skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, you object to people asking for citations because citations suck? The problem then comes back to how to know which to trust, which usually requires a reasonable degree of proficiency in and knowledge of the subject.

My point was partially that if I encounter you in another environment, I can quickly and easily assess whether you have the required proficiency, even if I don't possess it. It's much harder to do that online, at least at the moment.

I can't always do my own research, as I don't have the time to build a framework of knowledge that would allow me to do it efficiently, much less brute force it. All I can do is ask people I know who are very well educated in a field or read an abstract.
Very happy to see the improvements. Personally I stopped feeling comfortable on using search engines across the Atlantic since about a decade.

In case you'd be living around Europe, http://qwant.com is picking up the pace here as a search engine focused on privacy-aware users.

As an engineer, the service is answering quite well to my queries related to software.
Last I checked Bitcoin still works fine for transactions.
The economics speak in this is just wrong:

A cashier is a marginal cost... for a convenience
store to sell one more item requires some amount of
time on the part of a cashier, and that time costs
the convenience store operator money.

Since the cashier is paid regardless of whether the item is sold they are not a marginal cost in this context. If anything other than a publicity stunt Amazon Go is instead an effort to increase employee productivity, similar to grocery stores putting in self-checkout kiosks where two employees can supervise 10 to 20 kiosks instead of staffing one traditional checkout lane.
The article does mention it.

> We’re interested in what’s happening with Lightning and other proposals to enable faster payments.

Please be careful about promoting LN. It's great tech, yes.

> this stuff really works!

* yes, but please don't actually use it with money yet. [1]

[1] https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning#project-status
Well, there was about a month or two when Bitcoin looked more like a store of value than a medium of transaction at any rate. Fees are starting to look increasingly more reasonable now that the insane growth and massive speculation has stopped. (There's reason to suspect that during the worst of that period, a rather large proportion of transactions were to and from Coinbase/GDAX - not helped by the fact they don't batch withdrawals and have enough revenue to just throw money at transaction fees, which of course drove up fees for everyone.)
As I should have realized, they're sent to all wireless phones in the area. On an iPhone at least both Amber and Emergency alerts are on by default but you can turn either of them off.
> Just because Amazon happens to be for-profit, their presence in your city is an extraordinary asset

It's not though. You purposefully used examples of public or non-profit groups to make it sound like a benefit. But it's not. A more fair comparison would read:

It's like someone came to your town and I said, "I want to build a $20m McDonalds, Mobile Gas Station, WalMart and a Best Buy". I would hope your town says "good luck with that" and not "that's amazing, how should we corrupt the local market to make it easier for you to do that". Amazon is no different in any way except scale.

In a sane world, Amazon HQ2 would terrify cities, who will need to ensure they have extra taxes in place for Amazon, to ensure the city can handle the massive pollutions Amazon HQ2 will generate in the local housing markets, local economy, and local infrastructure.

> We’ve proven that this public/private partnership is basically the most effective growth engine we’ve got

Proven? Can you cite some examples? I've only seen "Public/private partnerships" used as a label to mask corruption and theft; as a way to socialize any losses but privatize any gains.
I didn't start with a complaint, just an observation.

The CEO made it clear those rates are essentially a tax paid by unsavvy engineers that haven't shopped for rates because they aren't actually interested in setting competitive rates.

The real market rate for interchange is FAR lower than those described here, and from the replies you'll see that even here on HN there are a lot of tech smart, finance dumb engineers that didn't know that they're throwing away a big chunk of their revenue by taking the shelf rate for payment processing.
7 minute mini documentary:

https://youtu.be/S-X97xxw5aI
I don't have any place to criticize at all but this seems pretty short-sighted. The primary criticism is low tps and fees… but that's exactly what lightning was invented to solve (edit: as I now see someone else mentioned)… and it's already working, in testing phase. Isn't it more effort to remove support then add it back again soon than just to wait a few months? So it /seems/ either something else is going on or they just didn't know and weren't told.
We've seen this increasingly happening as well, and it's kind of embarrassing because it's for a crypto-related website. After struggling with it for months I'm not surprised Stripe has thrown in the towel here.
What category are you looking for?

Supported or used or being experimented with or what?
> They claim to be interested in Lightning Network, but aren't interested in using it?

I don't understand how you conclude this from the post.

(Does Lightning even exist today? Could they use it today if they wanted to?)
nixops has hetzner deployment support, but I don't yet know how well it works (my account verification is still pending)

https://nixos.org/nixops/manual/#opt-deployment.hetzner.crea...
Actually it's pretty high too these days (not compared to Bitcoin of course)

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-transactionfee...
This plan is roughly isomorphic to option compensation. It has a serious incentive compatibility problem: the value of the options increases with volatility/risk, so incentivizes unnecessary, and even negative expectation, risk taking. Maybe Musk has a big enough stake in Tesla to mitigate this effect, but it's definitely not a risk free approach for minority shareholders.
That's a fair point. I've always found Firefox pretty speedy, but I can't judge other people's experiences and I don't think it's possible to objectively measure subjective user experience. Every piece of software has people who have unusually bad experiences and I don't know how to judge which are reliable and representative. The best you could do is polls, which are not reliable.

I don't know how to tell the difference between "Firefox is slow" and "Firefox has an undeserved reputation for being slow."
Until they provide a decent UI/UX to do that, you can use about:performance for now.
This is the 12th submission you've made to HN in 15 minutes.

You should slow it down a bit.
The interior will still degrade from normal wear and tear. Cracked plastic, ripped upholstery, broken trim, etc. And if any part of the vehicle is made of steel it's eventually going to rust unless the operator is really diligent about preventative maintenance.
Have your tried XLM, XRP, LTC, Dash, or pretty much any other cryptocurrency?

They're much faster, and considerably cheaper than Bitcoin to use.
The smart way to become an interplanetary species would be to throw money at physics research and AI.

The technological payback from an automated grocery store is unlikely to help us get to Proxima Centauri.

That sounds harsh, but I think there's a fallacy in believing that technological progress is cumulative, and each small step - no matter how tangential - gets you closer to the big goal.

It's like arguing that if you keep developing steam engines you eventually get a modern airliner.

In fact you only get a modern airliner with completely new technologies, including GPS, composites, fly-by-wire, digital airflow modelling, and so on.

You can't build an A380 with Victorian sheet metal and rivets, no matter how many times you iterate.

And there's something Victorian about Amazon's need to dominate and mechanise every possible consumer market. The single-pointed focus makes it smarter than legacy corps when it comes to retail, but it absolutely does not follow that this proves Amazon is smart enough to invent its way out-of-system.
Devils advocate:

It's possible that Amazon will be a drain on a region.

The cost of housing goes up for everyone.

The best and the brightest of the region get sucked back to HQ1

The startup ecosystem in the region gets drained to work at/for Amazon
Bitcoin is currently the crypto equivalent of gold. It's not reasonable to use it to buy a coffee. However, Bitcoin is trying (but many would argue, failing) to upgrade the network with something that will allow cheaper/faster transactions and make it a reasonable currency again. However, (imo) in-fighting has seriously hampered this. That being the reality, many people hope that Bitcoin will remain a store of value into the future, even if most people are using some other crypto for actual day-to-day transactions.

There are "old-school" cryptos with lower transaction fees (Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash). There is not much reason to use them as an actual currency except for the fact that they have more inertia than most other projects (and therefore more things have been built around them). In particular, most places that had some sort of Bitcoin integration can very easily switch to Bitcoin Cash for much lower tx fees.

There are many cryptos that are trying to be currency in a permanently scalable way (IOTA, Ripple, Stellar)

Other cryptos are trying to be cash, i.e. anonymous (Dash, Monero, ZCash).

Most others are either A. intended to be more platform than currency (Ethereum, NEO, EOS, Tron) or B. too small to mention.
Bitcoin is definitely acting more like an asset than a medium of exchange, and yeah, I don't see why it would hold any value if it's treated like an asset. But as soon as people realize that then it should go back to being a medium of exchange and then it'll hold value again as an asset?

Either way, just because Bitcoin isn't functioning correctly doesn't mean that all cryptocurrencies are not. But I guess at the moment it seems like everyone would rather hoard cryptocurrencies than actually use them for their intended purpose.
> you idiot

Personal attacks and uncivil swipes will get you banned on Hacker News. You've done this several times before. If you want to keep commenting here, please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do this again.
> What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it?

The same as gold does?
Why are both stripe and braintree so much cheaper in Europe?
Introducing the Smartphone
Did their api allow you to set the transaction fee?
Just a small counterpoint - the United Center in Chicago was supposed to revitalize the surrounding neighborhood, but in practice drove it down to the ground. Same deal with Yankee Stadium and Citi Field in New York.
Absolutely. FTA

> We may add support for Stellar (to which we provided seed funding) if substantive use continues to grow.
Gonna give a Hacker News discount? :)
My reading of this post is that Stripe has no particular love for Bitcoin, but wants to avoid the ire of the Bitcoin fans on the internet, and so it's coated in "Bitcoin is great, we were the first people to adopt it, we can't criticize it at all" etc. etc.
Lighting Network does indeed exist today. You can use it right now.

Download the desktop app and try it out: https://github.com/lightninglabs/lightning-app

It's early, but that's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I think you have it backwards here for the most part.

What problems do you see infinite blockchains solving?

No comment on whether or not a crash is inevitable, who knows where the price is going. That's not really too important to me. But the fact that Bitcoin is for now the most secure and technologically sound blockchain is what makes it interesting. And actually having those unique characteristics is what makes it special. I definitely don't see much special with 'blockchain the data structure' on its own.
Thanks, I'll give nightly a try to see how it works on Mesa / amdgpu+radeonsi.
It also defines that it may abort, and so culturally, people use them for only what’s intended, as otherwise, it limits your audience.
Also - any way to get Fedora rather than Centos?
Rule of thumb: if all the other words in your sentence are in French, then pronounce the word "France" the way French-speaking people say it. If the other words are English, pronounce it the way English-speaking people say it. Switching accents in the middle of a sentence sounds ridiculous.

To illustrate, there's a scene from "Better Off Dead" where the mother repeatedly says "Frawnch" in place of "French" trying to affect an authentic pronounciation, with predictably disastrous results
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhW7rpFhr2k
Store value / Investment.

You can buy gold, stocks, foreign currencies as means of investment.

You can't pay your restaurant bill with them but that doesn't mean they don't have a future.
I recently ended up in an interesting conversation with a university faculty member where we found that many of the most endowed universities could essentially make undergraduate education free and make back the difference (and often more) on straight interest accumulated from leaving their money in a bank.

Given that they are probably making more than the current interest rates by investing, I wonder why students still pay so much for tuition at these universities in particular.
Ask HN: Anyone getting repeated RoboCalls from Google+?
I get them at least 3x per month..for the last 5months.

tl;dr "It is extremely urgent that you complete your profile ..."
> why is it impossible to call a Perl 5 function in scalar context?

Has Stefan (who wrote IP5) said or written that it's impossible?

18 months ago he wrote "So far I've found 3 different ways to implement scalar/list context for method/function calls".[1]

He has left issue #31 open.[2]

Where did you read that it's impossible?

[1] https://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2016-08-03#i_12961486

[2] https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5/issues/31
I used this store every day over the summer when I worked in this building. Don't underestimate the reduced friction of cashier-less shopping: I went to that store way more often than the alternatives. I was able to get in and out of the store in around 30 seconds if I knew what I wanted.
You're not taking out the notch.

In total square inches, the X is 97.38% the size of the iPhone 8+, in actual usable space (once you consider the screen on the sides of the notch are effectively worthless for video / content / etc with the status bar hidden) it's roughly equivalent to a 5.0" display. You're paying $200 more for a much smaller screen.

Calling the X a 5.8" screen is just marketing. You wouldn't buy an 80" diagonal TV with a huge notch missing out of the top and say it was the same screen size as other 80" TVs, so why apply it to phones?
Well, I'm not sure this is fair. From what I can see in the rankings, they're size/population independent. So in absolute terms, the US is probably ahead in "innovation". But in relative terms, no, which might be more interesting if you're looking for a place to send your kids to university or whatever. Plus Israel has a huge number of tech companies, with really smart people (in my experience). Money is one thing, culture is another. With that in mind, I don't think it shocks anybody to hear the US education system is letting people down...
Or lead
Cool, thanks for the reply. That makes more sense.

How much volume do you guys handle?
> What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it?

I look at it (maybe naively) like a solid gold bar. You're not going to walk in to a convenience store and pay with a bar of solid gold; you might flee the country with one though.

Beyond that, I totally agree with your read on the post. Linking the pull request[0] was especially backhanded. It feels like there's some underlying frustration there that was expounded upon using good references and kind words.

[0]: https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org/pull/2010/fil...
Most fraud detection systems rely on blocking rules. So they'd detect a VPN/Tor and combined with an international order, it'd be an almost guaranteed block.

We'd factor this in, and it may be negative, but if the other 198 variables match up, you'll be in good shape with Bolt given your purchase behavior, on-page event patters, order details, and many other factors that are much better predictors of fraud than VPN/Country/etc.
FF 57 was much snappier on my Mac than on Chrome, but it occasionally turned into a CPU hog and got the fans spinning full blast. Did anyone else experience that?
I think they are being over cautious (other implementations are not as concern), but yes still in testing. There are over 100 nodes, doing a bunch of transactions no money lost.
Close. Apps is using mostly using j2cl.
I know that these (https://www.nrecosite.com/graphql_to_sql_database.aspx) guys are working on such component and have adapter for PostgreSQL (based on description)
This breaks the HN guideline against name-calling in arguments. Just because the rest of the internet is full of this does not make it ok to do here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.

Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post civilly and substantively, or not at all, from now on.
> What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it?

Lots of assets have value without people buying things with them. Gold, houses, stocks, etc.

The more interesting question is how long Bitcoin will remain top dog merely as a store of value if other cryptocurrencies solve this on-chain / off-chain scaling problem better / faster. There's definitely some amount of value in the name alone, and some more in the security of the mining, but neither of those are unassailable.
That bugzilla link is purple, so I guess that's the right one. But there's just so many APIs that were missing when they forced 57 on everyone, I honestly don't actively keep track because it's going to take a while. They were nowhere near ready, but a fixed release schedule is a fixed release schedule...

Edit: Looking at the status:

> Status: NEW → RESOLVED 4 days ago

That could have made it into 58. Or they can still add it: why wait? They started this quick major-release cycle to release features sooner, but I don't see why they can't just release them when they're, y'know, ready.
Elon Musk takes aim at £40bn payday – the world's biggest bonus
Those are all very successful projects. All the bad stuff that happened at Mt Gox occurred after he sold it to Karpelès.
I guess you can think of it as a "self-tuning" PID controller. It "learns" how to ride a bike.

If it were really "just" a PID, you would need some arbitrarily complex procedure involving a human for tuning all the parameters?
Carried double the recommended capacity for 10 tons for 8 mph fully loaded all day without recharge with the equivalent of 12 of today's batteries Probably from train station delivering the paper rolls to the printing presses all day back and forth.

Sounds impressive, the covered wagon cab when it came out is interesting too.
That’s a gross oversimplification. There are thousands of Bitcoin nodes running right now who verify that the miners are honest. Miners could refuse to include any transactions at all, but that would amount to a sort of constant denial-of-service attack, and could be resolved by moving to a new proof-of-work function (thus rendering all current Bitcoin mining hardware worthless).
I haven't been keeping up with this. What's the bitcoin transaction cost now?
This is something that is coming down the pike with the changes the current administration has made for "association health plans". They solve some micro problems (healthy self-employed people will be able to buy cheap group health insurance without being part of a traditional employer group) while also making the overall problem much worse (the individual exchanges become a de-facto high risk dumping ground and get way more expensive).

This is a problem for high income self-employed people with preexisting conditions. They probably won't be able to buy into an association health plan and they won't get premium subsidies from the government because they make too much, which means their premiums will be a ridiculous percentage of their income.

I switched from self-employed contracting to full time W2 with my biggest client back in December. The biggest reason is because they offered to pay for very good small group health insurance.
To clarify, you mean the current US political climate?

In all honesty, unless Amazon was going to go to Mississauga or Markham or something like that, I'd rather not have them. We need more jobs in the burbs, not more pressures on the inadequate Toronto infrastructure.
Weighted score rankings are useless / statistically irrelevant, no matter how much careful hand-tuning we do. The only way to maintain accuracy and scientific responsibility in such things is to:

1) Formally define what is meant by "innovation" in terms of clearly measurable outcomes.

2) Measure this clearly-defined quality among all countries and many sample points through time.

3) Try to separate out explanatory variables for the quality being measured. Build these data driven statistical models to model this formally defined "innovation" quantity -- not using hand-tuned weights of various measures, as these "rankings" or "indexes" often do.

4) Try to predict a probability distribution of the "innovation" quality, using models developed in step 3.

Step 1 should be qualified with explanation that this human-designed definition is an imperfect, and that all results should be understood in the context of this formal definition.

Step 2 should be qualified with notes of any possible limitations in the sampling methodology (availability of data, etc.) and how this factors into error margins.

Step 3 should be qualified with sufficient explanation that it's a model of reality derived from data, and therefore risks overfitting/underfitting/etc. errors.

Step 4 should be qualified with an explanation that this is a prediction based on the above model fit, and therefore is subject to potential errors compounded by any of the previous steps.

That would be the scientifically/statistically responsible and rigorous thing to do. But I suppose I'm crazy to expect Bloomberg to aim for any level of rigor in these "indexes".
One aspect of the "gig economy" that I've not seen covered is the way it effects gigsters professional social graphs. At the deep end of Mechanical Turk services where work is dispatched by an algorithm (Uber/Lyft/AirBnB/etc.) there are no upward connections to supervisors and managers and officers and no lateral connections to coworkers.

This means that working does not provide insider access to potentially better (or alternative) jobs when coworkers move on. There's no implicit social framework for insider information. There's no personal channel where a Lyft driver finds out that Uber is a better opportunity (or vice versa).

To put it another way, two Lyft drivers have little basis for connecting on Linkedin. Not that I think Linkedin is great. Only that gigsters don't even get the loose social connections that Linkedin facilitates...and cynically, the gig economy casts other Lyft drivers as competitors rather than coworkers.
But possibly not easy for an Uber driver, rather than a highly skilled tech worker.
Does the DDG addon replace other addons like HTTPSEverywhere or uBlock?
Electron RCE Vulnerability Fix
At first blush, the idea that comes to mind is this: Innovation and associated economic growth isn't the exclusive domain of grad students and graduates. Undergraduates can innovate, as do lots of people who are in private industry and not associated with academia at all.

Of course all that means is that it isn't a perfect proxy. It may well still be a good proxy. Tough to call.