skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Cryptocurrency FOMO
Hey HN -

Apologies for the Throwaway, but so be it. I'm feeling increasingly despondent with the whole fear of missing out when it comes to cryptocurrencies.

I've worked in tech for a long time. For the last few years, due to my family situation, I've had very little spare money. As such, and after watching the last bitcoin bubble swell and burst, and my worry about the tax implications and whatever else - I haven't invested in anything.

And yet everyday I'm hearing about how much people are making. New millionaires. Secret billionaires. How 'easy' it is. Our plumber spent $500 on bitcoin. The guy on the his cell on the train talking about how much he'd made. The guy who took out a new 10k credit card, bought Ripple, made 100k in ~8 weeks and paid back the card. God, I have friends who put in a spare 2, 10, 20k - and are now (on paper at least) millionaires. It's not even 'one off' people. It's seems like everyone I meet.

I understand I work in heavily 'tech' city. I work in a building full of people in tech. But is everyone talking about it? I mean, I see it in the papers, on TV. I want to say this is my own filter bubble, but is it? Is everyone buying this? Is everyone going to end up paying off their mortgages? Is everyone becoming rich around me?

I'm beginning to feel genuinely unhappy about the whole thing. Like I've missed out on 'easy' money. Money that really would have made a difference. Except I didn't have it to spend then and I don't now. And everyday I see it go up more and hear more people gloating, I feel more depressed.

FWIW, I think the whole blockchain thing is amazing. The technology is genuinely exciting. I'm not negative about that - just, the above.

Help me HN. Your thoughts would be very welcome.
Reddit admits its email provider was hacked to steal Bitcoin Cash tips
So applications that use Redis mainly for caching won't be hit as hard then?
> Except it's pretty clear that this bug has been in Intel products for many years.

existing vs knowing is different, dont you say?

as the saying goes - computers are always in a state of error, you only notice the problem when enough occur simultaneously to make the problem visible .... or something like that.
The iMessage monopoly is actually a good point.

I switched to a PC for quality/value reasons recently after waiting too long for update to Mac Pro.

Everyday I hate that I don't have iMessage on this machine. And my phone is constantly propped up against my screen so I can stay connected to my text messages.

I had no idea how much this would effect me and if I can find a third party solution that connects me to iMessage I will probably be switching back soon.
Ask HN: If there is to be a correction to the stock market what will cause it?
Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

On the contrary, the comment didn't share any specific experiences. "The reality the rest of us have been living our entire lives" is rhetoric, as generic as the rest of the language there.

Here's the thing about generics: the larger a topic, the fewer things one can meaningfully say about it. The fewer things one can say say, the more repetition there is, because you end up cycling through those same few things over and over ("mindless rich pissing away millions", "asinine apps and gadgets", etc.) Curiosity withers under repetition; HN is a site for curiosity; therefore generic comments aren't suitable here.

A fine way to turn a generic comment into a specific one, and thus get the needle back into the desired range, is to drop the rhetorical veneer and share something of the motivating specifics. That's what I mean by personal experience. Anyone who feels that strongly has good reasons to feel that strongly. To share some of those reasons in a neutral, informative discussion would be more in the spirit of this site.
It does, at the cost of preserving the firehose, through endless format and media shifts, and at the cost and under the assumption that future historians will want an archive they need a strong AI to manage. There is also the cost, as in paying people and buying equipment, drawn from an already overextended budget.
More and more "compliance" is an IT industry excuse for "because we want to."
And 30 years later? At some point it is necessary to rethink how a technology works. There are reasons why the world eventually gave up on freon and moved on to chemicals that were safer. There is a reason why telephone systems eventually went digital, even though the old systems worked.
HP introduces Chromebox G2 for education market
It's a racist trope in which a questionable/exaggerated historical claim is conflated with any suggestion of knowledge/innovation originating outside a eurocentric historical paradigm.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-wuz-kings
Different != Special
There's a non-trivial chance that the Bitcoin bubble will burst because of some drastic event from Coinbase (or another exchange, like Binance). There is some incredibly suspicious activity going on there including:

- The fact that the coins land in your account weeks after you've purchased it (presumably to stop a bitcoin run?)

- Inability to pay their users.

- their exchange GDAX is known for having spoof buy and sell orders that disappear sporadically (this is illegal in regulated markets).

- the whole Bitcoin cash fiasco

I'm OK with speculating and bubbles, but not manipulation.
When is the last time oceans were this warm and warming up this fast?
AMD PSP: Firmware TPM Remote Code Execution via Crafted EK Certificate
It's not due to the premature disclosure.

As far as Linux is concerned, the disclosure of Spectre and the hardware mitigations was uncoordinated by design. During the embargo period, distros were kept siloed and each more or less left on its own, assuming they were part of the early disclosure at all. This sucks, but until the embargo was lifted we were pretty much forced to play along. We did not even know who knew what, so we couldn't do anything about it.

As a result, distros all differ in the amount of tunables that they provide, in the exact behavior, and in the performance hit that you can expect from fixing CVE-2017-5715. Assuming it's fixed at all (it's not in either Debian or Fedora, for example).

The silver lining is that all discussions on the design choices for the fixes are going to be public. Anyway, based on some tweets from Alex Ionescu, it seems that these MSRs are what Windows uses (and RHEL as well, which is what I worked on).
Yeah, I hit a similar problem way back in college when trying to generate random light rays from a point. I remember it being a tricky problem and hard to model without some kind of software to figure out if the randomness was correct.
They want to hold renminbi and bolivars because it is necessary in order to pay taxes.
I wrote this tool because I don't want to explicitly know the original encoding, I just want _any_ encoding to be converted to UTF8. AFAIK, iconv requires the source encoding to be specified on the command line.
About the security content of updates for High Sierra, Sierra, El Capitan
I'm speaking generically, I don't expect my embedded system to have a USB RNG plugged in

And it's not a theoretical problem either.
Related: Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL
https://eng.uber.com/mysql-migration/

Edit: This is above my technical paygrade so I'll let others be the judge of whether these are in fact related! I believed so, from my earlier readings about the issue. Here's an article from the same blog in the OP about the Uber migration: http://rhaas.blogspot.in/2016/08/ubers-move-away-from-postgr...
Isn't it the whole point of WebAnything?
We've found that periodic invocations of pg_repack are necessary to keep things from bloating beyond the inflection point where vacuuming just can't keep up. I'd love to see VACUUM somehow able to take care of that, because the WAL volume of repacking multi-terabyte databases — even when you're just targeting the worst culprit tables — is absurd (especially when you're keeping all your WALs around forever, for PITR purposes). I'm just not sure what more it can do.
In those security disclosures, I often read what I see as contradictory language.

For example, I'm confused by this kind of statement:

> Mailgun has now completed its diagnostic of accounts that were affected and has notified each of the affected users. At this time, we believe less than 1% of our customer base was potentially affected. If you were not directly notified by Mailgun regarding this incident, then your account was not affected.

If you believe that less than 1% of users were affected, it means you don't know for sure how many accounts were affected.

From there, how can you state that "If you were not directly notified by Mailgun regarding this incident, then your account was not affected"?

Doesn't this last statement mean you know for sure my account was not affected? Isn't it in direct contradiction with the previous statement?
You do understand that there is no 100% free speech in the US either, right? Or in any other country for that matter.

And that is a _good_ thing.
Vacuuming is not why Uber flounced off PostgreSQL. They were naïvely using it as a KV store, and indexing every column, which caused a write-amplification cascade.

Edit, re: the parent's edit: Quoting that article, "Perhaps the thorniest problem which Uber raises is that of write amplification caused by secondary index updates." The word "vacuum" is mentioned exactly once, in the context of keeping up with index insertions (writes).
Looks good -- thank you!
Winning court cases doesn't necessarily mean justice was actually made.

It is all about who has the best lawyers that are able to influence the jury to achieve the goals of their clients.

The amount of US mistrials is a good example of it.
This is among the best replies I got.

I agree that there's tons of room and lots of things that enable such novel inventions today in certain spaces.

I was focusing on the bad hindsight that tries to assert that because we see inventions as obvious in hindsight, we should realize how non-obvious they were originally, in the same way that new inventions today are non-obvious.

I think tons of inventions are obvious, both then and now. The hard work to make a good rendition, spread the knowledge to others etc. is just different now than before. People have reinvented most inventions multiple times because the inventions are obvious enough. And still today, there's tons of obvious enough inventions — people imagine Apps that do things no app yet does. Bringing the invention to fruition and to market is harder.

But in the past, it was hard to learn that someone else had also invented the thing you're inventing. That's easier now, and easy enough to stop you from reinventing it in the first place (unless you're one of those self-centered startup people who delusionally believes that whatever your idea is must be novel and just skips doing the research to see what exists already).
That worth is the worth paid by people who don't know all the information, sold
by people who didn't give all the information.

Uber also wasn't worth $70B in the last round, investors didn't know that sexism was
rampant and the culture horrible, which would have surely made them not invest if they had talked to female
employees at uber.

However, they didn't know that the culture is horrible and not able to grow another 10x under these conditions and conquer the autonomous driving market.

They also didn't know that Uber had all these patent problem, but they did.

Now, investors have invested at a $48B valuation, but they still overpaid, because they don't know all the information. Maybe they didn't care, because Uber told them, they will definitely be able to bloat up the company to $100, so that SoftBank makes their 2x. Surely they also have liquidation preference.

So, they actual valuation of Uber, including all the bad that no one knows, is probably only at $10B.

It could also only be $1B, since Uber probably won't compete in the autonomous car market and can only make $50M profit per year after stripping away all its overhead. But most people don't know this.
GitMask – Develop Anonymously
Please don't bring lazyweb to HN. We can already see the duplicate replies (which are on the edge of karma whoring, for lack of a better term) filling the comment thread.

There is redis documentation for this, which is literally the first result for searching "pipelining redis":

https://redis.io/topics/pipelining

HN has a standard which at minimum is above LMGTFY.
Couldn't get past paywall, but it could be that Tim Cook is better at operations then whomever replaced him.
I think what you describe is true for the secondary market, but not the primary. Buying real estate and hoping market forces solely will help you generate a return would seem a poor use of money for the purpose of increasing the general quality of life for everyone.

On the other hand, real estate development, turning a barren lot into apartments with amenities, or single family homes, would seem to be productive and helpful, both are investments.

The same is true for investment accounts, secondary market trades in stocks and the like would match your analysis, but not so for IPOs, which presumably is being used for productive things by the company.
The Project Zero article [0] demonstrates breaking KVM this way by using indirect jumps to deduce the state of the CPU's internal branch history buffer:

>The branch history buffer state is leaked in steps of 2 bits by measuring misprediction rates of an indirect call with two targets.

That leaks out the physical address of the KVM driver, against which more code is speculative executed, with side channel being used to make these results deducible within the guest's memory area.

Technically speaking, the guest can't fully unsandbox (i.e., they can't run commands on the physical host OS) with Spectre/Meltdown alone, but they can read the memory content of the entire physical host in the case of Meltdown, or all of userspace in the case of a Meltdown-less Spectre.

This is being mitigated by retpoline + microcode update + new kernel parameters IBRS and IBPB, which will make it so that users can't mislead the CPU with speculative indirection (by killing the functionality in risky situations, another layer of slowdowns we will all have to confront soon; impact is not seen until major distros recompile everything with retpoline). PTI itself wouldn't mitigate that leakage, it just mitigates its exploitation to read back the host memory.

However, this is a hardware thing that affects the host OS. If the host already has these features enabled on the real kernel, what value do they provide within the guest itself? Is timing _within the guest kernel_ accurate enough for sandboxed exploitation, making this a universal sandbox-constrained privilege escalation? I don't know. It'd be nice to avoid the redundant overhead, of course.

[0] https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2018/01/reading-privi...
White foreigners are treated like celebrities in almost every non-western country.

That’s what we sort of mean by white previlege. Thanks to Hollywood movies and music + beauty ads with predominantly white people.
Is it only a coincidence the last payout to Iovine for Apple's acquisition of Beats in 2014 happens in August? Probably not. He's earned an exit.
Well, we all know about Debian, there is also Windows XP. And we all hear about bad PRNGs - maybe all those issues can be explained with userland implementations. I don't know. My point is, I don't have to know the answer to any of those questions if I opt for a hardware random generator.

Yes, I have to place trust in the hardware random generator instead. From a user perspective it seems like the attack surface (from the perspective of bad configuration, start seed, misuse etc.) is much smaller with a hardware generator.

And, conceptually it sounds like a safer option. Is it? Well, we arrive at yet another "I don't know".

Note, I'm not advocating the use of a hardware random generator at all, I'm merely responding to the statement that they don't solve any problem at all.
A few Ideas I'd have liked to explore if I had time (and some money):

- Code/Product Documentation SaaS tool for early stage tech companies (very few good products, one is ReadMe.io)

- An ad network for progressive web apps (PWA have good future and as of now there is no exclusive ad network for them)

- CRM kind of SaaS app for startup founders (where founders can manage all their relationship, communication and contacts like investors, journalists, team, power users, etc.)

I wish you good luck.
I am not arguing this. Your example is bad by:

a) bringing a civil law system to argue a point about a common law. It's like arguing about Linux with BeOS examples.

b) saying that the law was more or less the same while it has changed rather dramatically. Saying the US law has not significantly changed between Coolidge and Reagan would be less false than this.
"this is the natural outcome when someone who doesn’t truly love tech gets into the tech industry"

I had loved tech long before I started working in the industry, and when I first started everything was fresh and new. I saw wide, interesting vistas ahead of me. Learning whatever I had to learn was a joy, and I did it well. Even offices themselves were new and different to me. I was impressed by their opulence, access to cool tech that I couldn't afford on my own, by the professionalism and competence of the people I worked with. I felt I could learn a lot from them, and I did.

That lasted maybe a few years. Then I burnt out from overwork and from feeling undervalued and treated like crap by people who didn't understand what I did and thought themselves superior to me. People were lied to and manipulated for profit, treated like replaceable widgets, and thrown out on a whim. Corporate cheerleading speeches and "morale boosting" or "team building" activities were nauseating, two-faced affairs where management pretended to believe in the bullshit they were dishing out and their underlings pretended to love swallowing it. No one was fooled, but the charade continued.

The grand technological vistas I had seen ahead of me had dwindled as I learned and mastered the truly novel, interesting things I had to learn. What was left to do became repetitive and boring, and I really couldn't care less about being the cog in the machine that was designed to make the owners of the company and other bigshots rich. Instead of being interesting and challenging, over time I started viewing learning new tech as just an endless, tedious chore of learning irrelevant minutia, and every time I've gone back in to the industry after that first burn out, I've burnt out more and more.

Honestly, I don't know how some people keep up their enthusiasm for technology over the decades, in the face of so much stress, corporate bullshit, and endless repetition. I just get way too bored and fed up with all that before long.
Shameless plug for my own tracker, in case anyone is interested: I built https://agh.io/about for productivity/time tracking. The advantage is that it's completely passive, but still can accurately classify time spent away from your computer (e.g. driving), zoning out in a puddle of drool with emacs open, talking to a coworker about a project while leaving your browser on HN. Things that most time trackers fail at.

And if you'd rather run things yourself to avoid giving me your data, it's open source, too: https://github.com/johnswanson/tictag
I decided to read a bit about category theory last year. I quite enjoyed "Category Theory for Programmers" as a practical introduction. You can read it online here: https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/10/28/category-theory-for-p...

I also read "Basic Category Theory for Computer Scientists", which was a bit less practical but very good. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/basic-category-theory-compute...
>I like to think of the universe as a deterministic computer that is calculating its own outcome - there is no shortcut to jump to the end.

I hope there's no bugs in it then!
Elsewhere in the thread, someone asked the same question and got an answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16080230
Equivalent sort(1) invocations for your examples:

sort -k2 -k1 -k3 contacts.tsv
sort -k1 -k2 -k3 contacts.tsv

This assumes TSV input, but there are plenty of reasons to prefer that to CSV. If I'm working from CSV sources I usually convert to TSV first thing in my shell pipeline.
Wrong kind of arm processor.
This should the worst nightmare of any human. It completely removes any ability to be a productive member of society with the loss of both hands. It ruins them and just completely removes any possibility of a good quality of life without a prosthesis.
> With fiat currency, that mechanism is that I can easily and quickly exchange it for practically any service offered by pretty much anybody in the whole world, and that is backed by governments and large stable infrastructure.

That is precisely what makes Bitcoin so attractive.

Governments and central banks are losing trust by increasing the monetary base significantly over the last years.
The real bubble is in commercial bank and central bank money, combined with zero interest rates (artificial price manipulation of savings).

Bitcoin can quickly and easily be exchanged for practically any service in the world.

Within the next months, we will see a change of unit of account to Bits (1 million bits = 1 Bitcoin). This will make using Bitcoin in every day transactions much easier.

The large stable infrastructure is built as we speak. Compare it to how the Internet was slow and clumsy in 1995: nobody could imagine streaming movies at that time. Now it's reality.

> As an asset, bitcoin has no tie to anything of tangible value.

That's precisely what makes Bitcoin so attractive as money and Google shares so unattractive as money.

If somebody would pay for your services in Google shares, you would first have to do an in-depth research of the underlying value of the share before accepting it as payment.
AI is overhyped is probably an equally valid title.
>From my long experience, about 50% of coders are macho, taciturn, unhelpful frat bros who make anyone who is not a member of their boys club most unwelcome.

I think this is partly because your gay. A lot of gay people have a sort of lisp and effeminate manner that advertises their sexuality and many straight men can notice this. It's not that the straight men are trying to discriminate, but their is a certain level of subconscious discomfort that will make it much harder (not impossible) for you to be one of the boys.

Of course not all men are like this, and it's possible for men who are like this to get over it. Please keep in mind though, I doubt that there's a deliberate action to exclude you... It's similar to how an 80 year old man is excluded from hanging out with teenage high school girls. It's not deliberate, you just don't fit in by your nature.
Don't get into victim-blaming. Where bicycling is prioritized in the development planning (e.g. Netherlands, where it's also quite flat), people bike all the time.

There are powerful entities who throw their weight around in both policy and propaganda to promote the wasteful forms of transportation.
Has that been the result? I've heard fans complain about the quality of software decreasing. So they're shipping buggy products slowly?

I'm tired of companies in general putting out junk. The complete lack of embarrassment or care about putting out (and charging for) broken stuff frustrates me to no end. What I especially hate is instead of companies recognizing that and fixing it because they actually want to be better, they make excuses.

Is product quality not a priority anymore?
I feel I'm not the only one thinking that "select few" to archive will exclude a certain public figure. The benefit to the "full dump" is that it includes everything, without any bias or removals.