prove quantum supremacy.
The only reason you and I can buy $200 used Thinkpads is because everyone else is clamoring to overspend for shiny new ones. If more people were OK with keeping their computers longer or buying used, then the price of used computers would go up.

This would obviously be good because we would be valuing things closer to the actual benefit that they bring, but its not the case that we can ALL just have dirt-cheap few-year-old laptops.
Scientists Are Designing Artisanal Proteins for Your Body
> I probably disagree with the notion that people actively seek to create bullshit work for themselves, initially.

It's a matter of rationalization IMO. You have no job. Then you get an offer. The job seems to suck and be useless so you come up with reasons why it matters. That way you can both put food on the table and keep self-esteem.

> So part of the solution is also to stop valuing work so dam high.

That may be already happening:

"Beginning in 1973, the GSS showed a card to the person being interviewed and asked, “Would you please look at this card and tell me which one thing on this list you would most prefer in a job?” The card had these choices:

* High income
* No danger of being fired
* Chances for advancement
* Working hours are short; lots of free time
* Work important and gives a feeling of accomplishment

"After the subject gave his first priority, the interviewer ascertained which were his second, third, fourth, and last priorities. The item was given in almost every survey from 1973 through 1994. Then the GSS dropped it for the next twelve years, perhaps because the answers had been so consistent. Among prime-age whites, the most popular first choice was always work that “gives a feeling of accomplishment,” getting an average of 58 percent of the votes in each decade. The two least-chosen first choices were always short work hours (averaging 4 percent) and no danger of being fired (6 percent).

"In 2006, the GSS resurrected the question, and the results were startling. The 58 percent that had always voted first place to work that “gives a feeling of accomplishment” was down to 43 percent. First-place votes for short working hours more than doubled to 9 percent. “No danger of being fired” doubled to 12 percent, with another 13 percent ranking it in second place.
I'm aware of that. I prefer the *ect methods only because they've always seemed to be more popular amongst Rubyists.
Information overload.

Your brain is automatically filtering stuff out because if it didn't you'd go crazy. Just imagine remembering everyone's face you saw on your commute or every conversation you had at that party last week.
Ask HN: Running a data-oriented consultancy?
Is anyone running a data-oriented consultancy providing research/insights/data/training/infrastructure/software?

What services do you provide?

Where's you business coming from?

Where are you?

How big are you?

How's life at the moment?
In France, it’s technically illegal to pay more than €1000 cash for anything. Because terrorism. Though I suspect it’s really because of extremely high rates of tax evasion. Anytime a worker does anything at my house, there is always the quiet option of “sans facture” which means taxes are avoided for the purchase, but also it allows the worker to pretend he never received that income for income tax purposes. There is seemingly a dual economy — an unintended consequence (though completely foreseeable) of confiscacatory tax policy. If the tax rate were 10%, fewer people would bother evading and tax revenues would logically increase (per the Laffer Curve.)
Gameyness can partially be controlled using anti-oxidants during cooking (rose-mary, mustard, etc) - so it’s a bit up to the chef :)
I love this idea that asking people to not become filthy rich off of needed services is somehow equivalent to enslavement.
I was hoping the Red project would announce something interesting at the end of the year; but not something as interesting as this.
Seems odd to announce this around the same time of the announcement that the code base is being deprecated.
Disclaimer: I'm completely uneducated in this, so please point out my glaring flaws of logic.

I have no doubt that China will be a major economic player in the coming decades. Having said that, they have major hurdles to clear, perhaps most of which is transitioning from a manufacturing to a service economy that exists outside of China.

China's services-based companies that you all think of (Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, etc.) all ape on foreign services and succeed under the protection of government (via. the GFW). Meanwhile, the massive uplift of median wage and living conditions has increased the labour costs in China. I've seen it in my own work, where our 'manufacture in China' approach isn't nearly as beneficial as it was 5+ years ago, since it now costs more due to underlying wages (i.e. controlling for forex). This sort of puts a time limit on their growth at the current rate, because as it becomes more expensive, manufacturing will move (and already is) to other cheaper areas (such as Bangladesh, India and further to Africa).

In other countries, that uplift has broadly aligned with a transition out of manufacturing to services due to the higher education capacities, with subsequent offshoring of said manufacturing. The problem is, those services-based companies compete on a global scale and utilise that global market size to support higher profits (since duplicating knowledge is easier than duplicating phyiscal things). I can't think of on example off my head of a Chinese services-based company that's competed on a global level yet.

I think until that can happen (and I don't see how that happens, particularly but not limited to in tech, when the playing field is so distorted by government policy such as the GFW - it just encourages companies to focus domestically only), China will struggle to make that next step and continue to fuel their economic growth as manufacturing becomes too expensive with the growth of wages. The foreign influx of money from manufacturing will slowly dry up as it goes elsewhere. In turn, I think that'll lead to a stagnation unless they can transition, and I suspect that transitioning (to a level that the West operates) probably requires a ratio of market size to median wage that isn't possible by simply remaining domestic (in the most part, that is you need at least a minimum quantity of global companies to bring in overseas wealth and support the rest).

Interestingly, I've seen a little example of this attempted, where China is trying to build the infrastructure for future manufacturing places, but that's sort of a one-trick operation. For example, they've invested a heap of money into building infrastructure (rail, for example) through Africa. However, it's only a subset of a truly global economy and probably has a finite life as a stop-gap.

So yes, their growth is almost undoubtably going to be relentless and ongoing, but my uneducated opninion is that the pace will taper off sooner than most people expect as they struggle to convert high domestic manufacturing output to domestic knowledge and services output.
I know why you said Java. But I pretty expressly didn't, because BigCorp won't know or care why you said Java. Technical smugness doesn't change the fact that Scala and Clojure are exotic, and that exotic carries risk.
Inside Trump’s Cruel Campaign Against the U.S.D.A.’s Scientists
Other states who rely less on their military nuclear threat arsenal showed how to manage this small problem. Just act rationally without corrupt politicians and lobbyists who turn around the facts.

Renewable energy easily can provide all that.
Guatemala runs mostly on biomass energy from their sugar industry, Germany runs on wind. There's enough cheap biomass and solar and wind.
https://www.electricitymap.org/
خطبة مكتوبة للشيخ كشك
Since OP mentioned the nice big HP x,y plotters, that reminds me I once wrote an emacs lisp HPGL driver to hit the serial port and run one in grad school. I'll have to dig it up sometime.

Edit, just remembered: it was probably to output one of the VLSI CAD layer formats, like GDS or EDIF.
Plum, Chip, Trim, Cleo: how do these money-saving chatbots work
The Wheel
> Their house was around 1200 sq ft

That's rather unlikely. The average new home size in 1960 was less than 1000 sq ft (it's over 2500 sq ft today), and pretty much all existing stock at that point was under 1000 sq ft. Meanwhile, most urban apartments were SROs or what would today be called studios. Over the decades, the houses got additions and the apartments had interior walls knocked out and got combined. Our obsession with floorspace is one of the big drivers of housing being so expensive.
I love cash, but I really dislike coins. What we need isn't a cash or E-payment only, but a Hybrid. You should be able to pay with cash, and the changes should automatically be refunded to a payment system, since the retailer are highly unlikely to change their 98 or $99.99 pricing, those pennies will continue to exist.

This system and tech is already in multiple places in South East Asia. The problem is companies like to hype themselves as a replacement of cash, and most people aren't aware of the privacy concern and implication with a cashless society.
I upvoted your comment so that it could stick around to be argued with.

I have to admit, that I stopped believing things like what you expressed a long time ago. I know, I know, this isn't the REAL capitalism, there's some other capitalism that hasn't been allowed to flourish due to <insert excuse>. If only we had that real capitalism that's never existed, then! then we would be in good shape.

I just don't understand this line of thought anymore.
It's misleading not because it's false (it's not!), but because it's selectively leaving out context. The original title is better. I'm not saying there's no free speech dimension here, just that the original (since-corrected) hacker-news title was more click bait than accurate summary.
BruteSpray v1.6.0 – Brute-Forcing from Nmap output (Automatically attempts
Why no example on the page? Gotta seek through a 5 min video to find an example of it in action?
Does having tractor-feed paper mitigate the slippage problem at all?
New URL shortener with Crystal-lang
Was the New Deal socialist?

What's wrong with some balance? How do you keep capitalism from destroying the ability of customers to make informed decisions. (Monopolies, or even disinformation through advertising?)

Surely you don't think that a world where several billion people still sh*t in a hole in the ground is the best of all possible outcomes?
Does nobody else wonder how an un-peer-reviewed paper from Kalamazoo College is being reported by a tech blogger from NPR?

Why would anyone take this seriously?
And pug/jade.
Ask HN: People who employ contractors, what is it that makes them attractive?
I am currently in the market for a contractor PHP position, and am trying to figure out what it is (or what group of things) specifically that you look for in a contractors CV that makes them attractive to you as a prospect?

Any insight into this is appreciated!
Keybase is a good example of the centralized “secure ledger” described in the article you linked:

> Keybase's approach to server security: (1) each user has his or her own signature chain that grows monotonically with each announcement; (2) the server maintains a global Merkle Tree that covers all signature chains; and (3) the server signs and publishes the root of the Merkle Tree with every new user signature. This configuration strongly discourages the server from lying by omission, since clients have the tools to catch the server in the act.

Source: https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_bitco...
Everyone has their motivations for their career choices and for some that motivation is being rewarded with wealth. Would we end up with a surgeon shortage if they were expected to only do it out of a sense of duty to their fellow man? Unfortunately the only way to truly know is to risk a reduction in the number of surgeons by removing wealth rewards. The obvious problem is that if the result is indeed less people motivated to be surgeons, healthcare outcomes for many will suffer.
I often see this from writers trying to mimic much better ones. If they had the skill to pull off this writing style, you probably wouldn't be complaining.
Yeah, I think the rule is overzealously applied, not sure it's necessary in the first place. But let's have that debate based on reality rather than imply something worse is going on, when it's not.

(Personally, I think the idea of a minister getting involved and trying to control the debate is much worse than the student unions making relatively small mistakes, but hey, that's me).
Seriously? You'd rather round items up to the nearest dollar, so you spend a maximum of $5 more when buying ten items, than to just leave the extra change to the cashier?

Of all the suboptimal solutions...
No, I can't say I ever did. And I don't think I said that. But from a time, where I might have been neutral and possibly interested in legit ads, the advertising has managed to create a strongly negative feeling, which usually then applies to the advertised products, even if they are legit.
There were a couple notable wars in that time though.
Actually sh*tting in a hole in the ground forces u to extend your colon whilst those on their high horse and sit on a seat, damage their colon by pushing through an angle, not to mention the knee problems from not regularly squatting
100 cold calls per day. I have heard that a good metric for cold calling is rejections rather than successes because it gamifies the calling process in favor of the normal outcome.
Does anyone have an ad agency report from the 80's or 90's complaining about all the revenue lost from people going to bathroom during TV ad breaks?
What is JWT?
RIP Bob Givens, Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry Artist
Actual author of Sundown here.

> even if it was active it's not a very common Markdown implementation

First, even if this was true, it's still _not_ OK to name your project Sundown.

Second, _my_ Sundown is the most used Markdown engine in the world. It has powered all Markdown rendering in GitHub.com and Reddit.com for more than 5 years, and it has rendered billions more documents than all other Markdown parsers out there.

Could you please not be an asshole and rename your project? It's really not that hard to come up with a name for a parser. Don't steal mine.
How dare anyone demand that their livelihood and human dignity not be continually chipped away for profit by the wealthiest and most comfortable minority of beneficiaries in the history of civilization. Unbelievable.
> A potentially bigger shift involves making data portable. Guy Rolnik and Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago proposed in a recent New York Times op-ed that social media users should be able to re-route all their messages onto any platform, the way phone calls are re-routed regardless of whether AT&T or Verizon is the provider

> In the 2001 AOL-Time Warner merger, the FCC forced AOL’s market-leading Instant Messenger (AIM) to be compatible with chats from rivals.

I'm not sure how this would work these days. Looking at my Dock right now I have Slack (some open source communities use this for some reason, I also use it at work), Textual for IRC (freenode), Discord (some other open source communities use this, and gaming communities), WhatsApp (personal use), Skype etc

I remember common protocols like XMPP back in the day, but it looks like the closed systems have won hearts and minds
Wow, yeah, agree. Its not the only point in the article and some of the other ones are fairer criticism, but this line was a bit painful.

Use the median!!!
What I'm struck by are the parallels to problems currently being "solved" with machine learning. Engineers can build tiny robots who can navigate a maze dozens of times faster than a real mouse with far fewer errors and a perfect memory!

Now, take that fact and start raising money off the claim that you can soon replace all mice and potentially rats too with robots in the next five years. These rodents will have no disease, require no food, produce no poop, and only need to be rested on their inductive charging pads overnight! We know we're close because we've solved the maze problem!

That's ridiculous of course, and maybe pet mice aren't really a good stand-in for potentially useful technology. But the distance between these robot maze-solvers and a real mouse is about where we are with modern machine learning and AI. Yes, in a very narrow, extremely well-specified problem area, we have programs that can predict the next word you're going to type or transcribe speech or recognize a face. It works way faster and is 200x less error prone than a human! But of course, what errors do happen are catastrophically worse than any human would make, and if the parameters of the problem space vary in the least then everything goes out the window. And turns out the model can be trivially manipulated by malicious actors to churn out false positives or amplify propaganda or promote scams.

But we're almost there, I promise.
And you're compiling to a specific architecture.
Like everything else, you need to train it.

I have seen babies learn to walk, they don't get it the first, or the fifth time, but their parents encourage them, and most learn it.

However social skills are a completely different beast: here we just accept it as whatever you happen to learn is whatever level you will just have to live with.
That image does not map to letters, it maps to the phonetic alphabet. English has different phonetics for words when compared to their written counterparts. For example "money" needs to be converted to "mahnee" before being converted to emoji counterpart. Otherwise it is gibberish.
Matrasreview website
Out of curiosity, what are some counter-examples of decentralized protocols, or at least open protocols, that have gained significant adoption in recent decades?

The only major one I can think of is BitTorrent. Bitcoin and Tor are still niche.

It's too bad there aren't more. It seems very difficult for anything as fundamental and important as HTTP or SMTP to gain traction when there's no incentive for large companies to adopt an open protocol. Are we stuck with walled gardens like iMessage/WhatsApp/Slack/Twitter/Facebook from now on?
Edge case. How many times have you done business at a place that is cash only where you bought more than a few items? The majority of the time rounding up is a great solution because it means the cashier doesn't waste time counting change and doesn't have to account for revenue not matching sales. Having a count thar does not come out cleanly at the end of the day is a major inconvenience depending on the business.
ycombinator can't:

There should be emoji after the colon, I can type them fine in Chrome. Truth be told, they would make up great return values, making yourself indispensable to your employer.
So, you're claiming that since certain cancer screenings are ineffective it therefore means that managing issues such as hypercholesterolemia, hypertension, and diabetes are also ineffective? That seems like a stretcher to me, and I'm not buying it.
You can live for weeks without food, it can be stored easily (unlike services which aren't stored at all), and the barrier to entry is low... Many people even have their own food gardens. It's also very amenable to nearly complete automation. Therefore food is super cheap.
I like the idealism of this, but I highly doubt reality would follow through. At least not until organisational transparency is proven to be a winner in Business degree courses
I don't know if this tactic applies in this case. Jared Spool is a very well-known UX expert, he's also been ranting about NPS for ages. It feels more like the other way round, he wrote the post and attached a sales pitch, rather than (as you say) attaching a post to the sales pitch.
Boxing day event on Udemy goes live
Yeah, JWT, like YAML, was one of those dead-simple, great ideas that ended up overcomplicated and error-prone.