skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with the gold comparison.
Gold is priced far higher than it's industrial usefulness because it's seen as an value holding asset.

The properties that make gold a good value holding asset is:

1. It's rare and supply is limited (holds value in low physical volume)
2. It doesn't decay or rust
3. It's easy to split into smaller pieces or combine into a larger one.

Bitcoin is good at all three plus added benefit of easy, fast, cheap global transaction (compared to gold at least).
> You can sell your gold bar, and you can sell your private key. I see them as the same and no, I don't own Bitcoins.

If there's no support network for your bitcoins, their value is 0, exactly. Even if you assume people stop caring for shiny imputrescible metals, its intrinsic property (of being shiny and imputrescible) pretty much ensures there will always be some demand for gold, and thus it will keep a non-zero price. Possibly low, but not actually zero.
Only if you actually cash them bonds can also be effectively traded.
Use of gold for jewellery and other status symbols appears to have occurred independently from its use as currency/bullion though (several centuries prior in the case of Eurasian cultures, entirely independently in the case of the Aztecs who used it as jewellery but found the Spanish desire for bullion rather baffling)
Not necessarily, the real suicides -- not those ones claimed to be but eventually not carried out -- terminate all evolution on the very specific subjects who perform that action.
Fukushima fuel-removal quest leaves trail of dead robots
I get the temperature from my Apple Watch 90% of the time but I have been using Alexa more and more now that I have Echo/Dot's everywhere because I don't put my watch on until the end of my morning routine. I'm growing quite fond of saying "Alexa, Good Morning" and my lights coming on, it giving me the temperature, and it playing the 2-3 "news brief"'s I've picked. I'm VERY close to removing a few daily short podcasts from my podcasting app (Overcast) because I just listen to them on Alexa now.
Linus Torvalds Declares Intel Meltdown/Spectre Fix 'COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE'
Which shared a lot of roots with Chrome. It's probably that they are optimizing for things that are fast in Chrome's JavaScript engine, which isn't necessarily what's fast in Firefox's Javascript engine.
A thousand times this. "...we have both learned a lot and are richer for it, and can't wait to see how Bitcoin thrives in its new role..."

Semantic judo at its finest.
Firefox has improved dramatically since 57 and I'm using it more now, but the one reason why it's still not my main browser is that new windows open too slowly.

The extra lag can't be much more than 100 ms or so (if that), but opening new windows is the worst possible moment to be a little bit slower than other browsers (on macOS).
What structural factors, specifically, stop poor people from attaining the level of "expertise" necessary to buy disability insurance?
A bunch of dudes with spears in separate parts of the globe found some shiny rock that looked really cool. Then they probably started stabbing each other to fight for who gets to keep it. This phenomenon likely continued on for thousands of years, with gradually less spears involved.
It's nice that you have feelings, but they're likely using the clinical definition of Major Depressive Disorder, which takes the guess work out of defining who the sample group is.
United Healthcare... no surprised!
This crosses into personal attack, which is not allowed on HN. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't post like this again.
What's going on is ad revenue. Pick a touchy subject, write something(references and quality not required), and watch the impressions stack up.
Thanks for the feedback, I looked into it and it looks like neither of these problems have been fixed as of yet. I've asked the CI and UX teams if we can work on the Environments page.

Here's the issue for the table size: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/41594
P5 also has inline python, but it's nowhere near as easy as using a native library.
Why don't you just turn the damn thing up when you get home?
To begin to transfer P6 grammar/parsing features or techniques to another language you'd have to bundle NQP and one of its backends. Does that sound worthwhile?

Also, how would you handle strings in this other language?

In P6 and its grammar engine, a string is a sequence of characters, where characters are defined as the thing a human thinks of as a character.

Almost all other languages have adopted either a byte or a Unicode codepoint as being equivalent to a character, both of which are really profound problems that are still not being confronted to this day.

For example, the draft docs for Python 3.7 don't even mention characters (by which I mean what a user thinks of as characters, not bytes or codepoints).[1]

[1] https://docs.python.org/3.7/search.html?q=grapheme&check_key...
Try this: From the "Inspector" tab, click on any CSS file in order to open the Style Editor. Loading the file and then scrolling to the relevant part is much slower than Chrome if you do this on a page with several stylesheets.
It’s from 2014, before the Jeff Bezos acquisition and the current Russian collision investigation.

Regarding the Russian investigation, I agree with Glenn Greenewald that there is nothing there, and that the Democrats are in danger of becoming the HUAC of the 2020’s.

Also, in defense of Trump, I think he understands that the real danger is China, who fakes both the degrees AND the research. See this article:

- Fraud Scandals Sap China’s Dream of Becoming a Science Superpower https://nyti.ms/2kNc3Ez

I hope that adds more nuance to my post.
You can't disable telemetry in the Developer Edition for some reason, so I've gone back to Stable.
dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16202205
1726 points 652 comments
So how does Amazon coming in help a city get more affordable housing?
Yeah I see Apple more as primarily a fashion company that integrates a lot of tech into their products; not far from say Rolex, with the main differientator being that Apple keeps updating their technology stack.

For this reason, Apple will probably be one of the few western 'tech' companies who will most likely always have a foothold in places like China.
The single big thing that makes me go back and forth about whether I (deep down) like these systems is the surrender of control.

On the one hand: It is powerful at automating some the typical tedium you always have. It gives you a better chance to end up with a decent view model, by forcing it upon you.

On the other hand: You lose control. Almost always you can gain it back, but it is an uphill battle. If you know you need low level control (for example over complex animations and interactions in your UI) you've got to think carefully.

It all comes back to perspective. As an interaction engineer I really hate the process of trying to make a specific animation work the way I want inside of a React managed DOM. As an application developer, the purity of the approach is extremely attractive.

Also I must brush up on Grid. It's about time we got rid of god damn tables.
not only that ERC-20 is a standard, so apis and bots are easy to write on top of them, ever more reason why forks won't replace ICOs
They also don't want to do what the auto manufacturers did and make the host city completely dependent on them for the local economy.

Shreveport suffered quite a bit after the GM plant closure and drop in oil prices -- being so aligned to one sector was not in Shreveport's best interests.
With Bitcoin that problem may be somewhat short lived. The blockchain is forever. Once unmasked, your permanent, irrevocable, and cryptographically-verified transaction log is sitting in the open for all the world to analyze.

Doesn't matter how many years it's been since you've done business. Doesn't matter if you knew that the random dude you bought an antique thimble from was a political dissident or not. You still sent money to that btc address, that address owned by a terrorist, and now they're gonna wanna know why you were funding terrorism...
Is there a repo I can follow along at? Sounds interesting.
1) Sometimes it's actually helpful to use greek letters when a convention is used. For example: capitals for matrices (A), lowercase for column vectors (a), and Greek for scalars (α).

2) I agree with the gist of your point, but I'm guessing you're being down-voted because you come off as sort of flippant. Anyhow, I've long thought that mathematics should have hover-text to help remove the mental overhead of translating the concise notation to meaningful interpretation. Obviously, using variables names like `velocity_of_thing` is much too verbose in mathematics (papers would 1000's of pages); however, β with hover-text "This is the velocity vector of the thing." would be super helpful IMO.
The Craigslist link in the article has way more details and is more interesting to read than the article itself.

Also, people forget that the first cars were electric. Battery tech just wasn't there 100+ years ago and the combustion engine won out...

https://losangeles.craigslist.org/lac/cto/d/1912-t-electric-...
Yes! Shoot us an email: jobs [at] bolt.com
Why the I.R.S. Fears Bitcoin
I can't personally imagine using it while gh-pages is free - but I love how simple it is, good work.
I've found some stuff to be a bit slower on new FF since I made the switch when Quantum came out, but I chalk that up to heavy use of some Google webapps in which the chrome optimizations might have the opposite effect on a different JavaScript engine, and heavy use of containers, which are awesome.[1]

1: At first I didn't know how to get sites to default to a container, so kept having to close and reopen tabs to get the right contianer, but once I figured that out, it's smooth.
Ya science has this way with needing to look and seem self important. Or at least the scientists reviewing journals.
Well, if people decide to use it that way nobody can stop them. In my opinion, that would be an inefficient way of using the network, since if you pay with XLM today you need to first buy some, taking a loss on the conversion since you have to go through either eth or btc, then the payee needs to sell it (again with another intermediate currency) to get the money to pay their operating costs, and they'll likely charge a processing fee for that, and at that point you may as well be using a credit card.

On the other hand, if you use it like intended by getting USD stellar tokens from an anchor, and paying with those, the merchant can more or less accept them at face value (if they trust the anchor to give them USD for the token)
The EU is a confederation. They need to be considered as a block now. Don't look at Germany. Look at the EU.
Why is that on Amazon? If the city supports building more housing for incoming employees, then housing prices don't sky rocket and construction works make out like bandits.

I'm trying to understand why when a company like Amazon decides to create jobs in a city, suddenly they are to blame for everything wrong (homelessness, high housing prices, etc). It's absurd.
It might actually be the other way around. If you want Bitcoins in (say) six month's time, you can just go out and buy Bitcoins now, so it doesn't make much sense to have Bitcoin futures contracts except as a means of speculation on the price and that doesn't benefit from actual delivery. This isn't nearly so easy or practical if you want a certain number of live beef cattle of a certain quality in six months or a year. (Matt Levine talked about this in his Bloomberg column, as I recall.)
beat's post is correct. This is straight up incompetence and just another symptom of how bad things are in Health Care Software right now. To give more background I'll tell you that I work in a company that builds software for major state-wide US insurance companies. Our software touches hundreds of thousands of lives on a daily basis.

The problems you're seeing may not even be a part of our software even though our software will do the heavy lifting. Each Health Care customer hosts their own product, although in recent times this is changing thank god. This means they maintain their infrastructure apply patches, manage their network, do their own provisioning, etc, etc.

This also means if a manager has the bright idea to $save money$ and build their own in house customer facing claim submission portal we don't know about it. How can we open our software up to work with their shitty portal if we don't even know it exists?

It may be harsh to assume the portal is shitty and has bugs like you experienced in item 1 but it really is a safe guess. Most of these US based companies are staffed by workers in India. These workers in India have a long list of obstructions preventing them for doing their job properly:
a) 8am on the US Eastern seaboard is 6:30pm in Noida, India. So they're all basically working the night shift.

b) Lack of strong labor laws or fair compensation. High turnover in a critical IT field is bad, bad, bad. I've gotten calls from people in India who are trying to find out who their manager is in the US. I don't know bro I'm just a vendor :(.

c) A handful of non-technical, non-healthcare business folks managing a team of people on the other side of the world is a recipe for pain and failure. Here's a great example of the mysterious cause behind "Rising Medical Care Costs".

d) Lack of training and proper communication leads to horrible awful undocumented software abominations. I am borderline willing to blame my balding on these troubleshooting calls.

What I'm trying to make clear is that the failure may be between some shitty interface Insurance Co. #1234 built to save money. If that's the case it'll never really get fixed as the people managing it may not even be aware of the bug. If all goes well and the interface to our Insurance software is actually correct then "Hooray!" your customer facing bug gets to someone like me!

Now we've entered the realm of a US based software company. But our service that processes this information is 12 years old, the ONE guy who built it in the 90s is long gone, and there's no documentation. So good luck getting someone to take ownership of that. That's assuming I can even reproduce the bug. Reproducing the bug may be an odyssey wholly unto itself. It might take 3 developers and 1 QA engineer that has 20 years of seniority to figure out why logging isn't working for this 12 year old service.

So that's your dark pattern. It is more of business pattern but its a pattern that has so far caught every god damn piece of Health Care software in its net.
What are your networks?
Where do you go have discussions? I go read quality discussions on reddit and yc. I say read because it is very rare for me to use anything other than mobile, and I am biased to having discussions only when I have a keyboard at hand. There seems to be a lot of discussion that goes on in 'ephemeral' places, like comment sections. Are comment sections really the meat of a site? How about IRC? Do you use newsgroups?
Pick a topic: as an example, lets use the recent Net Neutrality repeal. Spread through the net there is a layer of comment sections in fb, g+, disqus, yc, etc that can be said to hold the people's opinion about the topic. Yet this feels so disorganized and redundant. Multiple debates, orthogonally repeating the same arguments, without really caring that the other threads exist. Is this the end of the line for discussions on the net? Is twitter a step up from that or a step down? Or does the answer lie in federated networks?
How about when you search for stuff? Are you still googling? How do you feel about feeding the spider? Did you try more private search engines? How did your search for better search end up? I tried yacy for a few weeks and it was an interesting experience. All in all, i came back to google, either because I have become needy of the way it answers my queries or the quality of the search results.
It also breaks the built-in screenshots: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1412961
Yep. Fast charging is still an unsolved problem for electric cars (15 minutes for a 85 miles is not fast enough IMHO) although some electric scooters have swappable battery packs which do fit the bill.

I do fully expect we will have these problems licked before the next turn of the century.
My favorite style is the retro looking one.
> California looks to have acheived a rather small bill.

The bill does nothing, so it's actually quite big for what it does. The CA bill currently under consideration that actually does something about neutrality rather than making a statement of intent (SB 460) is much bigger.
You don't need to. That's the beauty of spam, whether e-mail or paper.

If your client wants to target developers at Apple, you've narrowed the mailing list size from several million to just a few thousand. If 30% of those are developers, then you've already improved on the usual mass mailing targeting average, which is in the single digits.
I think you are not taking into account 'internet time' ie. 2-3 years is huge time span. No one can predict what will happen in that time.
What about people who have depression and get insomnia because of it?
Yes, gold is a very special case. Gold also has a very, very long history of being used as a global currency, which lends far more confidence in it than is probably warranted.

Bitcoin has not even 10 years of history as a currency, and most of that time the system was propped up by an inflation mechanism that will soon cease to exist (and is already mostly ineffective), and the rest has been fueled by speculative mania. Compared to gold, it is utterly unproven for the role.

There is no reason to think that Bitcoin is in any real position to replace gold in its role as a "store of value."
Do out of the box user management tools exist?
I have a database (cloudant) with account info and other things that would typically be stored in a database for an application. I can go build a custom admin portal to access the database for business users to "approve" users or add/change information - but I was hoping there would be tools that can connect to a database and provide a simple interface for CRUD actions to admin users.

Does anything like this exist in the market today?
Stop Drawing Dead Fish [video]
My 2 big things with home automation devices (and we can argue if this is really one of those) is:

1) Full voice coverage (I shouldn't have to redirect my voice or scream for it to hear me in any room).

2) Enough devices that talk to it so that it is habit-forming to use it for lights/tv/etc

I can see the HomePod doing 2 as that's more about what you have aside from the HomePod but I'm worried about #1 due to the price tag.

If I have a 3 bedroom house and a large enough Kitchen/Living Room we are talking about 5 devices. For HomePod that is $1,750. For ALL Echo's it's $500. If you were smart and did a mix of say 2 Echo's and the rest Dot's: $320 (At the $40/dot price point, I picked mine up at $30/ea). That is a HUGE price difference. The Dot's were so cheap that I stuck a few in bathrooms as well for even better coverage and it's awesome.
To be most accurate, those aren't the payment processing fees either. They are the blended rate, which include interchange, the payment processor's cut, the assessment fee, etc.

Most people don't know what a blended rate even means, though, so why bother using that terminology when I'm trying to save some smallco engineers on HN a few points on their startup's margin?

Feel free to replace my use of interchange with 'blended rate' if that helps.
The scarcity argument would be great if Bitcoin Cash didn't exist to disprove it.
Its utility is as a medium of exchange whose transactions are faster and cheaper than any other scarce asset.*

*Rewrite in past tense or read circa 2015.
It's not really a start, since the substantive bill (SB 460) was introduced before SB 822.
Right, that was my suspicion hence my uncertain language about it.

Related to that is my praise of California. It's more mockery than anything. Our state does not know how to write concise legislation. ;)
"Homelessness is not Amazon's problem."

But it is the problem of the city. They absolutely need to keep this in mind while negotiating with Amazon, who has a reputation for driving housing prices sky high, thus exacerbating the homelessness problem.

"Automation is good. Do you want us to ride horses to work?"

Automation is neutral, as it does cost people jobs, not all of whom can be retrained for something else. It also drives down wages. Hell, productivity has been skyrocketing for the past 30-40 years due to automation, yet workers have seen a pittance in rising wages.
The discussion so far reminds me a little of whenever a "Top N school rankings" report comes out. People who go (or went) to any of the top-ranked schools will use it to argue that their schools are better, and people who go to the lower-ranked schools will downplay the results, nit-pick the methodology, point out that the top N are all within a small margin of error, etc. A little tribalism?
A lot of the chatter in this post is about the underlying value of Bitcoin (and blockchain currency generally) as an asset class. I keep telling folks: yes, it absolutely does have value apart from sentiment; holding a blockchain currency gives you access to all the infrastructure built on that product -- regardless of whether that infrastructure is for exchange, or storage, or smart contracts, or whatever.

It follows that the worth of a specific blockchain currency is tied to the usefulness and -- to be brutally honest -- the coolness of the underlying technology.

This is why you should short BTC (and even ETH). Both are proof-of-work, both consume massive amounts of power, and both are increasingly useless for transacting. Eventually, the slow deprecation of Bitcoin as a means of transaction will make the underlying infrastructure (appear) worthless, and at that inflection point, it becomes worthless as an asset class as well, as it will no longer be a stable store of value.

So take all your winnings from the Bitcoin lottery and plough them into something that actually has legs.

When my 'sell' threshold hits (I currently hold ETH), I'm buying the shit out of, e.g., Cardano, and Stellar Lumens. And if the blockade by the old guard ever cracks, TenX -- connected to a payment card -- will be sex on legs. (Ok currencies can have neither sex nor legs but you get my drift.)

I am explicitly buying as an investment in the technology. Believe in functional coding and smart contracts? You could do a hell of a lot worse. Mutatis mutandis, Stellar Lumens; different virtues, but also impressive.

I can see both technologies going forward, and I believe in both of them. Can't say the same for Bitcoin anymore.

Finally, talking about infrastructure, also evaluate who the infrastructure is for, and how good it is at serving them. It probably makes sense to hold some Monero right now, as, like it or not, the traditional guarantor of value for Bitcoin is its utility in doing shady stuff. Privacycoins meet the needs of Bitcoin's original audience better than Bitcoin ever did.
This crosses into personal attack, which is not allowed on HN. Neither is flamebait, which your comments elsewhere in the thread have crossed into by being handwavey and inflammatory.
Would you please stop doing these things? As the site guidelines say: "Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

You've also posted a bunch of unsubstantive and even uncivil comments in the past, and we've warned you several times before. I don't think you're breaking the site rules on purpose, but we eventually ban accounts that repeatedly do this and don't change when we ask.

If you'd read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site more to heart when commenting here, we'd appreciate it.
ah! thank you :)