skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> To me, it all seems another gold craze, stoked not only by the usual crowd of techno-babblers keen on latching on the latest buzzword, but also by certified wingnuts from the long-discredited hyper-libertarian Austrian school of economics, kept buoyant by half-baked comparisons to "unreliable" "paper money" (which is nevertheless very effectively backed by the government's universal tendency to require said paper money for taxes, not to mention the inconvenient fact that if societal trust erodes sufficiently for paper money to lose its value, it’s highly unlikely an arbitrary string of ones and zeros in an arbitrary hard disk somewhere would fare much better), spotty comparisons of current economic system to few exceptions where hyperinflation was allowed to run rampant, and perhaps most of all, by simple wishes that the persons currently propping up the belief in blockchains will not be the last ones who are blinded by the latest buzzword and get-rich-quick scheme.

There are also people like me:

* I agree with the OP that there are a lot of techno-babblers keen on latching on the latest buzzword.

* I agree with the OP that there are many certified wingnuts who belong to the discredited Austrian school of economics.

* I agree with the OP that comparisons to "unreliable paper money" are half-baked at best.

Yet, I also see the point of Bitcoin.

I view Bitcoin partly as a supranational store-of-value, transaction platform, and distributed social network: its survival and usage do not depend on any particular country.

The only other "money-like" asset I know which is commonly viewed as supranational is gold, which has been used to store value and conduct transactions for at least 6,000 years.[a] These uses of Gold have lasted 25x longer than the age of the US, 12x longer than the life of the Roman empire, and 2x longer than the combined age of China and all its predecessors. Gold has outlasted all monetary systems devised by humankind so far. It's a barbarous relic, yes, but one that has survived "everything humankind has thrown at it" so far.

The Bitcoin network seems to have that same "survives everything humankind can throw at it" quality.

[a] https://www.ft.com/content/5604c5cc-d1b3-11e1-badb-00144feab...
If banks can't process 0.00001 transactions, then how in the world would cryptocurrencies be able to as cryptocurrencies are easily thousands of times less efficient than centralized servers?
None of the stories are completely about the Culture from within, but Look to Windward goes into a fair amount of detail about life in the Culture and Excession contains some details at the beginning of the story and in flashbacks to earlier in a character's life.
how well represented am i, really, in my group intelligence?
Android P
Scratch is a good introduction to programming concepts, regardless of age. How fortunate for your sixth grader; if such courses were common in earlier grades, a course like this could start with more challenging material.

This is not an EE class, it's an intro CS class, one that's not for those with prior knowledge who know they'll choose CS as a major. This kind of course can get new people interested, those who didn't think they'd like or could do CS. Even if they don't major in it, by taking this one course, they know more about an important part of what makes our world work.

CS50 at Harvard College [0] is also a very large, popular course that gets more people interested in CS as a major but is also useful to those who don't take another class. It also starts with Scratch though it switches to other languages very quickly and appears more challenging overall than this course.

[0] https://cs50.harvard.edu
I'm not familiar with the UK system, but this is certainly not the norm for western legal systems.
The tiny New Jersey town that rewired history
This is much older though, started (as in WikiLeaks become a sort of household name) with the release of US military fuckup videos in Iraq, and the US handling it like dumbasses, then the diplomatic cables.

Though they also published climate scientists' emails, which was not a sign of great rationality on behalf of Assagne.
"..overall can not recommend weighting the Vain to be drowned down with golden medalls and recommend the return to a boulder/concrete bucket. How somebody who gives a scrap about the opionion of his fellow men is supossed to archive true greatness - in particular beyond the boundrys of the knowledge of his fellow men escapes my feable mind."
It shouldn't be super difficult to backup/restore your db from localstorage using a dataURL.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/02/saving-images-and-files-in...
This reminds me of ACDC, a Deep-fried Convnets-like[0] approach by some NVIDIA employees. [1] See section 1.1, where they state they could perform the operation in analog.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.7149

[1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.05946
He Predicted the 2016 Fake News Crisis. Worries About an Information Apocalypse
Trust acts as capital in today's market. You can often get some sort of payback if you trust somebody else with your money.
> To your comments re bitcoin, it sounds to me like somebody complaining that Internet is slow back in the 90s/00s.

To their point though, dial-up modems are (by and large) a relic of the past and have been replaced by better (i.e. faster) methods of internet access.
Virtualized GPU Access: Implementing OpenGL ES 2.0 Support
A DNN might be more effective at exploring the hypyerparameter space than people are with their intuition and luck. Rumor is Google has achieved this.
What defines a "decent pair" of skates and why do they cost $300? Wouldn't a nice pair off the shelf at less than $100 or around $50 suffice for a young kid just wanting to play hockey?

I didn't consider the maintenance aspect; the need for sharpening makes sense though.
Then why provide a default at all? Especially one that isn't suppose to be used publically like google's?
> and any diplomat ... worth his/her salt already has procedures to skip the country.

It’s called diplomatic immunity. Diplomats don’t have secret plans for bailing out of countries because they don’t need them.

Diplomats don’t hide in embassies. They walk onto airplanes and fly home.
The irony here being I had to port our production RPM (rhel-based) build system to Docker just so it could have a reasonable API and be anything close to maintainable.

Edit: the extreme portability and "free" concurrency were just a bonus.
It's quite a lopsided relationship humans have developed with the elite that control their lives and use the mechanisms of facade democracies and process to appease and distract those who want to believe that things are legitimate and honest and good, when reality is the opposite.

The Obama administration and it's origins in the globalist elite cabal trying to reestablish elite domination over the whole planet is just a clear example of that dynamic. The vast majority of people seem to think that the Obama administration was some sort of force for good, when reality is quite the opposite and the vast majority of humanity was being (and quite possibly still is being) led to a horrible outcome. Reality simply is when you relinquish power and control over yourself and your live's choices, you will never get that back and it is far more likely than not that those you entrust with control and power over your life will not be making choices that are in your best interest.
> why oh why does it take 3 days (in the US) to transfer funds between my own accounts in two different banks?

Wire transfers are instantaneous [1]. They cost pennies a transaction, a fee banks often cover if you have more than ~$15,000 with them. For smaller transfers, real-time P2P was recently rolled out across most American banks [2]. This was a result of competition from Venmo, which one could think of as a lightning network over ACH [3]. (The latter being Fedwire's net settled and thus slower but cheaper cousin.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedwire

[2] https://www.zellepay.com

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Clearing_House
This is a non-solution if most of the names I like are non-ascii.
Show HN: eslint-plugin-i18n-json
There's now 2000 cryptocurrencies. Where's the finite property?
That's what SB827 does. If a property is within the given radius from a transit station or a high-frequency bus line, minimum height limits are imposed (between 45 and 85 feet, depending on other factors) and all design controls (parking requirements, floor area ratio, setbacks, bulk) are rendered ineffective.
The lack of a datetime data-type hasn't been a problem in my experience. I have, at different times, stored the timestamp as an integer representing number of microseconds since the epoch, or stored in YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM:SS (which sorts lexicographically so comparisons come out right). SQLite has some built-in facilities for working with datetimes as well, along the lines of strftime, etc.

H2, being java, is in a whole different universe from SQLite...not a valid comparison in my view.
"You can’t change the tax status of your Google Cloud Platform billing account."

I think this is what tripped me up before. I closed my business years ago but it was completely impossible to get Google to fix this. Now it fixed it "by itself".

Just a warning to everyone before signing up with your main Google account :-)
> there is no lack of trusted enough intermediaries...

Equifax? Wells Fargo? Happy that your payment card provider sells your purchase history? Or that we spent trillions to bail out bankers mistakes?

What about trust in nonfinancial matters: Voting machines?
Google? Facebook? The NSA? The 30 obscure random companies tracking any given web page?

Maybe we trust too readily.
There's yet not enough devices connected to the internet wiling to share their data. There's a whole lot of companies that need to be created and things to happen (which might never do) for something like a data marketplace to exist. If that ever happens, any company that has the resources to make sense of additional -targeted- streams of data (as they already effectively do) should be able to turn a significant profit from the acquisition of said data.
Either for product customization or advertising - or both.

For every transaction a bank processes there's obviously a fixed cost. Once you account for all the costs relative to them in a given year and divide that number with the number of transactions in that same year, I doubt, given the margins of a given transaction, that a bank can break even on 1 cents transactions. That's assuming that the tech the banks use as of now does not improve by magnitudes in a couple years.
This thread[1] by Michael Nielsen is a good description of the use of spaced repetition to memorize things.

[1] https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/95776322945477427...
And he made a great mistake in that, by encouraging hoarding instead of spending.
GDPR Cheat Sheet
There is already preliminary support for TPU devices in the TF API.
> you are basically implying that in light of Assange's political activity he cannot be credibly accused of any crime

No, I think he was implying that until he's been successfully using the phrase "a crime that was committed" is premature. It is still alleged.

If you want to know who did say "in light of Assange's political activity this crime is likely not credible" well... that would inconveniently be GCHQ:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/may/20/julian-assange...

>That doesn't stand up to any logical scrutiny

Straw men usually don't.
There is no need for an Act. The Police answers to the Crown, i.e. the Government, not to the Courts. Should the government accept his diplomatic status, they could tell the Police to step aside.
That depends on the cryptocurrency. Stellar already processes 1 cent transactions.
In any case, public chain cryptocurrencies are not the solution/upgrade you are looking for.
> Modern settlement and clearing is efficient. It's perhaps the most efficient part of the financial system; it is certainly the easiest to upgrade.

This isn't really right. Pre-trade (price discovery and trade matching) are about the most efficient parts around today - in equities in no small measure due to HFT. Post-trade (clearing & settlement) is pretty messy and error prone. Something like $50bn a year is spent on reconciliation processes, mostly in manual operations work. It's certainly reliable, but it isn't especially efficient.

It's also far from being the easiest to upgrade. See the incredible pain most markets go through when they face a mandatory move from T+3 to T+2 settlement. Making changes to post-trade procedures pretty much means a wholesale, industry wide change.

(As an aside, a shared database actually goes quite a long way towards alleviating some of the problems in clearing & settlement - the author makes it clear they see quite a bit of potential in private blockchains, just not public ones. And clearing & settlement is an area well served by private blockchains.)
There are no known solutions to the Two Generals problem at all, are there? It is proven to be not solvable isn't it?
I’d wonder that except that I’m finding I’m writing far fewer bugs

Fortunately there is some empirical data becoming available to support this (single data point) assertion:

“Functional languages have a smaller relationship to defects than other language classes such as procedural languages”
– A Large Scale Study of Programming Languages and Code Quality in Github

“Functional and scripting languages provide significantly more concise code than procedural and object-oriented languages.”
– A Comparative Study of Programming Languages in Rosetta Code
Well, that's interesting. I wasn't aware of that. I'll look into it. With that said, my theory is that unless most banks of the world adopt a similar technology within a reasonable timeframe (which is unlikely), a blockchain-solution will likely dominate.
Ah, you provided examples unlike the other comment I responded to. Thank you for that.

But if priced low-to-high the senior skates on that site start at $64.99 and go up from there. Assuming that the lower cost skates are not worth it, you get what you pay for and all that, what's wrong with the middle tier skates that are in the $100-$200 range? How long do they last once a kid's foot doesn't outgrow it every 3-to-6 months?
Best way to import or export the Git Configuration
The bank is getting an interest free loan from you, because they can. Why would they want to change anything?
In the same way that there is no formal theory for the exact shapes of proteins? I think it’s possible. But as with proteins, there are probably some general aspects of the problem that can be explained in simpler terms.
There was a warrant out for the guys arrest as far as I'm aware. IYO should we simply let people with arrest warrants walk free?

The correct place to answer the justice question is in a law court.

Basically you're asking the UK to [publicly and openly] forgo the rule of law.

Yes, it's highly annoying that Assange's actions have led to this cost in seeking to fulfil the warrant to have him answer for this alleged crime. But I can't see how we can maintain rule of law if we let people who have allegations to answer in court simply hunker down for a bit and avoid having to do so.

The British legal system may look like idiots to you, but that's immaterial. What they look like if the let Assange walk free is a system in which the rule of law doesn't apply to people who can muster the right social supporters.
I kind of see it the other way, IMO making unsourced comments (especially about complex and widely ignored subjects such as chinese history and invoking the Holocaust) should be frowned upon. It's too easy to cherry-pick facts to fit a narrative in these conditions. Not saying that's what the parent was doing, but he could've been doing it and I definitely lack the necessary knowledge to form my opinion. As such I kind of end up dismissing his comment because I simply can't reasonably trust it at face value.

I don't know about you but I'm not exactly super knowledgeable about Maoism, the "Great Leap Forward" and the state of chinese agriculture in the 1950's. Maybe I'm just being ignorant but given that this is a computer hacking forum I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect that most readers will be better versed in the subject than I am.

So yeah, Citations Needed as far as I'm concerned.
Exist – combine your data to better understand your life
Suggestion: (needs trust + fallback to a court of law) is less risky than (trust free + no fallback).

It's a moot point anyway - as has been said, bitcoin's a commodity not a currency.
Ask HN: Give up on my startup for high paying job?
I have a really difficult decision here and wondering if anyone has had something similar.

I've been working on my startup for about 2 years now. It's been a long, slow road as I'm a solo founder and have bootstrapped the company.

After 2 years, I'm finally starting to make some serious traction and have been picking up some big customers. I'm now able to steal customers from my competitors who have raised close to $100M, and I'm in talks for a funding round with investors.

I'm more or less broke though and have been struggling to get by. Then due to a bug in the system, I got hit with a huge AWS bill last month that wiped out most of my remaining runway. So I'm kind of fucked...

A friend reached out to me today who has been trying to recruit me to his company for years. He's offering a salary close to $400k. So really tempting being how broke I am.

I'm not sure what to do. Continue to work on my startup that's finally seeing progress, give up and take the job, try to do both? One idea is to take the job and hire someone to run my company...

Any thoughts?
I too have lived in the third world. But I also have cooked in a commercial setting for immune-compromised people, where I found health department guidelines enormously valuable.

> You're implying that the primary reason restaurants aren't making people sick, en masse, is because of rules and regulations.

No. The primary reason restaurants aren't making people sick is good hygiene all along the food supply chain. But good hygiene isn't easy. It gets harder the more industrial your operation gets. And short-term financial incentives cut against it, especially when you're working at scale.

I will happily eat from one of the probably-unlicensed hot dog carts in my neighborhood because a) I can inspect their kitchen, b) I see them around and so can know who's got a track record, c) I can see who's moving a lot of product, and d) they just can't carry a lot of inventory.

But I won't be nearly as casual with restaurants, because there is so much more opportunity for poor hygiene to impact food. Happily, I live in San Francisco, a city with vigorous restaurant inspection, one where the scores are posted physically in every restaurant. Here, I'll try new restaurants at the drop of a hat, because I'm not worried about shitting my guts out, something that happened to me repeatedly in my third-world eating adventures. My folks, who lived in Mexico for many years years, had a complicated set of heuristics around where to go and what dishes were most likely to be safe. Nobody in SF does that.

Your theory is that this is terrible for restaurateurs trying to do new things, but San Francisco is one of the best food cities in the world, with new, bold things opening frequently and often doing quite well. Unregulated sanitation strongly advantages chains, because people know they're getting a safe product. Strongly regulated sanitation enables entrepreneurs, because it removes safety from consideration when looking at a new restaurant.

People opening restaurants here complain about many barriers, but I've never heard one grumble about health code regulation. It's mostly what good cooks do anyhow, so they're happy to be held to a high standard, especially if it disadvantages competitors who would otherwise be cutting corners.
I assume Azure and AWS have some buddying up with Intel/Nervana and Nvidia counterstroke to Google TPUs. I can’t quite imagine what it will be though.
Irrational is not the way I'd frame rituals. There is always a reason for theSe things and the reason can be explained, which does not lie in the object of the ritual itself but the purpose. We give gifts from our travels because it tells our loved ones we were thinking about them even while we were so far away from them. It retrospectively bridges a time-space gap. We bring these objects home for ourselves for various reasons but one might be that the object somehow represents the place we were, maybe it has the look of the place, maybe it literally just acts as a physical reminder, or maybe we have a collection of those things already-- and a collection being an explorative fixation on the multitude ways that a particular type of object can express itself.
L.L. Bean Eliminates Its Legendary Lifetime Returns Policy
Of Bubbles and Blocks: the soft economy of cryptocurrency
Like 'skellera says in the sibling comment, heroin is an incredible time-sink. The methadone programme I am on (provided free by the UK NHS) is something that will let me gradually reduce the amount of heroin I'm taking, and eventually yes, get clean. After a couple on months in, I'm down to ~25% of what I was taking daily before, and that should reduce further to zero over time.

A methadone maintenance program will gradually increase the amount of methadone prescribed, while the user reduces the amount of heroin they take, until the user is 'stable' and no longer using heroin. After that I certainly would like to then stop taking methadone too, but in some cases the maintenance can continue indefinitely and it would still be considered a net positive outcome...
You're maybe taking an overly simplistic view of the needs of financial institutions.

In finance, the trustworthiness of the transactions themselves is pretty much a non-issue. The real issues are much more subtle. What's the likelihood that a counterparty actually has or can acquire the goods they're selling me? If I'm selling them a futures contract, what's the likelihood that they will have enough cash to make good on that deal at a future date? Does my bank have a healthy enough balance sheet that I will be able to get at my money when I need it?

These are all problems that the financial industry has solutions for. They are admittedly imperfect and of varying quality. But what's there is a far sight better than what blockchain has been able to offer, which is approximately nothing. Hopefully I shouldn't have to do more than mention the names MtGox and Tether to drive this point home.
Xiaomi Mi A1 Unboxing: 5.5“, Dual Rear Camera 12MP+12MP, 4GB RAM, and IR Blaster
If you'd kept reading, he'd have addressed your point.
Pretty ironic.

Making incentives to not spend 'cash'.
This is purely my experience and it is based on observations that are nearly two years old. Your mileage may vary. And since I've heard that Docker is much more stable, I plan on giving Docker another try (though on a side project) within the next six months.

That aside, the shortest possible answer is that Docker added significant amounts of complexity, without providing enough utility to make that additional cost worth it. As an example, at the time (I believe this has been fixed), you had to make sure that every machine that would work with Docker containers was on the exact same version of Docker. There was also significant overhead associated with making sure that the code inside of running containers was actually running. Finally, we found that some of the services we ran just simply didn't work well with Docker, so our deployments quickly became a mess of "this is Docker" and "this is raw."

Getting into Kubernetes certainly made Docker a more smooth experience, but that opened up another side. For me, the further I went down the Docker/Kubernetes path, the more I realized that I was implementing my own PAAS...at several times the cost of just using someone's PAAS!
Tesla employee explains why production hell is good