skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think companies should pay their fair share of tax, comply with stringent labour, environmental and other regulations (high minimum wage, decent holidays, humane limits on work hours per week etc.), even donating part of their profits to charity would be cool.

But you can’t expect companies to randomly create new jobs just for the sake of making jobs (because they have a bit of spare cash)... It just doesn’t make sense.
I wonder if CD Projekt heard the same arguments when they started GOG? Certainly they leveraged The Witcher and anger around DRM to gain traction. But they've found a sustainable niche that does not depend on going head to head with Steam's colossal network effect.

Steam is generally pretty great. But off the top of my head I can think of two areas where Steam arent delivering;

- Greenlight. Good idea, didnt work as planned. Room in the market for some kind of Greenlight/Kickstarter hybrid?

- Gaming for kids and educational software. A Kahn Academy approach but with games instead of lessons.
The cops would likely decline getting involved in a civil dispute. Movers claim you owe them extra charges, you claim they are scamming you, cop throws his hands up and tells you he can't force them to work; advises you to take the matter to court.

The shady movers have leverage, because you really need your stuff.
Could you give us a few examples of such businesses? Do customers really switch for marginal improvements?
Women who took on the Mafia
Hell, I wish the Google Play Store/Apple App Store did things half as well as Steam does, like:

- Backing up application data in the cloud (game saves)

- Update priorities (ASAP, before next launch, before everything else)

- Throttling bandwidth use or background updates (because I know you're streaming Youtube and your battery got low and you just want to have enough juice to finish your video, but Google Play Music/TV/Movies/Bloatware must update now, what's a little buffering for the next 20 minutes anyway?)

- Update windows (like when the phone is idle in the middle of the night, not when I'm in the middle of using it)

It doesn't seem like any of these things would be hard to build. I guess "package manager UX" doesn't look good on a product manager resume.
http://www.statesman.com/business/wells-fargo-customers-find...
This is great, appreciate having all of this in one place. Handy reference.
Serverless sort of got taken over by people trying to push PaaS subscriptions. A real serverless architecture would be something like IPFS and CRDTs
Assuming your clothes fit properly, your choice of clothing will have little effect on your chances of surviving your journey to the airport. However, clothing that might help you survive a plane crash will likely have the same benefit in a car crash.
> If that is why out failed, then wouldn't wasm fail for the same reason?

Web Assembly targets C and C++ as source languages, unlike the JVM.

> Why not just compile js et al to java bytecode?

Because JS and Java semantics are different, and emulating JS semantics on top of the JVM is slow.

> Sure hotspot itself couldn't be used straight up, but the changes are certainly much less than creating a whole new vm.

The Web Assembly VM shares as much code as possible with the engine's JS VM. This is obviously better than using HotSpot, as the relevant code is already shipping in browsers.

Nobody is going around rewriting code for no reason.
> but that TDD very obviously yields significant benefits for developers who aren't you

Isn't this a case of begging the question? It's "very obvious"? It's not so obvious to me. You claim it is "demonstrable," but demonstrate nothing.

I think the idea that writing tests is a substitute for design or documentation is a bad idea that can easily lead someone astray.
What about Herbie? Just because the Love Bug doesn't have blinky lights or smooth Pixar animation doesn't mean he's obsolete!

...We might want to think twice about admitting Christine though.
Would it work to argue that increasing taxes also is an incentive for layoffs? Higher taxes, means lower profit margins, means some product lines become unsustainable so departments are closed and people are laid off.

So lower taxes means people are laid off, higher taxes means they are laid off. What tax structure would give them an incentive _not_ to lay people off?

They are basically closing off 60 Sam's Clubs. When is the last time you went to Sam's Club? Do you know anyone who goes there regularly? I don't. I had membership many years ago. Many will be converted to e-distribution centers. Guessing this has little to do with taxes and more to do with new year reorg to compete with Amazon. Otherwise, what would you do? What kind of incentives would you give to Walmart to save those Sam's Club workers?
I'm not sure what that means. Every way that I can think of to compare movie ownership and car ownership suggests that I should be able to transfer a movie from one service to another.
Dupe:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16172492
Have you seen the GSMem paper? They demonstrate pretty much exactly what you've proposed: https://www.usenix.org/node/190937
Article's author here.

GOG.com got started in 2008, which was critical to their success. Steam had much lower market share back then. If GOG started today I would give them much, much, lower odds of succeeding.

And consider also that Desura, Direct2Drive, Impulse, etc, which also were around in that rough time period, are all dead and gone.
Yup, the Pennsylvanian is actually pretty nice. The route is the old Penn Railroad mainline and zigzags through some really scenic parts of the Appalachians!

The only downside is that it's on a once-per-day schedule (Pgh->NYC at 7:30am and NYC->Pgh at 10:50am). It's 8-9 hr downtown-to-downtown (vs. ~5-6 when flying) so you'd really want to do Fri/Mon for a weekend. FWIW, there are three or four Megabuses per day too, including an overnight bus in each direction, for when the train schedule doesn't work.

Also, flying to NYC from Pgh is oddly expensive, like $400 roundtrip expensive. Amtrak is about $150 RT if far enough in advance.

Anyway, welcome to Pittsburgh! I hope you're surviving the snow...
“And in other news, the ops team is deferring Debian 8 upgrades until Q3”
I'd rather throw it away than deal with the flakes on Craigslist. It rains here so leaving it on the curb will only ensure it loses whatever residual value it might have held.
Good question, I guess I should have made that more clear.

Terence Tao has a nice lecture published... trying to find it, brb.

In any case, the gist of it was: long as we treat the numbers in the sum as integers (ie discrete), we will get ill-defined sums, contradictions, infinities, and so on.

Once we switch to real numbers (and there is an underlying function that is differentiable), things "can" be made to work and converge. To -1/12 always.

So that's it. In particular, if we decided that our smallest unit of measure is... the size of atom, or whatever finite value, many of these techniques will just fail to work, and they won't match what we measured.
Which means something is wrong. Maybe things really are continuous. Or maybe they are not, it is just that our math is not sophisticated enough.

Obviously this is an open question.
I imagine her case was one of the less worrying things to make it to court that day, a genuine oversight by a woman who is doing great things for business, why 'throw the book' at her? Particularly if she is okay with getting all the paperwork signed.

Had she stole people's possessions in some scam seven times over with there being no evidence or some other reason why the theft could not be proven then I am sure the book would have been thoroughly thrown at her with the maximum penalties possible for not having the paperwork for moving across state lines.
I wonder if you could write a wrapper over Steam (and other services) that allows the same benefits of them, but lets you have your own store too. You'd have a launcher that could launch any game on your computer, whether it's on Steam or GOG or Itch or your own service, and a global storefront that merges them all (and prioritizes yours). Would that even be legal?
What happens if you get 1M requests. How many dB connections is this?
Two other super convenient things about Shinkansen:

- You always know how much the ticket will cost, no matter if you buy it the same day.

- If you had a reserved seat but you missed your train, just take the next one and go to the free seat area. Also, if you didn't have reserved seat and the free seat area is full, wait 15 minutes and take the next train.

(And yes, you can fly Tokyo - Osaka for cheaper than a Shinkansen ride, but the convenience of the Shinkansen is really higher than any flight.)
It’s not really that high speed if you factor in parking, tsa, terminal quirks and delays, and working with checked baggage.

Personally I’d much rather take a form of transit where I can bring a water bottle and avoid being groped by security for literally no rational reason at all.
good news, elixir is a such a joy to use.
Are you familiar with the term “abstraction”?
Data Buffering’s Role Grows
> I don't see how a dropping price has any bearing on a 51% attack.

Sure it does. Lower miner income = lower security.
I was just thinking of switching all my accounts from Chase to Wells Fargo because Chase isn't located in my new town.

This is a good reminder as to why I should choose a different bank. Thanks for posting.
Brave new I/O
Wow, sounds easy--almost as if it should be that way out of the box...
> Tickets are $45 for SFO-LAX each way in February right now (less than the expected cost of the train ticket). Other pairs (OAK-BUR, SJC-BUR) are similar ($49-$57 each way).

And how do I magically get from the airport to the city and city to the airport? Is it free? Is it instant?
Yup. It used to be called CGI ... In the '90s.
> But for rich and poor alike, a layoff is definitely life-changing....

Agree there, no doubt, most people would rather have a job than a $1000 bonus. But what does that mean in this context? Should Walmart keep those 60 Sam's Club stores open at a loss to avoid laying people off? Should the government subsidize them? Maybe it should break apart Amazon because a lot of those location will become e-distribution centers.

What would you have done. How would you have saved those Sam's Clubs workers? I am curious, not being sarcastic or tricky? I'd suggest breaking Amazon into regional companies like they did with AT&T. Or maybe breaking AWS away from Amazon-retail business.
Right. They'd be under DOT rules about commercial trucking which are stringent and micro-managerial enough that I don't see the need for separate licensing.
Network effects are the entire value of the Internet. This will not work; nobody will buy in, and the economic cost of forcing everyone to use it will be too great.
You should see how we came up with our language...
They will still be taxed on foreign profits. It's the global minimum tax of 11%. So if they are based in Ireland they'd pay 2% in Ireland and 9% to America. If in China, they'll pay 15% in China and 0% in America.

Regardless of this, stopping the flow of capital and investment into the country with a 35% tax is extremely dumb. Everyone will say effective is far less, but it's far less because of foreign profits and IP stashed in Ireland and effective may be 20% for tech, but marginal to bring back in the states is still 35%
Worth noting that Portier is sponsored in part by Mozilla. IIRC some of the people originally responsible for Persona are also involved with Portier.
Tolkien's ring trilogy,
Eddison's Mistress of Mistress's, and
Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls
> I will forgive them if there will be a way to adapt or design your own gizmos and make them work without being an approved developer

We are really really close to homebrew on switch (which will let you do this).

Get a console 3.0.2 or lower, which currently have the full stack (TrustZone, Kernel, Userland, all of it) pwned. Libraries exist to interface with joycon input as well. We're just waiting on public tooling.

It's probably not what you're asking for (Mario Maker Style) - but it's doable.
Because the cost and level-of-effort difference between those two options isn't comparable. Firing a function in a way that keeps it awake but uses no perceptible resources is simple and basically free.
Except the way the movie/music folks look at it is probably the same way they look at VHS, DVD, Blu-ray and BR 4K and so forth or vinyl, 8-track, cassette, CD, etc... Apple, Amazon and Google are yet another "format" as it were. More platforms means more money for them.

It's not about the customer--none of them cares, except at that moment in time the customer forks over the cash for it.
...which can be electronicaly moved without giving away control of your funds to a company/government who can easily seize, devalue, or prevent you from accessing your funds.

That's the important issue that bitcoin solves. Do you understand what being decentralized & permissionless mean? And the power shift it implies on a social level?
Tech billionaire on new opportunities – and threats – for startups in India
Do you think that there are actual daemons in your computer? If you have to kill a process, do you only do so in self-defense?
Best Home Gym Equipment for Weight Loss 2018 » the Fitness Mojo
Why Wells Fargo specifically?
> You're paying for the software, not the cardboard.

Indeed. $60 is a standard Nintendo game price. As far as people buying Switch games are concerned, it's free cardboard.
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/piracy-it-s-a-crime
This is not some new problem. Airbus sells Planes in the US and Boeing in Europe. Both sides spy on each other. If Boeing finds out the Germans have their engine designs they sue and play their own dirty games. Whether it's Apple vs Samsung or Intel vs AMD or Ford vs Toyota this game has been played since the beginning of time day in day out. Only the fittest survive.
Economist here.

No matter how fancy your pattern detection algorithm is, it can't find information that isn't there. If the patterns it's trying to detect are generated by strategic agents (traders) who learn, the algorithm's predictions aren't likely to be reliable for very long.
I did a bunch of trips recently. Flying is usually faster and cheaper, but more likely to go awry. Taxis to airports can vary widely in speed and cost. Flights can be delayed, security lines, etc.

Train is easy, consistent and comfortable. Always power, Wi-Fi and cell signal too.
My current work project is trying to switch to a primary serverless architecture. I'm trying to fight it but know I'm going to lose.

I don't have any problem with "serverless". Years ago I wrote a nginx handler that routed to .py files and ran them inside an lxc container, while at a hosting company. Fronted via haproxy, and documented with sphinx automatically.

My problem is the hidden costs. Sure lambda requests are low cost. But what about API gateway, dynamo/rds access. Then I'm writing a basic crud app. Low-performance low request rate, noncritical. There is this additional complexity, that just isn't necessary. Every day at my job I'm thinking to myself it doesn't need to be this difficult.

My usual route is django, django admin, and django rest. With an haproxy in front for load balancing. Dead simple and easy to work with. It's passe sure, but KISS. The alternative here is an api and a frontend. Several more projects to maintain. Tuning the projects to meet lambda size requirements/standards. The return on investment is minimal to me. If you can't automate managing a fleet of containers or vps instances then why're you here?

The vendor lock-in, is insane to me. You're pretty much at the beck and whim of the provider. They raise the prices, what're you going to do. You either go with the price increase or do a rewrite.

As I was sitting in these architecture meetings on moving too lambda. I was hearing several new packages/repos. New CI/CD, and configuration to maintain. During the meeting I scratched out a POC using EC2, Load Balancer, RDS and django to do what they were saying with half the code. But nope gotta be lambda.
I wish people are upfront about conflict of interest while writing articles like this. The author is the CEO of spotinst, which is listed in the last table as 2x-10x cheaper than any of the other FaaS options. The article is basically marketing copy devoid of technical details.
I used to work in payments. This happens sometimes, it's a bug it's not something nefarious, and it's really disruptive.

Many, many people will be put in a negative balance. Wells Fargo is probably one of those banks that don't order bill payments chronologically, but probably by amount, so things could get very very messy. There will be a lot of NSF charges that will need to be reversed, or Line of Credit charges for those accounts that have automatic line of credit to avoid NSF charges. But missed payments because of NSF will also be a problem as well, unless Wells Fargo foots the entire extra amount so that customers don't get massively fucked up.
Just to reiterate,

Once it gets inserted in their database you can use it and transfer it electronically.

And they have your cash in hand.

But they have already paid the cash in Advance or have credit with other banks so the cash has been exchanged even before you add it.

Once you deposit the money they assign that amount to your account number.

So no, they don't have two copies of the same money, All the money as been paid upfront or is given to them on credit.

Well this is my understanding, I could be wrong.
There’s a fundamental difference in how GOG got started though, and it’s buried in their acronym, which used to stand for “Good Old Games”. They were focused on providing access to classic/retro PC and DOS games, something that Steam didn’t do and much more in the “blue ocean” territory. It’s only later that they started to accept modern games on the service.
I wasn’t super familiar with the pricing, this makes sense.
Ask HN: What is the fair value of 1 Bitcoin and why?
> Rather than offer what amounts to nothing more than an ad hominem

Is this ad hominem? Why?

We can both agree to this and agree that Go's compile speed makes very large code bases possible (and that its cross-compile story is very compelling when your entire world revolves around writing on OSX machines and running in a linux docker container.

Lots of languages can deliver big static binaries. Hell, once upon a time this was considered a disadvantage and languages like Common Lisp and Smalltalk were totally raked over the coals for having an image & executable model!

> but you’d be hard pressed to justify a major advantage and add a lot of complexity overhead for the privilege of using them.

Why then is Go given this?

Because I could name 3 languages equally deserving right off the bat and one of them would be way less work: Kotlin, Swift and Haskell.
Discord could do it. Discord SHOULD do it.

There needs to be a serious competitor to Steam, something with significant enough market share that Steam gets scared. Steam could be so much better than it is -- I'm not saying that it's a bad product, just that it could be better.

Discord seems perfectly positioned to take on Steam. They already have incredible adoption in the gaming community. And they have quite a bit of experience at this rate too. (Maybe I should go work for them and push this line from within...)
Jean Piaget and the Child’s Spontaneous Geometry
Thank you. I was wondering if someone was going to mention this.
You can have a warpwallet or a seed memorized. No digital trace. No physical device to seize. Plausible deniability.
Wonder if we'll see password managers starting to support this, in some kind of agreed-upon standard.
To be fair, the original paper does mention the problem of whitespaces (see Appendix B on page 21). It seems that the recommended solution is to use this fast space remover: https://github.com/lemire/despacer
Everybody knows, African Americans tip the worst, Native Americans tip the best-- and tips are based on cup size.

The world is not fair.
Caltrain is currently in a project to convert to electric, as others have noted.

It's not particularly feasible in the US to convert freight-dominated lines to electric. Modern freight generally uses the double-stacked container as its loading gauge, and electric catenaries would sit several feet below the top of the double-stack container--the standard height for a bilevel in the US is 14.5 ft, but the double-stacked container runs to 20 ft.
Coincidentally just came across this interesting list of noir produced by blacklisted US writers: https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/17/force-of-evil-abraha...
If you read the article, they're not the same thing. Solfege is a way of teaching the notes in a major scale, while Solresol is an entire language built on top of that.
Another Pittsburgher here endorsing the Pennsylvanian! From PGH to NYP, it runs from 7:30 AM to 4:50 PM, which is a workday plus lunch and a nap. Really nice. It's longer than it should be; you take those turnpike tunnels for granted until you're in a train and you have to navigate the mountains.

If you want to spice it up, check out Southern Airways Express[0]. You can fly between Pittsburgh and Lancaster for as little as $30 on a tiny little 8-to-10-seat plane, which is a really unique and scenic experience. Catch a ride to the Lancaster Amtrak where there are a lot more options for getting to NYC.

I've done Megabus and Greyhound on return trips. You get what you pay for. But if you happen to live in the North Hills, the bus depot for Megabus is in Ohio Township and if you ask nicely they'll let you ride up there.

[0]: https://iflysouthern.com/
Traditionally, a web application creates a group of always-on reusable connections (a pool) to a database server since setting up the connection takes time and each connection uses up resources on the database server that could otherwise be used for computation. If there are more connections to your API that require the database than there are connections in the pool, those requests are queued and handled when the next connection is freed. These connections are then closed when the app shuts down.

The problem on Lambda is that you can’t persist any application state beyond the function call itself, so you can’t take advantage of connection pooling the way you normally would in a self-contained webapp. Without some kind of middleman, each database call will require you to open a new connection to the database and close it when the function ends. This becomes catastrophic for the database server as the number of requests scales up.
Elvish 0.11 released
Beyond Bitcoin
There are different definitions of "summation". Also different definitions of "integration".

I can see how overlapping notation can be confusing for laymen (me included).

But that does not mean that people that came up with those are crackpots, just because they reused the "=" symbol.
One striking feature is the depth of trust in these organisations. Many of them function without written records for all or most matters of importance.
How likely do you think it would be for Valve to buy Discord?
The demand between SF and LA is simply not big enough either. Luckily there are 27 planned stations on the line allowing for 351 possible origin/destination pairs, which added up accounts for way more demand than SF-LA.
I haven't thought of the courts. It might be interesting to see what would happen. Fighting with a hundred billion dollar company in court is tough though. The have infinite legal resources basically.

And yeah, I see the point about it being considered a person but that is mostly what is called "legal fiction" (it is actually a technical term, not just me being silly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_fiction). And that only goes so far. Mostly to benefit the corporate entity not the society. I'd like to put some companies in prison for life for destroying the environment or poisoning its workers but it just won't work. It would be nice to see how far it would go though.