skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cowboy Neal is not amused
Are there actually people in the world who think Tether's USDT pricing is legitimate? I can't figure out how in the hell it could be. It doesn't make any sense at all.

I have to admit that I didn't consider it's effect on the price of Bitcoin as a whole. If it really is inflating the bubble that hard then yeah, it's going to pop at some point. Probably sooner rather than later.
Tracing .NET Core on Linux with USDT and BCC
All of your examples involve moderate to high self selection for thoughtfulness and have a culture of self-critique. Reddit has it historically and HN has it in daily practice.

However, Facebook is nearly a wasteland of relatives and acquaintances yanked into the network, sometimes against their better judgement. Once their and fluent in the technical aspects they feel free to be themselves, not necessarily a thoughtful member of the network.
I would like to see some authentication and encryption in the communications protocols like modbus and ethernet IP. Could be as simple as entering the same phassphrase on the client and the server. If you don't have the passphrase your requests are dropped or you can't decrypt any packets you might get your hands on.

I can't see why that wouldn't be achievable. Yes it would take some extra processing power on the PLCs and would generate a bit more heat.

It would have to be implemented by Schneider and Rockwell, who have been pushing all responsibility for security to the network level.

At least the latest schneider PLC, the m580, allows for requiring a password to connect using the programming software[0], and also some ability to restrict what client IPs can connect[1]. The m580 was released in the last two years, so everything prior to 2016 doesn't have those features and comes set up to allow anonymous upload of new firmware by TFTP.

[0]: https://www.schneider-electric.ca/en/faqs/FA238215/
[1]: https://www.schneider-electric.com/en/faqs/FA282558/
A Simple, and Trivially Parallelizable Triangle Rasterization Approach
I don't want to speculate as to his intentions, but I see nowhere in this post where he argued for a stop to "technological progress". I don't even see an implication thereto.
OK, but even by that definition, it's not the UN that has made it illegal. The UN is pretty toothless.

I mean, yes, they have peacekeeping forces. Those forces are not keeping the peace by force. In fact, there have been times when they have stood aside while one side violated the peace, because the UN force's rules of engagement didn't allow them to use force to prevent one side from starting the war back up.
John Gray: Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war (2015)
"Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory." —Franklin Pierce Adams
The Dell-EMC merger was reported at $67B by cash and stock. I am not sure how much Dell paid out in cash, but I am imagining something like 10,20% were paid to the major shareholders, and the rest were just stock shares? How does this cash + stock payout work in practice?
If going down this route, we must also ask why a CT scanner costs millions of dollars. Medical equipment costs are equally insane. Basically, the costs of everything in the medical field are greatly inflated because they can be.
To be fair, this is only just happening on a pure cost basis, if this is true it will be new for this year, previously it has only been in countries with high retail rates and high solar output (Italy, Australia, Hawaii etc) where solar plus battery was on the verge of competitive, and even then more on a somewhat hypothetical basis assuming friendly planning laws, access to equipment like a Powerwall which may actually be difficult to get hold of straight away, efficient installation ecosystem, and so on.

The things that we should be criticizing are more about:

i) Failing to acknowledge the transition had to be done regardless of whether it was more expensive, because the result of climate change would be worse

ii) Failing to accept that the cost of these technologies (electric batteries, electric cars plus charging infrastructure, solar, wind) was consistently falling in a way which implied they would become cheaper than current technologies over a period of decades.

iii) Supporting new technologies over the existing technologies, and to what degree to push them over a tipping point quickly. Subsidies and mandates have been completely instrumental to getting to these point, there's no way solar in particular would have scaled up without them. If we are already at or around a tipping point, maybe we will be able to reduce them quickly rather than slowly, but I still think they will be important over the next 5-10 years for making this happen by 2040 rather than 2060.
>This is less of an issue with Linux, per se, and more to do with proprietary video drivers.

Actually, it IS a problem with Linux. I don't get this behavior on my Windows or OSX machines where NVIDIA has been reliably (modulo obvious caveats) shipping "evil proprietary" drivers for a decade.

Linux is great, but it doesn't need to be coddled.
A) Solar tariffs were initially brought in under Obama and B) I figured the question was a general one - not specific to Australia.
Do you buy a Snickers bar from a place that only sells Snickers bars?

If not, then the question of why you chose Snickers to satisfy your hunger--as opposed to all the other options available for about the same price--is of deep interest to just about any snack company.
The actual issue is that the USA used to be a productive country with an economy that could absorb these kinds of false positives. Now it can't. This is what that looks like.
I appreciated Sapiens because while it also examines similar measures for how our lives are "improving," it also stops to ask how we decide what those measures should be. Progress is subjective.
What is the best location to watch the launch from?
CIA Calendar Art Offers a Glimpse into the World of Spies
This is every (bad) company ever. I worked for a company with 500m in revenue, that made nothing but consumer electronics, and defined its own ENGINEERS as "cost centers."

You know the only people who weren't defined as cost centers by management? Themselves.
Yes, absolutely, this too is insane.
"The bomb? The plague? Trump? Not to worry; things are getting better."[0]

Comparing Trump to nuclear bombs and plagues does not seem a good idea to start a conversation about reason, science, humanism, and progress.

[0]https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/kirkus_review_of...
Further to that point, there hasn't been a serious war between major powers in seven decades. One of the longest stretches in recorded history.

Overwhelmingly what we've seen in the way of war deaths since WW2, is in civil war and genocides by Socialist, Communist and Fascist regimes.
Never ever regret making a decision that you thought would make you happier. The fact that it didn’t work out like you thought is nothing to regret. that’s life. It turns out, with the benefit of hindsight, that maybe staying a traditional career path would have been a better choice — but you only know that because of the journey you’ve taken. There was no other way for you personally to have learned that. Now you’re 4 years older and you know much more about who you are and the type of life to want to live. Lucky for you, you get to make the choice between your ambitions and a traditional career again, this time with more knowledge that will hopefully lead to a better decision.

That said, don’t discount your ambitions — sometimes a poor, unsuccessful life spent in pursuit of something beautiful is more happy than a traditionally successful life in pursuit of nothing at all.
>Surely the Cold War would have been a real war if not for nukes, no? I don't think the US and Russia were avoiding conflict because "the UN made it illegal."

No way, no how. Russia's economy, at their peak, was 1/7th of the size of the USA's. At the end of WW2, it's unlikely they could have beaten western Europe, let alone kept the US out, who were clocking 50% of world GDP at the end of '45.

Equally, the USA could have never beaten Russia in the USSR itself. The entire nation was an absolute fortress. The armies of tanks, that would be vulnerable to air power in an offensive war, would be absolutely unstoppable in a defensive war, where you don't have long supply lines.
A good point. But this is mostly a solved problem. App can only PostMessage to another app running under the same user account. Regarding app sandboxing: it sounds good on paper, but in reality it becomes evident that sandboxing breaks interoperability between the apps returning all of us to the stone age of computing circa 197x.
This is a great point.

I've explained my issues to the client. According to them the only way they can put in more money is by generating revenue. Since they keep on adding more "We can't go live without X"... The launch is already delayed by over an year.

There is a good chance that it may fail, even if technically we are better than competition. User feedback and design processes are crucial.
Venmo alternative Zelle moved $75B last year, says 100,000 people enroll daily
Which wars did the US start on a lie for oil?
I think the two are fairly closely linked. In my mind, each persona is essentially a group of user roles collected together and given a explanatory biography and a fake moustache
Do you find that calling a large number of people foolish generates a useful discussion, either on Twitter or on Hacker News?
The World's Largest Biometric ID System (Aadhaar) Keeps Getting Hacked
See more David Gerard in r/buttcoin and the Something Awful YOSPOS bitcoin thread, which is now basically free of anyone supporting any of this idiocy
We are't talking about hypotheticals, we are talking about what is current, now. You are moving the goal posts...
Anyone else find these numbers ridiculous?

- Google Play Zelle app has ~500k downloads and a 1.7 rating

- ZellePay.com U.S. Alexa rank = 6,505; Venmo.com = 757

- $75B/247M payments = $304 avg transaction??
I'm eyeing Threadripper for my next build but beyond that I'm going to choose a motherboard vendor based on the level of support they offer in this scenario. Some observations that I'm making:

* How promptly did they address the issue via official channels, i.e. did they leave users in the dark as they appealed to vendors in their forums (hint: most of them seem to have gone down this route) or did they share updates directly on their official sites, social media accounts, etc.

* Did they provide some estimates as to when users could expect patches?

* How much of their product catalogue were they willing to cover with security updates? Since this is a unique security issue with high impact I would have expected them to cover motherboards at least 4-5 years old.
I always wonder - do the bid prices really reflect the future? I mean it is entirely possible for these prices to not hold long term and many of these projects shutting down/ending in huge losses.

Anyone in the solar energy industry have some insights on the pricing?
Retaining Customers
> If you're an anthem customer you can't go to the ER to deal with unknown and possibly life threatening issues.

As a different anecdote, Anthem paid all of my cost for an ER visit last year (minus deductible). It was a first time thing. That's why your parent was asking you to avoid hyperbole.
I also play chess at a competitive level (>2000, Expert in the US) and play Melee at a low competitive level (playing in local meetups, winning a few matches). I've had many arguments about ranking systems, ELO, etc with my fellow Smashers, and I reached similar conclusions. This is a great writeup.

There are huge differences between the Swiss system used in chess (which works great for ELO, since seeding is done by rating and players are not eliminated) and the double elimination system used in Melee tournaments. I don't think it's possible to have an objective ranking system in Melee because of the intricacies of this issue (seeding influences final placement, low-seeded players will hit a wall where they lose to high-seeded players earlier, etc).
You must be new to the author, but check out his other articles, nearly every article is written the same way. And plenty of them mention Europe.
> "The bigger risk is doing nothing," executive chairman Bill Ford told WIRED back in 2015, as he outlined a future where a single, digital ticket could buy you a ride on a car, taxi, subway, bus, or bicycle. "I am very confident that we can compete and morph into something quite different."

We already have that in Los Angeles. It’s called a TAP Card.
It's being suggested that Tivo did things correctly (Collected $1.6 billion in patent court) by creating a "boring" product.

If you could go back to 2006, it would be better to create a Stripe then a TrialPay, even if Stripe is boring.

The final takeaway
*
Boring products can be very disruptive. Innovated products have a hard time finding their market. Find a boring product you can create that adds value directly to consumers. Build your company on that product. Innovation is easier to do after you have customers and cashflow.
*

The author admits this is opposite of how investment funds usually work.

These opinions are not necessarily my own, but my own summary of my understanding of the article's point of view.
I can't wait for Dell to go public again, so that we can someday have a repeat of the last private buyout debacle, in which banks literally couldn't keep track of who owned Dell stock[0], and Dell shareholders simultaneously argued that the stock price was too high while also suing for it being too low.... and won[1].

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-07-14/banks-for...

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-01/michael-d...
Could you imagine having chest pain for the first time, going to the hospital, them running the whole suite of tests like an EKGs, X-Ray, full blood panel and the like, then determining it wasn't a heart attack but instead something much less severe like pneumonia? I use that example because that is something I went through, I was able to breathe alright, and didn't have any other illness symptoms, but woke up intense chest pain. Thankfully in Canada there was no issue of coverage, but would Anthem determine pneumonia to be non-emergency care?

What if you went in with chest pain, found out it was pneumonia, then got billed $10,000 for all the tests. Would you think twice about going back to the ER the next time you got chest pain? I think this policy will absolutely kill people. But clearly it's fine because it's only a minority of cases (sarcasm).
You can see a copy of the report here: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2015/wp15105.pdf

It isn't a direct subsidy. They're saying pollution from coal has external costs and there isn't a tax on the coal-burning polluters to pay for this, so in effect coal has a subsidy.

I guess it has a point but I think calling that subsidy is misleading.
Apple shares under pressure on report that it's halving its iPhone X production
Introduction to Neural Networks with Scikit-Learn
It's a well-known superstition in sports: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_Illustrated_cover_jinx.
The former, because words are subjective, therefore this is no way to get everything anyone anywhere would ever consider hate speech. It's just an impossible scenario.
The bill was based on what insurance company would pay, or as the opening gambit in a round of negotiations to get the insurance company to pay a reasonable amount. An individual could probably get the hospital to knock a '0' off, but even $1,200 for an emergency room visit is too much to expect a person to pay.

It's been demonstrated that when people have to pay for ER visits, they stop going to the ER. And, from past experience, anytime there is pain in the gut, even doing the "right" thing and going to an urgent care clinic first will get you turned around right away and pointed at the ER.

For the record, I don't agree that it's the "right" thing, but it's required by some insurance companies.
Apple's approach goes a fair bit beyond simple servo control (which only tends to work well for truly low-frequency content.

While Apple hasn't disclosed much about the particular details, it's bound to be in the same vein as Klippel's work, which doesn't use feedback as much as it monitors a few states as input to a feed-forward error-correcting mechanism. The net result is that distortion is lower, and it's much less limited with regards to the frequency range you can support.

[1] http://www.audioxpress.com/article/louder-faithful-and-consi...

[2] https://www.klippel.de/fileadmin/_migrated/content_uploads/A...
There's another aspect of the "scary sentient AI" trope that I think about a lot. It's not about the danger, but the surprise. People don't expect to be surprised by things that aren't other animals, or the weather. It doesn't matter whether AI is "conscious" or "intelligent" if it seems intelligent.

Imagine how surprising an automatic door opener would be to a person living 150 years ago. It would seem as if the door "knew" they were approaching, and politely opened for them. Imagine how surprised we would be if Clippy understood what you were doing, and offered help that was actually helpful.

As AI advances and is incorporated more and more into everyday things, our environment will become a reactive, "intelligent" black box, and along the way there will be some sudden advances that may be very startling and surreal.
https://www.peerio.com/
I haven't read the book but I wonder.. as a billionaire he clearly stands to gain a lot from spreading a message of optimism and collective progress over the last century presumably to maintain status quo when an equally factual but completely opposite perspective on the world (unprecedented levels of inequality, our global lack of response to climate change, etc.) is also there for us to see.

I find it very hard to believe that his motives are so pure.
Agreed.

The sentiment "American Healthcare isn't as bad as people say it is!" has become a defense mechanism.

As in, its purpose is not to ensure that a discussion is reasonable, but to make the speaker feel both superior to, and insulated from, the problems killing fellow human beings.

Pretty sad.
There is other research[0] (also recently posted to HN, though it got a lot less traction than Gates and Pinker), that claims this trend may very likely not be there. It's very hard to prove.

[0] http://www.mn.uio.no/math/english/research/projects/focustat...
These guys also have a cheap laser cutting service if you want a more customized enclosure.
It is /possible/ that their books add up, in a technical sense which would make wall street blush.

They never claim that USDT are backed up by USD. They claim that every USDT is backed up 1:1 by "Assets."

Here's the scene: BFX is hacked, loses banking, and has tens of thousands of crypto millionaires ready to sue them. What they /do/ have is cold storage of lots of crypto under their control.

Say they start with 0 holdings of their own, generate 100M in USDT, and use it to buy up e.g. 10k bitcoin. However, due to that price movement, those are now worth 120M. That gives them 20M of "assets" which are not 1:1 matched to their tether, so they print 20M more. The cycle continues ad infinitum (until it doesn't). Every time It becomes more effective as their previous crypto holdings also increase in value.

Technically they are always "backed" 1:1 by "assets" for as long as they sustain upward momentum on crypto prices. But really it only needs to last long enough to dip set.
Did you actually watch the entire story or just a lets play/review? Wolfenstein isn't that great of an example despite having a story it's not exactly a story rich game.

I'm not sure the same thing would hold for a game like the Witcher 3, HzD etc.
A game that I've just watched the edited cutscene & cinematics movie for is Halo Wars 2 I'm somewhat of a fan of the Halo franchise primarily if I can get the story I don't really feel the need to play that game since to me for that specific game the story would be the main benefit rather than the actual game mechanics.

Another example would be Star Wars Battlefront 2, I've cancelled the pre-Order after the debacle with the loot boxes so I just watches the single player game, I have a few friends that watched the Mass Effect Andromeda main story made into a movie instead of buying it both because of the bad press and the time.

And it's funny that you've mentioned Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, I've bought the game (well preordered it because both of Ninja Theory and their GDC demos) my GF watched me play it, and 10+ friends I know just watched it on youtube rather than buy it mostly again because of the same excuse "I don't have time for that" despite I know exactly how much time they sit on their PS4/XboxOne/PC because I can see when they are online. But they much rather play CoD/BF/CS:GO/WoW etc. in the bulk of their time and consume games via effectively binge watching instead of playing, I don't know how much they enjoy it but at least they don't feel out of picture when people are discussing games heck I've seen entire "discussions" on discord about games like HB:SS or HzD where the vast majority of participants if not all of them didn't play the game or didn't even buy it.

So I'm happy that you've bought Wolfenstein but it looks like you've bought it for the mechanics, It's also nice that a demo convinced you to buy it but sadly demos have shown to reduce game purchases not increase them especially these days.

And given the purchasing behaviours of both myself, my friends, and my acquaintances I understand quite well why publishers want to effectively kill turning their games into a movie, and for anyone one that claims fair use it's not.
Hidden Bosses always get exposed at nationals because no matter how good or talented they are, they will get destroyed by players who are used to competing against other national threats. We've encouraged our local hidden boss (#1 in TN) to attend more nationals, but work schedules get in the way. Just like in chess, Melee is only profitable if you are one of the best in the world, and life gets in the way.
The important part here is this article probably got the patients ER decision reversed and approved. I would argue that alone is worth the article.
Not really. The small city-based subs are alright and the hobby based subs are pretty good, bots don't really waste their time in the 'long tail' as of yet, but that will be changing in the next 5 years.
On the flip side, 11 hours seems high. I've washed clothes by hand before; it doesn't take that long and in fact it's faster than washing by machine (though you can't do something else at the same time).
Nothing is stopping that.

But for the downside of "having to type a little bit more", I think it's more than useful enough at what it does fix/solve.

In other words, it solves between 0 and "a bunch" of problems for packages, and the downside is fixed at "needs to type a little more".

Even in the worst case, it's not that much harm, but in the best case could prevent exploits.
So we all agree we should be rioting. Good. But, um, I'm afraid I can't take the risk of being injured in a riot - I don't have $12k to blow on a trip to the ER (I spent all my money on premiums). So, y'all go ahead without me.
I don't understand why Bitcoin will crash if Tether is indeed a scam.

Those who exchanged Bitcoin for Tether will be holding worthless Tether tokens and will want to quickly exchange it for something else... like Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency.

Shouldn't the converse be true: Bitcoin price starts to rise as more and more people start to realize Tether is worthless?