skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bitcoin has very few of the properties that one would consider desirable for a currency.

1) Transaction costs. Don't want to beat this horse to death. Some other cryptos improve on this.

2) It's inherently deflationary. Deflation is bad. This ties into another strange thing, which is that the boosters of every coin think they are supporting the long-term adoption of the technology by "HODL"ing but that is the opposite of what people would do with a real currency. I haven't seen a crypto that isn't deflationary.

3) The bitcoin protocol decentralizes some things but centralizes along other dimensions. For mature cryptos its very tough to get the entire community to agree to a hard fork, which means that mundane fraud can't be effectively unwound, like banks could probably do with fiat transactions. I have the most trouble articulating this.
As an on-again off-again pro-wrestling fan, I find indie wrestling very bizzare.

I really dislike when the performers itself treat it like a joke or don't take it seriously. We all know it's a story and not a real athletic competition, but watching all the fourth-wall breaking, winking, nudging and general silliness that goes on with a lot of indie stuff truly leaves me be-wildered. Even if the performers treat it as a joke, it's still incredibly dangerous and taxing on the body. So you have performers making no effort to suspend our disbelief while in reality they're injuring themselves just the same.
It would, in essence, but you can't really list every obscure site, can you now? Facebook is the most public offender of this even if Google's offenses may be more prolific, but it's not as in people's face as facebook.
FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds
I don't understand the article. They explain than going in and out of the airport is burdersome, and that taking the Eurostar from London to Amsterdam is a much better experience, except for the change in Brussels

A London to Amsterdam is currently 4 hours and 38 minutes (incl. a 47min change in Brussels). With a propre planning between Eurostar and Thalys, the route could be done in less than four hours.

Taking a flight, on the contrary, will likely be much longer if you include the time to go to the airport, arrive 90 minutes in advance, and the time to leave airport in Amsterdam. Eurostar seem to have a clear advantage here, with prices often competitive, especially if you include Snap tickets.
> So what is the HN audience to Facebook? Our we taste makers? A demographic ahead of the product curve, predictive of Facebook's imminent decline?

We certainly aren't taste makers. HN is so small that it is irrelevant.

> Are we the people going to the art house movie theaters while the masses flood into multiplexes for the latest Marvel sensory overload spectacle?

We are just victims of the ongoing media campaign against facebook and social media. Once facebook gives in, the media will shift their hate to something else. Every time I come on HN, it's the same old facebook story. So just do what I do and click "hide" whenever you see an article about facebook on HN.

I wish HN would offer us the ability to filter our stories. I don't have facebook. Never used it ( I'm a unicorn ). I don't want to read headlines about it every day on HN.
Agree, just because something is different it's not "bizarre". But "special" doesn't feel better. I've always gone with "odd" for something that is not normal but not out of this world. Feels less negative.
Most businesses will probably not develop and train their own systems, but rather implemented solutions developed by the folks with the expertise and training data.
1., If you store data of EU residents, you are under EU jurisdiction (GDPR) and can be targeted by fines.

2., The EU is a very rich, large market - considered the single largest economy in the world (GDP per capita). Good luck not targeting it with your products.

3., The pendulum around data protection is swinging back, this is normal. Apple saw it and adjusted already. Google is cooperating and staying quiet. Only FB is stupid enough to fight in courts.
Picking the right ecommerce solution (and why you should probably use Shopify)
My teenage daughters never use Facebook, which isn't to say they will never do so.
Are you responding to the same screenshot that tfehring is commenting on? https://imgur.com/a/j47ls It says:

> "A mark-up is added to item prices at this retailer to cover the cost of the Instacart service. Prices are based on data collected in store and are subject to delays and errors."

There is no good, ethical reason why a delivery service should show me an item price that's different from what's in the store. It's completely ethical if the company wants to say, "The service fee for this store is X% (as a percent of item prices)", or "This store has an additional $X service fee". That is honest and reasonable. I expect a delivery service to quote me the same item price as the retailer quotes in its store.

The reason I have this preference is because of a delivery service's value proposition: shopping in my store, on my behalf. I have access to the same products and can buy them directly. So I want to directly consider the service's value proposition, by considering the service fee I'll need to pay versus buying things myself. (EDIT: Simplify)
A “broadcast this comment?” prompt after successfully submitting a comment, even a toggle that’s default-on, would solve this elegantly IMO. I have no idea why they don’t do it. Facebook was once great at understanding that people don’t want to draw outside attention to some things that they technically do in public. They seem to have ceded that ground to Snapchat entirely, which is a painful sentence to type.
I use Perl 6
It's really important to point out here that market downturn =/= recession. They often occur simultaneously but some market downturns are unrelated to recessions.
When I started pirating things regularly many years ago, I'll admit that some of it was just the fun of having such a huge library of content available for free, combined with my "f* the RIAA/MPAA" attitude.

I mostly grew out of that phase, and began pirating things mostly to discover new obscure content. What.cd was amazing for music discovery, and I definitely went to a handful of concerts and bought a handful of CDs of bands I almost certainly never would have discovered without what.cd. Same goes for old and indie films.

These days I do very little pirating. I'll occasionally pirate a TV show or film that I can't find on the handful of VOD services I or my friends subscribe to. Say what you will about the bad aspects of the modern media ecosystem: DRM, "stream instead of own," fragmentation, etc. But, at least for me, the industry has done a decent job of competing with piracy on convenience.
Wait until GDPR is in place in May and German and other EU courts will rule FB to death.

IDK how FB will ever be compliant with GDPR and survive that huge upcoming fines in the long term or in the worst case the withdrawal from these markets.
Isn’t that what Twitter is?
Amazon Fresh is a different service from Prime Now. Prime Now also delivers from local grocery stores (e.g. in LA, I can order groceries from Sprouts and Bristol Farms).
Awesome! Browser-editor would support everything out-of-the-box, while a Linux native editor would be awesome as well.

Very glad to hear and looking forward to hearing news in the future.
In Steam it is actually the case that a user can select their own display name (distinct from the account name used to log in) and change it at any time (and there's very few restrictions on what you can set it to, the system doesn't care if every single one of your friends has the same display name).

This function is separate from the "tagging" feature, which is helpful for keeping track of those friends who frequently change their display names and avatars. It's also possible to view the list of previous display names a given user has had, at least if you're friends with them.
It sounds quite efficient for him. I would love to be able to do the same.
Perl 6 actually exists and has a REPL which Perl 5 lacked.
> It's bizarre because it's the only form of fiction where some people are convinced the fans don't know it's fiction.

A fun way to make sure you aren't invited back to parties is to convince those people that you genuinely believe the UFC is a work while pro-wrestling is a legitimate competition.
Copyright has a hilariously convoluted story.

The term is from England, but many of the rules are from France. Because in France they came up with "rights of the creator" that included things like the estate being able to deny someone the use of a play or song after the creators death.

Then these two got merged via the Berne convention on copyright. But USA didn't sing that one until the 1980s(!).

So for a long long time, USA used a variant of the English copyright law, that only concerned itself with the printing of books (then as the tech came online, they expanded it to cover the likes of recorded music and computer software).

One thing to keep in mind is that the Berne convention requires that the signatory nations respect copyright duration of the nation of first release. And thanks to France we have this whole thing about death plus X years.

And like i said, USA didn't sign any of that until very recently. And thus we had situations like Tolkien becoming popular with hippies because an American publisher picked up a copy while visiting the UK, and went on to print a pile of cheap copies back in the US.

Anyways, thanks to global media corporations, lobbyists, and the whole Berne thing, we now have a constant ratcheting of the whole death+X duration thanks to the lobbyists playing on national fears of being out-competed by others with "better" terms for the corporations.

IANAL and all that.
again, in 99.99% of the cases, we aren't doing the markup.

and, in the one case where we do not have a signed relationship with the retailer, we do explicitly note the percentage.

we aren't hiding anything. and, you have that precise problem with amazon prime -- what markup are they charging?
> today I'd probably not set up any presence in the EU

Facebook is a national security risk and should not be let to reign free as it likes. I see no problem if we tame a vulnerability - the way it handles our personal data, how it uses it to push ads and politics, how it influences elections by tweaking the feeds. Not to mention that it doesn't like to pay taxes in EU.
It's actually Blizzard Battle.net, now.

I wish I was making this up. Maybe they're trying to get their chat app acquired by Google.
It's not just Germans. Maybe 20% of my "FB friends" use a fake or distorted name, even though it's against FB's TOS.
I think it's interesting that more antitrust lawsuits seem to be brought and won against big SV companies recently in Europe. Is it just recently because because bureaucracy takes its' time, or is it because nowadays there is more political will to act against American companies since EU-American relations worsened since Trump came into office?
Interesting. Wouldn’t you say, that “special” has a (slightly) positive connotation?
> USA doesn't constantly fine its firms for not doing "enough"

The EU isn't fining its firms. It is fining US firms. Big difference.
>A lot of Germans use Fb with a fake name anyway

To FB the fake name is only yet another datapoint connected to your identity. Make no mistake, they know who you are and what you did last summer, and can pretty much predict what you will do next summer as well. Or worse, influence what you will do.
Yep, I think the more interesting question is: if labor market is so strong (low unemployment) then why aren't wages increasing meaningfully?

Here's one of my favorite practicing economists giving a bit more insight into the Fed and its interest rate strategy:
https://www.newsmax.com/finance/narayanakocherlakota/fed-dri...
Oldest study on the topic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1626509/

This dates back to 1939, and is a rather over the top experiment still:

Accordingly, Davis devised the experiment to let children do for themselves because she suspected that children's bodies instinctively “knew best” what the individual child should eat. Her intellectual model, a view that would later be called “the wisdom of the body,” likened a child's instinctive appetite to the way various autonomic body systems effortlessly adjust themselves to compensate for external challenges — think of sweating on a hot day, and breathing faster when you start to run.

Initially, it seemed that this conceit didn't apply to Davis's test children and their food preferences. None of the eat-what-and-how-much-of-what-you-want infants had the same diet on any given day, week or month. “Every diet differed from every other diet, 15 different patterns of taste being presented, and not one diet was the predominantly cereal-and-milk diet, with smaller supplements of fruit, eggs and meat, that is commonly thought proper for this age,” she told her Montréal audience.

Yet, she and others later saw that the infants' fanatical heterodoxy turned into what appeared to be 15 uniformly well-nourished, healthy children.

... The important bits:

It is actually beyond easy to imagine how Davis's orphans could have eaten themselves sick with healthy foods. Had one or more chosen only meat, fish and eggs, within short order they would likely have come down with scurvy. Had another been a fanatical vegan and eaten only fruits and vegetables, there is a good likelihood that he or she would have experienced a vitamin B12 deficiency and megaloblastic anemia.

Thus, the issue, really, was the extent to which an inner nutrition-seeking mechanism might lead children through the maze of choices they actually would face in the modern, eating world.

PS: Several versions of this experiment have been preformed including some with plenty of junk food, though the setting up an orphanage bit was rather extreme. Also, diets that seem odd are not necessarily unhealthy.
I think it is pretty easy to argue that someone has the freedom to put their info on a website that will use it according to the terms of service.
> in the most wasteful and inefficient way possible:

I mean, that's a drop compared to the paper waste in most companies. And it's not inefficient. Paper copies make annotations easier which makes replying easier and better quality.
Effects of Achievement Motivation on Behavior (2005)
Conclusion: Going into physics was the biggest mistake of my life. I should've declared CS. I still wouldn't have any women, but at least I'd be rolling in cash.
"Amazon's dominance in the emerging area of voice search is a threat to Google's general dominance in search." (Like the Apple's iPhone platform is a threat to Google, which Google is attempting to counter by promoting Android.)
> The word "byzantine" is so over-used as well as abused in this field of research, that for a random paper that mentions that word I can't really tell what actual problem it's solving unless I read through it fully in detail

I wouldn't say this is a problem. It's a useful red flag that you should stop reading this paper, or at the very least question the competency of the authors. Could save hours of your life!
If you're willing to take in advance and not at the best time, I usually pay around 150GBP for London <-> Lyon. It's way more pleasant/practical than the plane so I'm willing to pay more, but I really wish it would be cheaper in general.
That's a bit revisionist.

Google saw a tiny but steady rise in mobile searches and realized they needed to become mobile focused. They acquired a startup called Danger Inc. which brought in Andy Rubin who helped birth their Android efforts.

Rubin saw just how good the iPhone was then threw out their work to start from scratch [1] before they eventually put out their first device: the Android G1. Steve Jobs was furious at the similarities with the iPhone because he had gotten firm promises Google would not copy the iPhone in their phone efforts. Eventually, Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple's board when it was clear both companies would be competing head on in mobile.

[1] https://amp.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-android-founde...
What was your first gig, if you don't mind my asking?
Do you also turn your phone off, because phones can be triangulated by cell towers.
as i have noted elsewhere in the thread, that is a message -- from the retailer -- that the prices are different from in-store (and again, online pricing is their prerogative).

instacart is not marking anything up.

edit: it seems clear that we can do better in terms of communicating this, so i've passed that feedback on to the team.
> so you can scrap everything on the server and redo it on the client.

Were you writing the same queries on the client and the server? Generally client and server are different moving parts of the same machine, so they don't really share a lot of code anyway. (Perhaps in some cases computations could optionally run on client or server depending on the circumstances, but security concerns limit the opportunities to do that.)

Yes, it's a pain to have to know two different technologies, but it doesn't seem like this often leads to literally needing to scrap code and rewrite it.
Didn't they plan for this with the acquisitions of Instagram, Whatsapp, and most recently tbh?

They know the particular property of facebook.com can't last forever, so they go where the users are going. Last I checked Instagram is the hottest app out there for anyone 35 or under. As of last year at least Facebook, messenger and Instagram were each still in the top 5-10 most used apps.

I feel like people somehow don't see facebook as the digital conglomerate that they are and focus on what is happening on facebook.com as though it's a harbinger of the rest of the company.

Also, IMO they have the best Machine Learning (specifically vision) team on the planet and are consistently making amazing tools open source. That alone is worth a lot.
Why that country TLD?
I think this article hints at what may have been one of the causes of that change in direction. It appears that Russia faked black radical activism in social media in order to intentionally sow division in the US. But that action plays into the larger current political climate where it's "either you're with us or against us" by default rather than "even if we don't agree on everything, let's make progress where we do agree."
Game-changer.
This claim is completely unsubstantiated.
> I'm on a VPN all the time, and torrenting without a VPN, to me, is living on the edge. I'd constantly wonder: how long before I receive a stern letter?

That's really a USA thing.
Those who can’t innovate, regulate. I think trying to money from big US tech companies since Europe doesn’t have many of its own is definitely part of the equation.
If you decentrelize social networks, courts would need as many trials as there are networks and would get smaller fines.
thank you for the kind feedback -- we love to hear from customers who we help like this! and, we are constantly trying to improve the experience (especially the replacement experience!)
Since you seem to have a Mac app that can render your Haiku format, are you considering open sourcing the renderer just like the 'Haiku Core' renderer? I ask because animation abstractions for macOS are severely lacking. Even Lottie isn't supported.
Anyone with an existing credit relationship with you can still do soft inqueries so it’s not complete but (on paper) it does prevent them from selling your name to others. However if you look even closer these companies have other databases which are not intended for being used in credit decisions and are thus not subject to FCRA and it’s impossible to have information removed from those. They have every address I ever lived at, every phone number I’ve ever had, a list of known associates including relatives of ex-girlfriends whom I lived with only briefly during school, and apparently I own a sporting goods store in Texas - can’t tell them otherwise.
One of my (many) tasks at my current position is to maintain a SQL Server database where a lot of the date times are stored as raw strings in various different formats.

If you're determined enough you can turn any datastore into a mess, though I suppose SQLite gives you less tools.
Capture the state of many μ-services' DBs in a single commit
Not everything is about Trump.

The EU has long had stronger user-privacy protections. This isn't new or unique to the last year.
Also, I get invited to "groups" all the time. Because my friends want to win beauty cream and free flights to X. I leave the group, then I get re-invited again. Then I leave, then I get re-invited again. Why is this a thing?
There will always be people that push the envelope because they are suicidal. But funny enough buying pure fentanyl is one of the only ways to get a powerful opiate with a known potency.

You cant trust street dope because of the fentanyl, but if you order a pure fentanyl analog from China, and you are smart about dosing using volumetric dilution, you can be very aware exactly how much you are taking. Whereas with street dope, you will never know.

But by definition, a supply of known potency will never cause a "hot shot" as long as you are being smart and responsible.

The problem is some people don't "feel" high until they are pushing the limits of respiratory depression, so you will have people overdosing no matter what.

I've known people that overdosed, were revived at the hospital, only to go home and shoot up again and die. Its very sad.
> I have a theory that the current generation growing up with their young artists only working through streaming platforms are going to have a tough time in 20 years reliving songs they loved of their youth because the streaming platforms they listened to them on will be long dead and no one bothered pirating it and sharing it.

This is what happened to a lot of the songs by amateur musicians on mp3.com when it shut down in 2001, and that was all downloadable. I still have a few songs I downloaded from mp3.com that I have not seen hosted anywhere else. For streaming this has been an ongoing problem with SoundCloud for a long time. A lot of musicians delete their accounts or get blocked, move on with their life, and there is not a download option so all that is left are "check out this cool track" dead links.

This is ironic when you consider that a lot of mp3 blogs of the 2008-2011 era were about "rediscovering" amateur cassette and little known vinyl releases from the 1970s and 1980s.
> Also: I don’t think “bizzare” is a good word to describe the community. “Special” would have been much better.

Maybe this is regional, but "special" can mean "special like special education", that is, mentally disabled.
Poorly advertised? With a lack of marketing/funding I can understand it though. But as for me, I had heard of Firebird but not the embeddable, and of course of SQLite everywhere. Maybe it's also in part because the OSS space has limited room for this niche and SQLite kind of happened to grab the largest share.
While this is true, infants do not eat grains and many are breastfed almost exclusively especially if money is an issue. A $5 bottle of D3 vitamin drops to supplement breastmilk for months is much cheaper than buying formula.
I rarely pay more than £100 return even booking late, usyally pay a little nore for premium economy.
After Steam took off I did the same, it's much more convenient than piracy.

The only exception I make is when software has overbearing DRM in place. I will not hand over money for a tainted product when I can get better for nothing.

With video media I'm largely covered with Netflix and Amazon Prime Video but there is still plenty of content I'm missing. Instead of doing the right thing many networks are rolling their own half arsed subscription streaming services. Nobody in their right mind is going to stay subbed to the likes of CBS All Access when the only thing half worth watching is Star Trek Discovery, I've seen many people ditching their sub now that the season is over.