skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a lot interesting in here, but a few real howlers. In particular:

> Homo economicus, not only has it never existed, my contention is that if homo economicus evolved for some peculiar reason, it would die out very, very quickly or we would club it to death with sticks. It's not in our evolutionary interest to be rational optimizers, by the way. Any species that's rational also becomes highly predictable, and anybody who's highly predictable is rapidly dead because you can anticipate his behavior and game it. Sometimes being unpredictable is the best approach.

There is no reason that rational behavior necessitates predicatability. The author mentions game theory but based on this paragraph you'd imagine he'd never studied it. Has he never heard of a mixed strategy?

> In the commercial world it's not in the interests of consumers to be rational. If you imagine a world of rational consumers where they all bought cars based on some formula, which was fuel economy multiplied by acceleration divided by depreciation or whatever it may be, what they would end up with would be really, really terrible cars. Car manufacturers would immediately game their predictable and easily understanding preferences and produce cars, which met all the metrics laid down for a desirable car, but the cars would be ugly, uncomfortable, and generally ghastly, and no pleasure to own.

Apparently "rational" to this author means "taking one's actual preferences, and then throwing them out and replacing them by an easier-to-specify set of preferences that aren't your real preferences". Either the formula is their real preferences or it is not. If it is indeed their real preferences, then there is no problem; to say that this is their real preferences means they are truly indifferent to the fact that the cars are "ugly, uncomfortable, and generally ghastly", and so the conclusion that they would be "no pleasure to own" would be incorrect. If it's not, then there's your problem right there -- the problem isn't that they attempted to be "rational", it's that they attempted to make explicit their own preferences and got it wrong. You can't "game" someone's real preferences! Now it's true that any attempt to explicitly write down your real preferences is almost certainly going to go wrong, and it's probably a bad idea to attempt it, but the problem here isn't "rationality", it's making the mistake of deciding to act according to preferences you've written down rather than by your real preferences.

More generally: If you find yourself saying "it is not in your interest to be rational", something has gone wrong.
buying crypto is a sign of risky behavior on its own :)
With some hacking, probably. It'd probably be easiest to have the camera face your side, then just calculate the grades between hips, shoulders, and head. Obviously, you'd have to calibrate it to your posture and it wouldn't be spot on.
I just bought a car a couple months ago and the personal tech aspect was the last thing on my mind (sort of). As long as the radio has bluetooth I'm content as I can just use that to connect to play music/podcasts from my phone.
How does this differ from triplebyte?
You're right, apparently Plastiq reached out to a blogger and made the following statement: “mortgage payments are not an allowable category on Visa cards.”

My Citi is a MasterCard and I've never had problems paying my mortgage with it. I did just last month. So Visa and AMEX won't let you pay mortgages but MasterCard is ok with it.
>If the government / bank decides to freeze your assets, you could lose (temporary or permanently) everything. And there have been precedents in my country where the government abused this power.

because of civil forfeiture in the US, that's probably a bigger problem with cash than with bank money.
I feel click baited by the title.
All your graph says is that those coins are less valuable in terms of USD.

Transaction costs are specified by the protocol in satoshis, which is the base unit of Bitcoin. How much you can buy for one satoshi only depends on what people want to pay for it. We call this the coin value.

A coin without value is free to transact with. Run your applications on testnet if there are no other considerations.
That does sound nice.
The last rumoured explanation what they did was that they disable the emission control system when the AdBlue (carbamide) tank fill level drops under 10%. According to the EU laws a diesel car isn't allowed to start if the AdBlue is empty so they didn't use it anymore, so it never gets empty...
Pros:

1) You almost always will own a larger chunk of the core product, and it's easy to point your finger to details that you played a big role in figuring out.

2) At good (small) startups, the transparency is enough so that you have trust in your leadership and understand how big decisions are made. At big companies, it's generally far more convoluted.

3) You gain a skillset outside of proprietary internal tools. This is often overlooked, but if you get used to the internal tools at your company, it means your skills are not nearly as transferrable if you used other industry standards. This makes you more valuable for other jobs.

4) Startups can be a great way to broaden your horizons and jump into a new industry.

5) There are things you will learn building a startup that you really probably won't learn much of at a big tech company. The decision to go to a startup isn't just a compensation risk tradeoff. Examples: you are typically exposed to vastly different parts of the company much more, and you more often learn how to build things from scratch.

Cons:

1) Salary expectations honestly need to be lower, and you need to be excited about the job despite this. There are lots of comments here about this.

2) Benefits and perks are less, but I typically don't consider this as big of a deal as most people. But, it's pretty objectively better at the bigger well-known companies.

3) Company culture can vary tremendously, and there isn't a great way to know much about this without actually working there. OTOH, you can learn a lot more about the culture of the big companies because there's a better chance you know people there =).

4) The stress levels are generally higher at startups. Similarly, achieving a good work/life balance is definitely harder.

I've honestly always felt that human connections play a decent role in helping a person figure out what they want to do. If their social and/or professional bubble isn't into startups, then you already have quite a mountain to climb, even if you think they would love it (and even if they seem to be genuinely considering it).
Theres literally nothing preventing them from adding another port on the other side. It was a design decision not a technical limitation - there's plenty of ultralights the same size for a lot less money that have two USB-C's. It's been the single biggest complaint about the product. Calling it an edge case is a massive understatement.
This is exactly how overseas outsourcing works. The vast majority of the foreign people I work with are under arrangements just like you describe.

This is also similar to how a lot of small software development firms work; they develop web sites and mobile apps for companies on contract.
This is a suggestion I see given a lot, but something that falls flat to me personally. The analogy I would put forth is that it feels like reading lots of different furniture assembly instructions in the the hopes of getting better at assembling IKEA furniture. Such a thing is informative, but probably not nearly as much as just assembling lots of IKEA furniture. To those who make it a point to read lots of code, are there approaches you take or methodologies you use? Or certain things you look for? Or concepts you compare to them to in your native language?
Yeah, and I didn't mean to slam conferences. I enjoy going to conferences and find the well regarded ones beneficial (especially ones offering workshops and certifications).

My point was more about the token conference goer.

I have an acquaintance that has given the same talk at 13 different conferences over the last 12 months. I don't know how that benefits him or the company. He's also on twitter literally all day. I just don't get it (as I hypocritically type this out on HN).
That is hilarious. At least it gives you the option.
So, a different kind of dystopia then?
That mantra some of you repeat to yourselves all the time only gets you so far. The lack of self-awareness is probably part of how this mess got started in the first place.
No, AFAIU it only implies that such an attacker would have to face the multi million dollar cost of renting enough hashing power to guarantee that no-one could steal the 'loot' before the attack has settled. I didn't study the article a lot, but it seems the attack transaction(s) previously crafted can essentially be stolen by any node working with it, and that the costs sunk by the attacker to craft the could then be avoided by THAT attacker.
I dug that article up - really interesting read, and seems pretty accurate.

(Warning: long)
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/06/guns-and-states/
JSON5's support for unquoted keys seems like a misfeature. Not to mention that (by its nature) it has the same (lack of) support burden as any other new configuration format. If you're going to go through that frustration and incompatibility, why not pick something better suited to the job?
A multi-billion dollar bribe was offered, allegedly, "An introduction to a Russian businessman, by the Russian ambassador, the day after Leave.EU launched its campaign, who reportedly offered Banks a multibillion dollar opportunity to buy Russian goldmines."
Don’t forget the political risks of accepting crypto credit card transactions. I can see the post-crash Senate panel now:

Senator: what volume did you process?

Bank CEO: about $800M, madam.

Senator: $800M. And that didn’t concern you?

Bank CEO: well it was within parameters, madam

Senator: let me read you a letter from a single mother who bought $2000 of coins...

Etc.
When I was in elementary school (early 90s) our field day included a "tractor race" that was this - two kids in a box racing two other kids in a box. Of course you can't quite see where you're going, so it's crucial you and your teammate crawl at the same rate. Good times :)
> This happens on every platform, otherwise there wouldn't be a platform.

It's just a bit hypocritical of the Voat people to complain that another platform has arbitrary and carpricious censorship, and then to start their own platform that ostensibly has no censorship, only to instate their own arbitrary and capricious censorship.
Best i understand, they kinda are. But then the electronics at either end is responsible for negotiating what side is "up".
You only really need to slow charge when you get near to top or bottom end of the battery's charge. From around 20-80% charge you can charge the fuck out of you shit with no drawbacks, but if you try and push the those limits then you start seeing significant wear.
> but ultimately the road is a (very expensive) public good, (snip) big picture, we need many orders of magnitude more money on the problem than Domino's can ever provide.

I don't really understand this logic. Roads are cheap. Really cheap. (Yes, even if StrongTowns claims otherwise, roads are still really cheap). It's expensive to look at as a standalone figure, as everything is. But per taxpayer, roads are cheaper than military, cheaper than public education, cheaper than governance, and many more.

I can't speak to all municipalities, but I know on my own taxes, roads are even cheaper than public transit and cheaper than municipal garbage and recycling services.

If every citizen pitched in approximately one Netflix subscription worth of extra taxes, road repair would mostly be a solved problem. Yes, that's a lot of money, but it's not really a lot of money, as part of the context of the government budget.

Or to put it another way, Roads are so cheap that Domino's Pizza can afford to fix roads as a fun publicity stunt.
The Distant Executioner (2010)
Regardless the power has still fundamentally shifted from the private domain into public top-down control. Just because there are areas where lobbying has been influential in getting gov to help them doesn't make this not the case. If anything the corporations are then not private corporations as they were in the 1800s/early 1900s, but merely an extension of the government. They are being handed monopolies/oligopolies top-down, much like state owned corporations are sanctioned market power centrally.

So no, it's not the same. The corporation in a modern state-capitalist context doesn't have to provide value to the public to gain power and wealth, merely influence the right people in politics. That's way different than private industry, and potentially far more destructive and wasteful of resources (see: "private" prisons which depend completely on government for survival and have little of the benefits of market functions like competition and growth via customer value).

Not to mention special interest groups, unions, influential individuals, etc also have significant pull in the government as well. It's not just corporations. There have been plenty of economic intervention by the government, politicians have hardly been monopolized only by (pseudo private) corporate interests.
shrug I bought my first Mac in 2002 as I was quitting my job to go back to college. It was immediately obvious to me that Apple was going places, and I was seriously tempted to buy as much Apple stock as I could swing.

It would have paid off mightily.

That said, I couldn't afford it. It was a bad decision for me then, so I'm glad I didn't make that decision. It was the right choice, even though it would have been very profitable.
Pro: Remote friendly (sometimes). Startups can't pay the big $$ for good talent, so they're more open to remote employees. I've worked for a few startups where I never met anyone else on the team face-to-face, worked from our corners of the world, and we built cool shit.
Good points! Most of the time, though, employees draw a (slightly) bigger salary than the founders, at least until real funding (Series A or B) is obtained. Then unless the company changes its compensation model the balance definitely and clearly shifts: employees are taking bigger risks.
> The actual experience of consciousness clearly influences human behavior, otherwise we wouldn't talk about it.

The argument that epiphenominalists put forth is that zombies can also talk "as if" they had consciousness, with all the same arguments that we put forth that they are conscious, that qualia are important, etc. The difference is that they simply aren't conscious, they are just acting out a play, and what they mean by consciousness is not the same thing as what we mean.

If you think then that the concept of consciousness then becomes virtually vacuous, amounting merely to your first person, passive observation of an automoton that is your body moving through space and time, then you're not alone.
I've been contemplating switching to cash because it's easier to spend less, even when accounting for cash back, air miles, etc. I think this is why banks and businesses are pushing so strongly for cash less transactions only. People simply spend more this way because they are less aware of their spending. And if people use credit and don't pay things off every month, then there's interest too on top of the extra spending. Of course this is worth spending millions lobbying for, enacting, and enforcing. People are the only ones losing out on their money and privacy while companies win.
Treasury Sanctions Russian Federal Security Service Enablers
This and more is explained in the doco.

:help terminal-emulator-input
Have you tested this on the infamous stretch of California highway?
How are there no mentions of the other great beneficiaries of cardboard boxes in here? I speak, of course, of cats. Cat + box = happiest cat.
> It's also in response to an equally-hypothetical situation

It's not hypothetical. It has actually happened.

> I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that some large internet companies would subsidize plans...

Again, you don't have to assume. This has happened.

> I think that providing a cheap plan that allows access to some subset of the Internet targeted at people who wouldn't otherwise have internet is preferable to those people just not having access at all. Is that wrong of me?

Considering they would be losing a cheap plan that allows access to all of the internet in the process, yes, it is wrong of you.
IHOP Becomes IHOb, the International House of  Burgers
I concur with your concerns, but I think it's worth shaking up the situation we are in now. Technology has made capital many times more powerful than before, so it's a tough fight to be had. My hope would be that removing the cheap (illegal) labor from the US will disrupt the organizations relying on the cheap labor and result in increased wages, and/or moving some of production from the US to poorer countries, which would in the end help them without having to risk life and limb to come to the US.
Gold is "real" because the intrinsic qualities that underpin the value of gold are constant and inherent to its chemical composition. Conversely, the qualities that underpin the value of blockchain tokens are an emergent property of a complicated and expensive technical system that sits on top of an even more complex system (the internet) that is dependent on a functioning electrical grid (a brittle dependency in many places) all of which requires active maintenance at every level.

If you lock a nugget of gold away for 5000 years in an unbreachable time capsule, it will still be a pliable and lustrous metal when you dig up, if you do the same thing with a wallet private key, you can't even be sure if the token's network exists much less all the infrastructure that it depends on to even exist.
I see what you are saying, yes.

Also, in c++ if you try to use an empty value in an optional<T> it isn't using undefined behavior as dereferencing a null pointer would, plus with optional you get value semantics so things like copy are deep vs copying the pointer. Not sure about C# nullables, but I guess if you copy the .value member it is deep.
I live in the UK. Sometimes I spend less than £100/cash in a month
Ask HN: Best way to add “View in Browser Link” to emails with PostMark
Hi All,

I'm currently using PostMark for transactional email (very pleased with the service, fwiw!). At the moment, I'm stuck trying to think of the best way to go about adding a "View in Browser" link to some of the transactional emails that we send out. It's not surprising how many email clients are still blocking images or rendering CSS poorly, so I'm just looking for a way to give users the ability to view the email in the browser so it's displayed in the way it was intended/designed.

For some background, the application is developed in Python (the front-end is a flask app, and we're using Falcon for our back-end API).

I'm just after some advice for those who are either existing PostMark users on how they went about adding this functionality, or any other feedback on the best way to do this without over-engineering something which could have a relatively easily solution. I have a few ideas, but interested to see if there's a better way to go about doing this.

Thanks in advance!
Oof, this is just drama-mongering, made worse by cherrypicking the grumpiest thing from the email to put in the title. Not much point bringing that drama for a re-warming here.
Reading these kinds of articles really makes one thankful that we live in an era where books can no longer be burned. In these times, there is no despot powerful enough to wipe out all traces of any public information
"Contrary to what many have been led to believe, there is currently no evidence to suggest that Comcast made an explicit decision to slow down streaming traffic; rather, the slowdown resulted from high volumes of streaming video, which congested Internet links between the video content and the users themselves.

"Netflix claims that they were paying for transit to Comcast customers through their transit ISPs, and that they should not be responsible for upgrading the (congested) peering links between Comcast and the transit providers. The FCC declaration went so far as to claim that Comcast was intentionally letting peering links congest (see paragraph 29 of the declaration) to force Netflix to pay for direct connectivity. (Here is precisely where the confusion with net neutrality and paid prioritization comes into play, but this is not about paid prioritization, but rather about who should pay who for connectivity. More on that later.)

"Comcast claims that Netflix was sending traffic at such high volumes as to intentionally congest the links between different transit ISPs and Comcast, essentially taking a page from Norton’s “peering playbook” and forcing Comcast and its peers (i.e., the transit providers, Cogent, Level 3, Tata, and others) to upgrade capacity one-by-one, before sending traffic down a different path, congesting that, and forcing an upgrade. Their position was that Netflix was sending more traffic through these transit providers than the transit providers could handle, and thus that Netflix or their transit providers should pay to connect to Comcast directly. Comcast also implies that certain transit providers such as Cogent are likely the source of congested paths, a claim that has been explored but not yet conclusively proved one way or the other, owing to the difficulty of locating these points of congestion (more on that in a future post).

"The best technical solution (and what ultimately happened) is that Netflix and Comcast should interconnect directly. But, who should pay for that interconnection? Should Netflix pay Comcast, since Netflix depends on reaching its subscribers, many of whom are Comcast customers? Or, should Comcast pay Netflix, since Comcast subscribers would be unhappy with poor Netflix performance? This is where market leverage comes into play: Because most consumers do not have choice in broadband Internet providers, Comcast arguably (and, empirically speaking, as well) has more market leverage: They can afford to ask Netflix to pay for that direct link—a common Internet business relationship called paid peering—because they have more market power. This is exactly what happened, and once Netflix paid Comcast for the direct peering link, congestion was relieved and performance returned to normal."

I have to suggest that the anecdote is spot on. Cui bono, and all that.
> I think this whole idea of pushing "serverless" as a concept to engineers is deceptive at best and damaging at worst…

To me, serverless is as normal a progression of abstraction as anything in software development. What about FaaS crosses a line for you, where (presumably) PaaS doesn't?
I did consider it, but at least for me, it's only a negative. The key quote:

> [The repeal] will protect consumers and promote better, faster Internet access and more competition

First of all: I think the "competition" in question is along an axis that I'm not interested in; e.g. does this plan give me faster Netflix or unlimited Facebook. So now I have one more thing to worry about when picking a plan, which is very likely going to make me less happy with my choice.

The better/faster internet he's talking about is probably along these lines too, e.g a deal being struck with Netflix to make just Netflix faster.

So, for me as a consumer, I think this is terrible. I'm going to be spend more time thinking about my plan and be less happy it. It will also be worse in the sense that ISPs are spending time and money on a feature that I didn't want in the first place.

I also think this is terrible for new companies, but that's for another post.

A great book on this is The Paradox of Choice