skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When was the last time you used a paper map?

When was the last time you used the yellow pages?

How much money have you spent buying encyclopedias in the last 20 years?

How much time searching for someone who has a mediocre copy-of-a-copy of bootleg tapes of that one amazing concert by the band you liked?

How many hours have you spent on the phone with a company because you lost the user's manual to their product?

How big is your rolodex?

When was the last time you had a conversation to the effect of "what was the name of that actor in that movie" and you were unable to get the answer?

When was the last time you had to spend 15 minutes planning out where and when you would meet when because your group is splitting up when on a trip?
Haven't carbon nanotubes already been shown to exhibit ballistic conduction at room temperature?
Exactly. Ask any quack chiropractor and he'll tell you about the "superfood" benefits of avocado.
I just purchased a few stickers from this site, and I'm a happy customer!
I have a question as a relatively uninformed spectator: where do these transaction fees go and why do they have to be so high?
A capability system is sort of like having lots and lots of those roles. But a key element is that within the system you don't have to be an administrator or have any kind of privileged-operation access to create a new capability, you just do it, and then you can pass it around (loosely equivalent to giving the role to others).

Capability systems include a way to _pass_ capabilities as part of the basic routine operations.
Mostly by ignoring him.
I think this is kind of unfortunate. I wish I could still get my hands on a huge iPod that just does music. Maybe anachronistic but for the car and other activities, I would have loved to have the massive iPods.
March of the Cards 2018 PC Mac Game Full Free Download Highly Compressed
The author consistently compares code language style to literature language style, but I don't think it's a helpful comparison at all.

Literature operates by an intractably complex interaction between the words written on the page and the mind of the reader. Exchanging a single word for another may totally alter the effect of a passage, based on factors like the meaning of the word, the associations the word has for each reader, and the aesthetic appearance and sound of the word.

Moreover, we have no objective way of measuring the effect of literature. We don't have a test that can measure how much more empathetic I become after reading a novel, or how much more I understand the human experience.

Computer code typically has measurable outcomes. While "readability" may still be a relatively subjective measure, we can at least say "these two versions of this function are equivalent" if the outcome is the same - the array is sorted correctly, the transaction amount is calculated correctly, the graph is rendered with the same pixels.

This means that editing computer code is nothing at all like editing literature. The cliff-notes version of Macbeth can never produce the same effect in the mind of the reader as reading Macbeth -- but a function that is subjectively easier to read can be shown objectively to produce the same effect as the original function.
Cell phones were still futuristic in the 80s, and they were science fiction in the 60s.
Time is a commodity. The extra time spent reviewing or maintaining code that is difficult to read would be better spent writing the code well the first time.

In open source development, a maintainer’s time is often extremely limited. If you can’t make your code easily readable for that maintainer, then your contribution is worthless. You have created an asset with a transaction fee that prices you out of the market.
If our clients saw how much googling we do...
Net neutrality gaining steam in state legislatures after FCC repeal
A case where the knock offs were sometimes better than the original in my opinion. Where the iPod you still had to use iTunes to get music on to the device, but could otherwise use it as a USB drive(can't remember if you had to specifically allocate space for that or if all free space was available), but on the cheap Chinese knockoffs, you just had the file system on the USB stick where you could dump files and a mp3 files alike and it would shuffle what ever mp3 files it found on there.

The iTunes reliance was annoying in general, but it seemed even more out of placed with the "USB stick" shuffle.
It's misleading because, for experienced + well-qualified people, the upper ranges of the established rates are rather high, and therefore don't significantly constrain the hourly rates of those people.

So for instance, if, within a given discipline like "security", there are 6 experience levels (1 = fresh-out undergrad, 6 = most senior), and within those, 4 maturity levels (20th thru 80th percentile, say), then the 80th percentile of, say, level 5, will be a very high rate.

Because it's HN, and the comments above were referring to boutique security consultants ("top NSA specialists work[ing] for contractor firms"), I assumed that's who we're talking about. Cybersecurity, especially, has become a domain where institutional constraints have been lifted in the last few years - it requires less on-paper experience to get up to the "level 5" above.

On the other hand, and in agreement with your comment, the aggregate labor rate for a large contract (I'm sure $1B qualifies) could not be too out of whack with industry norms, and this would be a significant constraint on rates.
DataChile: New Visualization Engine for Chile's Public Data
> One could argue that a blockchain's only real world purpose is as a shared database, just as http's only real world purpose is the transfer of data between computers.

So far it seems like the only thing anyone actually makes based on this shared database are new mini-currencies.
US ending protections for 200k+ Salvadorans, but giving time for a transition
Virtually the entire article is about Ethereum. Ok, sure, a poorly and intentionally differently designed system is choking at scale. But Ethereum != cryptocurrencies. In fact I would stay very much away from calling it a currency at all since it's not fungible. So I am struggling to see how this article is not just a big false equivalence.
> Rich people can afford astroturfing services to spread memes and good morale to pump the price. Rich people likely have significant control over hype cycles and may even be pumping other cryptocurrencies to start diversifying.

That's super interesting. We assumed that the decentralization of content brought on by the Internet and social media would put a stop to stuff like that, but instead, due to anonymity, simply painted a veneer of populism over the same old trick. It worked for the election, so why not apply it to manipulate speculative investments?

ICO is a way to get around the reporting requirements of an IPO and the minimum-net-worth requirements for private investments by regular folk (ostensibly to protect them from exactly this kind of asymmetric information, speculative manipulation that occurred in the roaring 20s...).
But it can absolutely be easily manipulated by a government. Governments have the resources to pump/dump coins, buy huge amounts of mining hardware, etc. Even a smaller nation state could, if it wanted to waste the money, launch a 51% attack against Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency by just buying enough mining hardware. Beyond direct manipulation you have the ability of competent intelligence agencies to execute mass cyber attacks. "Code as law" is pretty dangerous when code is so vulnerable.

Other well-heeled organizations can do these things as well: corporations, hedge funds, organized crime, ...

People seem to think that currency manipulation and other financial games were invented in the 20th century with modern fiat currency. The price of gold absolutely was manipulated in the past in a variety of ways: secret hoarding, spoofing reserves, false transactions, etc. Every currency or medium of exchange has been manipulated.

In many ways central banking and fiat currency was invented to defend against many types of market manipulation by non-state or foreign state actors (as well as against undesirable emergent behaviors in markets). I once read someone talking about US vs. China trade and Chinese currency manipulation state that for the US to abolish the Fed would amount to "unilateral disarmament." We would suddenly have no coherent way to defend ourselves against other nations armed with the ability to manipulate their own currencies (and ours!).
All the writer had to do was a bit of googling and they would have had so much more to say [1], but then they would probably have missed the quota of articles they had to write.

[1] https://jalopnik.com/this-is-the-only-airline-with-non-stop-...
Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16084575
FTC/SEC would likely block such a merger... even in the current administration it would be nearly impossible to get done.
(Pre-Launch) Rent high-end YouTube gear
We had a pretty good discussion going a few months back when I posted part 1. Curious to hear your thoughts.
This sounds like the beginning of a Dr Seuss
I assume you look at that world as bad. Though that's purely assumption on my part, since you offer no value judgement.

But using that assumption and for the sake of discussion, I'll point out that your dystopian vision could be applied to most technologies. Imagine a time when anyone can get a hold of you. They no longer need to write a letter or go to a telegraph office, your voice is there, whenever they want it. They are able to invade your home with this attention seeking technology by installing a little bell. You are more and more marginalized in the workplace if you are not permanently wired to this network of contacts.

Of course, this process escalates as technology escalates, but it's not the first time that someone has looked at the future and said "think about this world that is so alien". I just wonder where we cross the line to dystopia
My lawyer said that's not the case, at least in my state. LLCs protect against criminal and contractual liabilities, but not tort liabilities.

I google'd it since I couldn't remember his exact legal reasoning, this blog post just about sums it up: https://www.litigationandtrial.com/2009/05/articles/attorney...

Certainly better than nothing, but I was personally not concerned with criminal/contractual liabilities
Blogger doesn't even load if you have js disabled.
It is incredible, and most people didn't see it coming, but compared to the scifi stuff I read and watched as a kid, the future doesn't feel all that mind-blowing, at least so far.

Part of it is living through it and adjusting to the changes, but I was also born into a world that had TVs, telephones, microwaves, VCRs, satellites, space programs, and personal computers. Computer networks and games existed back then. Miniaturization and Moore's law was known about.

I think living through the early 20th century might have been more mind blowing.
Motti (chopped wood) tactics, and the White Death served them well in the Winter War.
Somehow that's even worse.
If you aren't opposed to eating fish (or don't already eat a lot of fish), you could consider incorporating mackerel or sardines into your diet. It will vary by brand, but mackerel is 230 kcal, 19g fat, 15g protein per tin and sardines (bone-in skin-on) are 150 kcal, 9g fat and 18g protein per tin. Both have a good proportion of omega-3 fats. I find mackerel delicious right out of the tin, sardines need some condiments but still taste pretty good without much work.
Ah yes, the old "The USA is responsible for everything" line of reasoning.
In an Actor model, you can explicitly send messages to actors (send), monitor their state (executing, failed, completed), and take actions against them (kill, spawn).

A fallout from this is that you can have one actor supervise another, to protect your program from errors: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Supervisor.html

The Golang runtime provides only these actions: (spawn). It’s up to the author to create communication channels, and it’s impossible to query for the status of a Goroutine. This means you have no explicit control over goroutines, so you can’t kill misbehaving ones like you could in another language.
We would have preferred a deal with the devil, but Hitler had tanks and guns.
This makes me think, that on the scale of the paperclips game we are well past where most players would think we are. We are actually at the beginning of the hypno drone release project.
Same case here. I built my first webpage in FrontPage hosted GeoCities[0] when I was 12 years old.

I remember downloading "magic" scripts from Dynamic Drive[1] mainly I learned how to use tables in HTML and inline styles.

I also had this prompt that asked for your name and the website displayed a welcome message.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_GeoCities

[1] http://dynamicdrive.com/
Because the future belongs to fuel cells. Electric cars are undoubtedly the future but batteries, at least in their current form, probably aren't. Huge banks of batteries are a stop-gap until fuel cell tech matures.

* The practical range of an electric car isn't great. There's no foreseeable story for a <5 minute charge.

* (Compared to fuel cells) Banks of batteries are dangerous in a crash.

I think the Electrek authors are wrong in their take on the situation. Distribution of the hydrogen will have razor thin margins just like gas stations. They're right that the current process for hydrogen isn't exactly efficient today, but that doesn't really sink the tech.

It might not be full fuel cell but a hybrid fuel cell battery car might end up being the best of both worlds.
Right. And gpg messages are also independently encrypted, although subject isn't scrubbed by default, and some routing information leaks by default (although eg Mixmasters exist as one approach for mitigating the latter to a certain extent. All system will need to have some routing information. Come to think of it, gpg+usenet might be "better" example of "old tech" secure messaging).

Ed: i suppose the question.becomes if new systems rely on tls to help obscure meta-data or not; like what mail+gpg does.
No, but give me 50 years and I'll tell you a good one.
That's true, and their argument is valid, assuming they really are okay with trading off some potential increase in short term security with a rather certain long term oppression.
Yeah, the language is pretty overloaded from the layman's perspective. In the airline industry (which I'm not a part of, but I have significant professional connections with operations researchers which do route planning for the airline industry), they distinguish between a point-to-point route and a direct route.

Direct means you fulfill the customer's desire with one flight, irrespective of whether there is a hub at the origin or destination, although most are to or from a hub. That is why airlines advertise direct routes. Despite their marketing as direct routes, typically fewer than 10% of passengers on that flight will share the same origin and destination.

Point to point means a route that doesn't connect between a hub and a spoke, neither of which has full scale maintenance operations and significant staffing for that airline. It is also expected that 100% of passengers on the flight are coming from the same origin and to the same destination.

All point-to-point routes are direct routes, but not vice versa. For example, when I fly from Seattle to San Jose on southwest, I'm flying on a direct route, but I'm also flying a point to point route, because neither Seattle or San Jose are hubs for Southwest. It actually takes a lot of volume for an actual point to point route to make sense, and in this case it does because of the significant business ties between Silicon Valley and Seattle. But when I fly Seattle to Oakland, it is only a direct route, because Oakland happens to be a hub.

> So let's [...] rewrite A380 headlines as "Airbus A380 lost because of the rise of non-superhub to non-superhub traffic". Does that materially change anything about the incorrect market assumptions that Airbus made?

In the sense of the magnitude of how bad that decision was, it matters: it made it doubly bad for airbus. Because even between superhubs, they're now running A350's, 777s, and 787s.

The A380 only made sense at superhubs because of constrained takeoff and landing slots. Those slots have a non-linear value: an airpoint at 99% capacity may charge 10x more for a takeoff or landing slot than an airport at 95% capacity. So if I'm running American Airlines between JFK and Heathrow, an A380 may make sense, but if 10% of the competing airline volume on that route switches to LaGuardia and/or Gatwick, it no longer makes sense for me to run an A380...even though my network map hasn't changed at all. So airbus even lost out even on the airlines that never changed with the times.
LOVE this feedback, thank you so much. This is extremely helpful.

I've jotted down some tasks as a result of this. And I'll say to point #4 - if I have to rebrand, it will be the second time. (And as a result, won't be too hard to swap the name out) Fun fact: was originally called git.cash, and well, Git started enforcing their trademark so that was a no-go :-)

Thanks again, I really enjoyed this write up.
I know this may sound trite, but are you forced to fly Delta for work or is there a destination that only they travel to? I avoid Delta for this reason.
About the only thing I learned in the cooking part of my class in 8th grade--which had in a prior generation been called "home ec" and "shop" but was now "life skills" and "industrial arts"--was that everything I made myself tasted better than anything that came out of the school cafeteria's kitchen.

The part about putting the fork on the left and the knife (blade facing the plate) and spoon on the right was useless filler. When they added in salad forks and dessert spoons, I really had to wonder how many rich people just got tired of screaming at their servants for putting the soup spoon where the dinner spoon should go. A practical class would have graded us on our use of chopsticks, instead of the correct placement of the asparagus-tickler for a 15-course banquet.

They never taught us about peanut-butter burritos that require no cooking, water, or refrigeration--great for when you have no utilities turned on. They never mentioned the magical amino-acid balance of beans-rice-corn or ordinary potato, for when you can't afford actual meat. They certainly didn't say anything about the locked trash containers behind the grocery store or haggling over the coupon policy. They didn't go into any detail about how the remains of one meal can be used to stretch the next. That would have been useful stuff to learn for the bottom economic quintile we were to be dumped into after high-school graduation.

My own kids don't even have it as an elective. Future food comes from a box or a vending machine. I suspect that the last master chefs will be programming DLC modules for all the auto-cook robots.
The comparison of lsd to overclocking a processor is a pretty good one. Someone I know describes the experience in a similar way: "In normal waking life, data comes into my brain in a singular stream. On lsd my brain feels like it has the ability to process more at once- more streams."

Interesting things happen with all this input. Sensations get mixed around and felt in odd ways. For instance synesthesia... You make hear colors, or see emotions.

Here's an article about LSDs effects on the brain: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/apr/11/lsd-impact-b...
> and those almost every time encoded in comments

which lanugages do that?
Nah, somebody would make a free version.
They're still available on the secondary market, and I still use mine almost every day.
This isn't the Supreme Court. They don't need to be consistent and they are going to see past the pointless trolling.
Okay, but a trade-off that forces complexity into hundreds of thousands of programs to avoid complexity in one is poorly-conceived.
Twitter Allowing Hackers to Run Malicious Ads to Verify People on Twitter
How the author of GoRails (screencasts for Rails) makes $15k / month
It did not seem that the road to adoption was as obstacle-heavy, when Silk Road was around, with its customer, I'm guessing, coming mainly from the mainstream

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)#Sales

"From February 6, 2011 to July 23, 2013 there were approximately 1,229,465 transactions completed on the site. The total revenue generated from these sales was 9,519,664 Bitcoins, and the total commissions collected by Silk Road from the sales amounted to 614,305 Bitcoins. These figures are equivalent to roughly $1.2 billion in revenue and $79.8 million in commissions, at current Bitcoin exchange rates..."

Granted, the number of buyers was at somewhat measly 146,946.

The "store of value" and "investment opportunity" spiel only started when transaction fees became too onerous for everyday usage.
Not sure how you deduced that fiber would lead to high blood sugar from my response but what I was trying to convey was that fiber "slows down" carb absorption, thereby blunting the blood sugar increase which then as a corollary blunts the insulin response.
"To me, focus is more accessible to the wealthy. "

Focus is a choice.
It depends on where the contract designates the court of arbitration/which jurisdiction disputes will be settled. So yes it can be enforced.
Here's a question: will the iPod have a retro comeback moment, as electro-mechanical media like vinyl records and even cassettes have had?

Or maybe once you cross into the digital divide, does the experience and associated nostalgia perhaps not work the same way?
Interestingly, William Gibson includes something very much like this as a plot point at the end of "Zero History."
I think infrared LEDs can solve the problem quite easily.
Yes, and the boom times of 1998-2000 inspired a bunch of young people to spend more time learning about tech, and some of them grew up to be programmers who added significant value at Google and Amazon. There are lots of these kinds of secondary effects and many of them were significant, such as your fiber example, which is a good one.

The point though, is that both Google and Amazon were able to get themselves off of the ground without taking advantage of all the stupid money that flooded the Valley in the 1998-2000 time period, quite to the contrary of the argument I quoted in the parent comment.
What the Men Didn't Say
In general or for iOS?

Right now from WiiU to Switch my impression has been that the entire platform is “kid first”. Online play is chat minimal with only some prescripted text. Friendly characters from the Mario universe with great games built around them like Mario Kart, Mario 3D World or Zelda.

With Zelda I like that my 9 year old is slowly working his way through things that are hard. He’s talking to friends at school about how to work through tougher parts or find secrets.

Probably the thing that I wish was available more than anything was an equivalent to Nintendo Power magazines. Being able to let them read, find secrets, learn about other games, etc from something where I don’t need to worry about parental controls or click to buys would be a relief.

I like giving them to opportunity to find ways through something that is hard but fun. I just don’t want to have to feel like I have to keep looking over their shoulder.
So these features were totally not useful enough to be part fo the language, but you can't even build the compiler without them.

Just like generics is totally useful enough to be used by parts of the runtime, but when it comes to including them in the lanuage they can't even think of a use case.