skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The user agent string definitely has a place on the web, the problem is that it's been used and abused by web developers in the 90s and 2000s when trying to deal with the utter mess that was "browser compatibility" back then.

I run whatismybrowser.com and it's a perfect case of why user agents are useful information. It'll tell you what browser you've got, what OS, and whether you're up to date or not. It's extremely useful to know this info when helping non-tech users - you would not believe how many people still reply "I just click the internet" when you ask them what browser they're using. My site helps answer all those complicated "first" questions.

I completely agree that using User Agents for feature detection/brower compatibilty is a terrible idea, but apparently enough websites still do it to warrant having to keep all that useless, contraditory mumbo jumbo in it too - it isn't what they should be used for any more!

And also, I don't think there's any problem with including "too much" information in the user agent either - point in case: Firefox used to include the full version number of Firefox in the user agent, but now it only shows the major version number, not the exact revision etc. The problem is I can no longer perfectly warn users if they're actually up to date or not.

The reasoning for this is given as a security concern, which I still don't understand - if there's a security problem in a particular point-revision version of Firefox which can be exploited by a malicious web server - odds are they're just going to try that exploit for any version of firefox and it either will or won't work - how does the malicious site knowing the exact version make the situation any worse?!
whenever I need to explain swing, I refer people to some Texas shuffle playing from SRV. Not jazz per se, but most of his blues rhythmic playing accentuates swinging quite a lot.
Abstractly, I do not see how, economically, devolving trust can reduce cost. You pay for trust either to a third party as now or you pay it to the network verifiers. Somewhere there is a cost.

Now, keeping all records digitally and openly accessible, and having automated processes to replace human processes, that can certainly reduce cost, but it's a business process change and orthogonal to the blockchain.
I feel that many of the uber/lyft drivers are in this position. They squeeze some money out of the asset that they have, but in the long run I don't see how they come out ahead.
Microsoft has hidden the drill behind the launch button.

Facebook has a dozen of fake drill buttons, and one real drill button, but you can't tell which is which.

Apple has a launch button but it doesn't work because the missiles are of a different brand.

Google's drill button turns out to be an ad.
Hey everyone! I'm the OP and primary author of Twirp. I'm happy to answer any questions and hear feedback.

You can also reach me directly, if you like, email is in my profile.
Also I can't help but continue to notice the reliability complaints people have about new MBP keyboards. I love my Macbook Air keyboard.

I'm still doing fine with my 2012 MBA. The battery was shot, so I replaced it. I'd love to see Apple continue making them...
I know this varies greatly based on location but it would be good if you could include a section on legal challenges given that there are many municipalities actively trying to discourage any sort of competition.

Secondly, looking at common.net, how did you arrive at 75Mbps as the offering speed?
I agree with you that the Titanic is a wonderful, marvelous vessel. I'm just asking, "Hey, is that an iceberg?"
Be careful with your quotes (depending on which pseudo-language this is.)
I don't think you copy down the license plates of cars in the driveway just because. In my opinion, she knew exactly what she was doing and what this information could mean to other people. I think this is straight up blackmail.
If mining is too difficult,the difficulty drops, until a single PC is finding every block on schedule. I'll mine, so that won't happen.
Quantum Computing since Democritus, by Scott Aaronson

and

The City and The City, by China Mieville
This is so true. I remember that I had to pause video playback after about 30 minutes or you would experience jitter. The next generation did not suffer from this problem, but I'm still kinda disappointed in Apple for selling such a bad product. A $1000+ laptop that cannot play 30 minutes of HD video is just sad, even in 2009.
If you're going to worry about that, wouldn't you be more concerned about the operator being fully blind? And simply justify not hiring the vision impaired for this particular position?

"safety-critical systems with a large user base"

Surely a missile warning system would be operated by a very, very small number of people, on the order of twenty or thirty?
This hasn't been authenticated as being real. All we know is that there is an AP image and there is a post it note saying something on the monitor. We don't even know if the enhancement or anything else about it is real.
Have you tried https://www.postbox-inc.com/ ? It's a commercial version of thunderbird from an older thunderbird core dev and it comes with multiple lines. And other niceties. $40 with volume discounts.
In a Nutshell the Israel-Palestine conflict
Easy come.
Sheryl Sandberg and Jack Dorsey Are Leaving Walt Disney’s Board
A is 65 in ASCII. http://www.asciitable.com
Definitely. I tried to find the report to see if they have appended the questionnaire, but it returns a 404: https://take.lyft.com/economic-impact/Lyft-Drives-Economy.pd...
I don't know if I'm rich (actually decidedly not), but I freelance and save a large proportion of my income, and when I'm not working on client projects I just work on my own, which can be for weeks at a time. My day pretty much looks the same whether I'm working for a client or myself, but with way less emails/Slack/whatever taking me out of flow.

It's a very enjoyable way to pass the time.
My wife and I share my Jeep but I tried really hard to be carless in Austin, TX. I even experimented with a variety of Segways (at the expense of many jokes) and alternatives to a bike for the longer-hauls so that I'm not drenched in sweat when I get to the office. [1]

I was totally fine when we lived downtown as it's becoming very walkable, but it's pretty impractical when you live even a short distance from the core. There are people that do it, we have decent running and bike trails, but it's just not suitable for us. My wife and I are on different time schedules which makes commuting together hard, and Austin lacks great public transportation combined with terrible traffic which drives up the Uber/Lyft cost per ride.

We decided to buy a 2nd car again but this time a used EV (BMW i3) so that our total cost of ownership is really low. Based on my napkin math and the deal we got on the car, I suspect we'll break-even or better compared with using a ride sharing service.

[1] Texas weather is also a thing...
Musician Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty [video]
I appreciate your nitpick! It's been a little while since I used SQLAlchemy, and I did run into surprises with these overloaded operators.
Mux is hiring a Developer Evangelist to help developers build better video
Even in the PDP era I am not so sure, given the architectures and OSes being developed outside AT&T, some of them in production.
It looks like web extensions are coming https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/Add-ons_Guide_57
Seems pretty straightforward. If it becomes an actual problem, they start calling it out and make it a requirement, even if it's negotiable.

ADDED: The reality is that there are lots of implicit assumptions in a professional job. Unless it's a job that involves significant/regular travel, they probably won't ask you if you're willing to step on a plane. They probably won't ask you if you're OK with attending meetings before 10am. Etc. If you have out-of-mainstream requirements it's probably mostly on you to raise them.
Zipcar usually has both and hourly and day rate. The day rate is typically something like $85 and the process of picking up the car is typically much easier than a traditional rental.
New C-BRIC Center Will Tackle Brain-Inspired Computing
there are road conditions you cannot drive in without snow chains, and rental companies don't allow you to attach chains. these road conditions are not uncommon if you're going skiing.

effectively there are moderately common road/condition combinations that you cannot drive in a rental car.
Thanks for posting! Does Twirp use a single HTTP request per call, or does it use a persistent connection similar to the net/rpc package? If the latter, does it provide options for heartbeat, reconnect and retry?

EDIT: the blog post covers this in the protocol section. Every request is a POST :)
Looks like the website got a HN hug of death and isn't really loading for me whatsoever.
I personally choose not to live in a freezing place, and most people can do that. Even without crossing a border intra-EU/CN/US/AU moves achieve this goal.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... and order by 'emission per capita'.
You've been making a habit of breaking the HN guidelines. We ban accounts that do that, so would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site to heart? That means thoughtful discussion, not rants.
22 state AGs, Mozilla, neutrality supporters asked court to reject FCC’s repeal
> The originals were, IMO, something for upper management to show off with.

Even at that time I never could understand how the MBA could be used for showing off with. To me (lack of speed, lack of ports etc.) it was rather a device that shows to everyone that the user does not care about good technology or usability and has a desire to throw money down the drain. In other worse: A device that you use when you seriously want to be ridiculed.
The role of technology in society is a perpetual balancing act negotiated by the actions of the people. Perhaps it isn't so much "navel gazing through the past" as recognizing that the balance has, for some, shifted too far in the direction of sacrifice.

Luckily, there are other societies that have managed to achieve most of the benefits of cars with fewer of the costs. We can learn from them as we try to find a balance that is acceptable to a broader population.
That long term stability may be impossible with a central bank.
I hope they get some extra coin for keeping the place clean enough to not need janitorial services in the secure room.
Detroit reality punctures CES dreams – Axios
Animal spirits

Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations, whether moral or hedonistic or economic.

Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits—a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_spirits_(Keynes)
It is on drivers tests, though, so that helps. The general idea (there are kids playing and people walking) seems to get across.

Incidentally it drove me crazy when I saw big red X's in circles upon moving to a place with European signage. It always felt wrong to proceed, when in fact the sign means don't stop. https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/50403/what-does-t...
> In Amsterdam, people cycle in -10°C when there's 10cm of snow on the ground

I assume that the parent post meant 0°F which is around -18°C.
Ask HN: Anyone having issues with Linkedin share count?
I've created a slack channel for discussing crypto besides "it will go to zero".

https://join.slack.com/t/hncrypto/shared_invite/enQtMjk5MDg2...

Certain merits are undeniable.
DNA from an escaped slave who ended up in Iceland ID’d in his descendants
Sure. It's an overvalued, speculative commodity in a bubble. Ostensibly a currency, but without any of the useful features of a currency (effectively unusable for common transactions due to high fees, slow transaction confirmation rates, and highly unstable value). As a currency, assuming that its value stabilized, it suffers from being deflationary which will impede its ability to survive as either a global currency or a multi-generational currency.

Its current status is essentially a speculative commodity. But in that regard it has no utility. Most commodities are, well, something tangible or valued based on something else in the world. Bitcoin as a commodity has nothing backing it up other than its distributed ledger and the massive amount of computational power behind that. But the distributed ledger will see a drop in miners as the value of BTC drops, or an increase in fees to make it even less tenable as a currency than it already is. If BTC were a useful currency, then BTC the commodity would at least have that as a backing. In theory the commodity price and currency price would move towards each other (with one leading or lagging behind the other). But BTC the commodity has made BTC the currency essentially impossible to use due to the present overvaluation.

Regarding deflation and its inability to survive more than one or two generations, assuming some stability, if it maintains a modest 2% deflation rate the real value of a nominal amount of BTC would double every 32 years. So someone receiving 1 BTC as salary today would receive 0.5 BTC for the same work in approximately 32 years. Halved again 32 years later, the 3rd or 4th generation would receive 1/4 the salary of the first generation (in nominal terms) and have a fraction of the buying power.

I suppose a novel aspect of this is that it virtually eliminates the need for pensions as the mere presence of money in your wallet means you'll have more buying power in the future than now. Unfortunately this only makes financial inequality even worse than the situation we have today. Lending would be eliminated, or the terms would be so dreadful only the most desperate would seek it. Savings would go up, but in the "under the mattress" sense rather than the "in the bank" sense, where the money can at least continue to have some utility by being lended out to others by the bank. A massive economic drag.

None of this is novel stuff, from an economics standpoint.
There's no need to imagine. The quantity and orbits of spy satellites are public knowledge since there's no way to hide anything in space. The exact capabilities of each satellite are classified but but we can guess how good their sensors are just based on physics. Currently it costs so much to build and launch a spy satellite that we can't afford to put a bunch of them strung out in a single orbit, but maybe that will become practical eventually as launch costs decline.
I know you're no partial to this line of reasoning, but please humor me...

Could we achieve the same end by creating a big Git repository under control of the SEC? Anyone can make a clone, SEC will approve pull requests as needed. Or would you argue that this effectively becomes a blockchain as soon as we use start using hashes?

I think it's useful to have a paper-trail of hashed blocks/files, gives you a simple mental model to reason about immutability. I just don't quite understand the need for the decentralized commit protocol. For any legitimate (legal) purpose one could rely on a large central entity yielding much higher speed and lower expense/complexity.
>Tone isn't that important in jazz. Hence, the importance of the saxophone, an instrument rightly reviled in classical music for mostly sounding awful.

Jazz doesn't have a fixed ideal of timbre. The saxophone has immense timbral versatility and expressiveness, which is integral to it's role in jazz. The saxophone emphasises every nuance of breathing and embouchure. The smoother, sweeter-sounding clarinet disappeared from jazz with the dawn of bebop. The clarinet will still do those silky legato runs, it's only marginally more difficult to finger, but it just doesn't speak with the same expressiveness. A similar argument could be made about the use of brass mutes, especially plungers - they don't make a particularly pretty sound, but they're tremendously expressive.

The obvious example here would be Albert Ayler, whose playing is either exquisitely expressive or grotesquely ugly depending on your perspective. Compare his tone with Ben Webster or Johnny Hodges and you'll see my point.

Mildly cantankerous sidebar: if classical musicians really cared about quality of tone, they would have adopted the cornet a century ago. British brass bands rightly revile the trumpet as the vulgar, shrill cousin of the cornet.
You're still paying >$5k? for something you apparently barely use at $25 gas per month. That is a lot of dollars to soothe anxiety.
Unlikely? It's hosted on medium - I'm pretty sure they can handle the load. However here is the cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6vYOM9...
The last time South Korea hinted at banning it the price only fell to $13k . No one knows what is going to happen or when.

Just happy I sold some around $18-19k
I wonder if governments would take even more drastic measures if currency weakness was driving people into crypto. The US made owning gold illegal in the past.
May be the word I’d “hoisting”
Right, but there is also a lot of evidence (or at least it looked like there would be when I was in the field 5+ years ago), that it isn't that simple, and there is also considerable ipsilateral motor control in the cortex as well. This would make sense for activities that require coordination between both hands, so that, in the motor cortex, we wouldn't have the case where "the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing." So, if there is MORE coordination required than in a typical cortex, maybe non-coordinated tasks become clumsier? I have no idea. Maybe musical people tend to spend less time doing non-musical athletic things, and aren't as graceful? Maybe both, or something else? Sounds like a cool imaging project for a neuroscience or BME grad student.
The last time China explicitly banned Bitcoin, it dropped by around 45% to around $6000. It went on to $20K from there.

But what's different this time is that there are first time investors in millions who joined in the last 2 months. They didn't read the white paper, they didn't invest in technology, they invested for the monster returns. So I think there will be a more sell off this time before it rebounds back to $13K+ or may be the 1000th time is the charm and the bubble actually gets burst.
Must just be your network. I would be surprised if HN traffic could bring down Medium
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the HN guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The backlash was enormous tho.
You will spend longer waiting on uber/lyft to show up than you will fueling once a week and getting an oil change every 3k miles. A full set of tires takes under (1)30 minutes.

Arkansas does not run any emissions checks outside of 2 counties. However when I lived in texas they did. The cost was state limited to $5/year. Falls under the category of maintenance.

As for accidents I have 2 on record. one at fault and one not. I am not running the cheapest insurance but I am insuring a 90s/2000s car. It is much less than full coverage on a newer one. If I had a new car that I could not afford to eat the replacement costs I would definitely run full coverage but as it sits it is better not to.

I do not drink or smoke. Driving sleepy something I rarely do although it happens sometimes. However if I nod at all Ill pull over and park it. Not worth the risk. As for drinking uber and lyft is by far better. I was never trying to argue against them when needed. But for an only vehicle it seems to be higher costs.

I do treat my cars as disposable. When a transmission goes out and I can get a better car all around for less than a transmission rebuild would cost I don't waste the money fixing what I already have. I usually get a new (to me) car ever 2-4 years. I put yearly in my calculations because buying a nicer $3000 car every 3 years averages out to the same cost.

If anything I over estimated the cost out here although I do admit that the big cost other keep mentioning is parking and nobody around here charges for parking outside of meters downtown. and those are 10c/12 minutes. But if you live were those are an issue the cost would be more.

(1)A bit off topic but it can vary widely. I have taken a single tire to walmart for work several times. Took up to 3 hours to get done and never under 1 hour. However we have had a Discount Tire (The actual name. The service is not discount) open up here recently and I have had 2 vehicles in and out. car one was 2 tires in 15 minutes and 3 (spare) in 20 minutes. Car two was a set of 4 in 22 minutes. At this point I would recommend my local one to just about anybody. It greatly suprised me how good the service could be.
> As a practical matter the Echo and other similar devices are difficult to turn into full-time listen-and-record devices unnoticed.

Why would it be harder to pwn than anything else?
Bitcoin can change it's divisibility any time.
The fact that you can bend javascript to make it do this is not particularly remarkable.

The fact that there are 5 or 6 completely different ways to accomplish this is boggling!
Good advice, thanks. I have struggled throughout with knowing when to be more specific and when to be more general, although I do try to pepper in a lot of 'if you don't know what to do, do this' type advice.

I've been trying to build the community around this matrix chatroom: https://riot.im/app/#/room/#startyourownisp:matrix.org I'm not really a developer by trade so Github isn't really a go-to solution for me, good thought though!
Honestly, I don't think it's due to a fear of a regulatory crackdown. I think this plunge is a long time coming, when people put down the memes and irrational exuberance and take an honest look at the valuations of these coins and ask themselves why. The reason we're seeing 25% plunges is because of the lack of people buying at this point. A speculative bubble such as Cryptocurrency follows the same patterns as any other bubble - a spectacular rise equaled only by its (inevitable) spectacular fall.
The crypto market keeps going further down because every day there’s hundreds of articles of "news" reports going with some some doomsday promoting theme. Just today some scientific report claiming bots were responsible for bitcoin's rise from $150-$1000, and now the media is taking advantage of everyone’s fear of a rising China by claiming the PRC will start freezing bank accounts, etc.

Everyone is being played. If you’ve been paying attention to the news for the past two years know how easy it is to put out fake news articles. You know that fake news has been used to alter perceptions and maybe mess with elections. This is no different. Dropping false news reports to mess with market prices to cause market swings for profit is straight out of the textbook.

There is quite a lot money at play, and you'd be naive to think that all the random articles popping up on HN today are intended to do anything other than instill further panic and sell-offs. Do yourself and everyone a favor, start spreading awareness of the fake news about crypto! I kinda like this community and I would hate HN to lose to what is an egregious and coordinated effort to induce panic and destroy the crypto market.
Congressman wants answers about chip security flaws – Axios
Thanks for posting! How did you work around issues with GRPC on AWS/ELB?
HN probably isn't a good place to ask for advice on ICOs. We'll just tell you that you're a scammer and you should die.
Bitcoin can fork to change it's Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm.