skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm guessing it's more to do with transaction times than anything. A merchant needs to wait 10, 20 or 30 minutes to get a confirmation in Bitcoin, because he can't be sure there will not be a double-spend of the money until it is confirmed.

Technically, this has always been the case, but there was a false belief that 0conf transactions were secure, because Bitcoin clients rejected double-spend attempts by default (as a DoS protection). This prevention of double-spending unconfirmed transactions was never part of the protocol though, and it was made clear when Replace-by-fee was added, which shows how clients can easily replace existing transactions with new ones, without changing the Bitcoin protocol.

There's still a crowd who believe that 0conf transactions are fine, and RBF should be removed (eg, the Bitcoin Cash developers), but it's really just ignoring the reality that RBF is not an enforcible protocol rule, but a client-side policy in the software. It's probably fine to use 0conf for small transactions because it is manageable risk, similar to accepting credit cards where payments can be reversed.

Another possible solution to faster payments is with payment channels, where the risk of double-spending is mitigated by hashed time-locked contracts which are transmitted between parties and not broadcast over the Bitcoin network until one of the parties wants to reclaim their funds onto the Bitcoin network. Since the parties are just exchanging HTLCs over a TCP connection, they're practically instant, the fees are low or nil, and there is a potential privacy improvement by not revealing every transaction into the Bitcoin ledger. This is in development (minimally working on Lightning Network now), but proceeding quite slowly.

If Bitcoin is going to have widespread global usage, these problems need to be overcome so that it is as simple, or simpler to use than credit cards for the average user. It possibly is simpler to set up for merchants already, if they're technical enough, because they don't have to involve 3rd party payment processors.

The other side to it is that we take credit cards for granted in the developed world, and often miss that there are a billion or more people without banks in the developing world. These are the people who have the real use-case for Bitcoin. A single user can set up a Bitcoin node on a smartphone in some remote village, and suddenly bring banking capability to their entire village. I think that's a very strong use case. People are also using it to hedge against their national currencies which are being hyper-inflated by their own governments - as is happening in Venezuela right now.
Trump is creating a new enemy image out of Germany (German)
It is a weird feeling visiting Dubai because you see all the normal hustle and busyness of a large city.

Then you realise that you haven't seen a single owner - a single citizen.

Then you next wonder: how much does that occur in my own city and country (in a different form)?
GitHub enterprise is a walled garden: you can’t use it to host open source software.
Yes. The unsized trait object type is being renamed from `Trait` to `dyn Trait`.
It doesn't. It pays for someone else to come through and fix the mistake consumers are making down the road.

You make products that people don't bother to recycle, or that people easily mis-recycle into the wrong bin, you pay to fix it.

Example: plastic bag tax. We could just as easily tax envelopes with plastic windows in them.
Excellent Sheep (2014)
Inflation adjusted rent of 60k a year is 1.5-2 million of capital, depending on the risk you are willing to take.
Ask HN: What are your hobbies?
How do you spend your free time? Is it rewarding?
Probably because you're asking people to Google stuff for you? It's all public.

There are two women. One posted on Twitter the next day boasting about the awesome night she'd had with Assange. She later deleted the post but others had recorded it already. The other woman sent lots of text messages saying she wasn't raped and only reported Assange because she wanted him to take an std test, that the police had blown it up and seemed to want to get him.

http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-07/julian-assange-goes...

Moreover the women only filed these charges after they met each other and realised they'd both slept with him.

Look, I don't know why you're being so skeptical about this. False reports of rape are extremely common. Most credible studies I've seen peg it at 50% or higher. You should never take such an accusation at face value before a case has been won and in this case we don't even need a trial - the women both created documentary evidence they were lying and one even attempted to destroy it.
> This is pretty interesting. Did you ever have to interact/view the content?

I was 20 at the time, so yeah, of course.

The ethical concern, I agree. It's not something that you might want to bring up on a first date or when you visit your grand parents. So for that purpose I worked for "a web development company".

Your vibe with the boss, yeah, there are some black sheeps. But working for public companies later on I gotta say I had the most relaxed people working in my team. In general, ethical questionable (the kind that doesn't kill anyone at least) industries tend to have the nicest people I ever met professionally.
> early telephone users were probably "culty"

Telephones strapped onto the telegraph network. After that, they were “leased in pairs” [1]. It wasn’t until 1889 that switches were deployed. Only the could these bilateral-only phones begin talking to each other. (This is also when network effects began emerging.)

TL; DR Telephones, like most useful technology, established themselves in a small niche and then scaled from that base. Its success in its niche wasn’t driven by zeal, but by usefulness.

[1] https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-the-telephone-alexander...
Yes, active involvement in situation to make it worse and lack of involvement in situation to make it better are valued in a drastically different ways in most moral systems.
Monopoly and coercion are an essential part of regulation. You need regulation for the things you can't verify. I can only repeat myself in saying information (as opposed to data) is a public good and systematically undermining its production by government is bound to be catastrophic. Every criticism of how government works should lead us to say "let's fix government" not "let's get rid of government". Libertarians are like fish who want to abolish water because it seems to impede swimming...or a brain that wants to eliminate the heart because of its monopoly on pumping blood.
Maps reveal hidden truths of the world's cities [video with subtitles]
Only in America. The rest of the world doesn't have the DMCA.
I use https://github.com/rarcega/instagram-scraper

The rate limit by instagram is a bit tough, though, but as i only for archiving a few of my close friends, as it supports private accounts, that's OK.
Here is also a google translate link
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=h...
“Your mouth is saying you value me but my equity share says you don’t.” I might not say it out loud to the founder, but I’d be thinking it.
Ask HN: Can you recommend an online hang out?
Does anybody have any recommendations for a good programming Discord server or other real time hangouts? Is there are Discord server for HNers, for example?

I've tried a few servers that and they weren't too friendly or welcoming :(
A Croatian artist launched a controversial petition – and proved people will sign anything

http://www.calvertjournal.com/news/show/10196/sinisa-labrovi...
Ugh. These silly conspiracy theories don't hold up to reality. An overwhelming majority of the technical development community, wider community and industry was and still is supportive of Bitcoin's scaling roadmap. Trying to attribute that to Blockstream or to the moderation policies of a subreddit (among hundreds of online bitcoin communities) is just silly and not grounded on any facts.

See my previous comments on that topic for some more info:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15774816

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15033611

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15033489

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15026822

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13911867

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13627362
This seems like an excellent example of postmodernist notion of moral relativism getting too far.

Of course Aztecs didn't see this practice as evil - but why would we care? We have our own moral system, and I don't see any reason not to use it in this case.
I can't provide any resources to help you learn or about who to contact, just an interesting story I heard.

I think it was on Reddit, but a guy had hooked up all of the lights in his house to a ML box, that he trained based on his family's actions for a few weeks and then let it take over. The idea being that he has motion sensor data and the data for when lights are turning on and off feeding into this machine and making decisions on when to turn lights on and off, with a few rules; don't leave lights on indefinitely, etc.

He noted how at times the "AI" would turn on lights for a room he wasn't in on Saturday, but M-F he was in that room at that time. It also would make incorrect assumptions about which lights to turn on based on a variety of other factors. In those cases, he would manually turn the light off and the machine would note that it was incorrect.

Towards the end he said that the false positives were getting infrequent, maybe 1 or 2 day, whereas in the beginning they were occurred more often. I think there might have even been a calendar integration so the house knew when guests were coming over and that the light patterns were different.

I think there is a lot of room for growth in ML for this type of residential application. For example, a garden that could water itself, but also check the weather forecast and delay watering until after a storm has cleared the area, all while checking soil sensors and periodic photos of the garden to see if the plants are the correct size/color.

I'm really excited to see what uses will be possible once computing power makes ML trivial.
It really doesn't have anything to do with souls or wanting to survive. The implications of this form of immortality are not comforting to contemplate.
I use https://www.home-assistant.io/ to do a coupple of automations like switching everything which uses power off when I leave home to preserve energy and switching a CCTV cam on at the same time for safety reasons.

But one of the more usefull automations is a text2speach script which fires in the morning between 6 and 11, during workdays, when I'm not asleep but still at home, always 7 minutes before the next train to work leaves. This way I miss the train faar less often.
I did a similar thing, via an esp8266 device and a vibration sensor!

I also automated the display of tram-departures from the tram-stop next to my house with similar hardware.

Otherwise I setup some "wireless buttons" to trigger alerts/actions on my Linux desktop system, and record local temperature/humidity into a time-series database for tracking purposes.
A reference is appropriate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDrHkNgGQDs
A lot of these forgotten technologies are revived in various contemporary green movements - such as Permaculture and Earthship, for example.

Permaculture attempts to learn as much forgotten technology as possible and re-apply it in a modern context for agriculture - the Earthship movement, same but for architecture.

I think the biggest barrier to these forgotten technologies is the stigma around the cultures they attract, as well as the hubris around the technologies they supplant. Its very difficult to get someone who has grown up with the Monsanto mindset to consider Permaculture concepts as a viable means of agricultural production - likewise with Earthship.

Stigma and Hubris seem to be the number one causes of lost technology, imho.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship
We have some battery-powered motion-detector LED lights about 1ft from the ground in our bathroom and hallway.

Makes walking around late at night less painful. (Children's toys end up everywhere!)
The border between The Netherlands and Belgium has been open for "ages" (as long as I can remember); way longer than the EU.
I don't care what programming language a native program is written in, why should I care what web applications are written in?

As long as modules written in different languages can call into each other, having a broader choice of programming language is a good thing.

I think the majority of 'application style' webpages will have their core parts compiled to WASM from a language that also compiles to native machine code (for the 'native' version of this app -- actually native, not running through Electron that is), and the glue code and HTML UI scripting written in JS (or another scripting language that compiles to JS).
You forget that if you live and work in US, your cost of living is also the same as any native. 1/15th would only be attractive to person in India at Indian prices.

Besides, why would someone take 1/15th, if they can have the whole thing? I mean, by a similar logic, you'd expect people in US readily undercut each other at 1/2th, 1/4th etc in a race to the bottom. But we don't.
Just reading the exchange with "botg" is really all the information you'll ever need to know about Filezilla, using it (bundled or not) would just be gross negligence after that.

Here is an alternative: https://winscp.net/eng/index.php
Your banking password isn't that sensitive, because banks are used by regular people who don't have any conception of good security practices. The worst case scenario of your bank login credentials leaking are really not that bad.

Your personal email account is probably a million times more sensitive. It contains enough personal information to get your identity stolen a thousand times over, and once your email has been compromised there is no way to ascertain the damage.
A quarter is irrelevant when we are talking orders of magnitude compared to current social programs.
Top Best Cameras for Vlogging with Flip Screen
It's not a tax reduction then. It's a bluff call on a tax designed specifically to hit them (and Starbucks).
It seems that you're more concerned with giving value judgements to Aztecs and Spanish, and their comparison – but why is it relevant, or even interesting, at all? Just like in a case where article's author took to Twitter to announce that "human sacrifice wasn't horrific" (which it of course was), I just don't understand why people can't discuss history without fixating on moral value judgements. Do you have a horse in this race, or something?
Actually the last time the French government was toppled was in 1958. The communists had become the largest party, and French officers, unhappy with decolonization, especially in Algeria, seized Corsica and planned to invade Metropolitan France in Operation Resurrection.
> Apple - You can argue Apple, the hardware company, is a cult. The fans are rabid in their support for the company. Often the discussions are not at all civil and in this particular case there is no financial incentive.

According to Wikipedia, Apple has sold 1.2 billion+ iPhones. Are you going to tell me that all of those people are going to “rabidly” support Apple?

No way.

What you are seeing is a very vocal very small minority.
> I am generally curious as to why horses became extinct in North America

“The causes of [North American horses’] extinction have been debated. Given the suddenness of the event and because these mammals had been flourishing for millions of years previously, something quite unusual must have happened. The first main hypothesis attributes extinction to climate change. For example, in Alaska, beginning approximately 12,500 years ago, the grasses characteristic of a steppe ecosystem gave way to shrub tundra, which was covered with unpalatable plants. However, it has been proposed that the steppe-tundra vegetation transition in Beringia may have been a consequence, rather than a cause, of the extinction of megafaunal grazers.

The other hypothesis suggests extinction was linked to overexploitation of native prey by newly arrived humans. The extinctions were roughly simultaneous with the end of the most recent glacial advance and the appearance of the big game-hunting Clovis culture. Several studies have indicated humans probably arrived in Alaska at the same time or shortly before the local extinction of horses” [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_the_United_States
Don't believe everything you read online, especially in the Bitcoin space, which is flooded with nonsense, conspiracies and deception promoted to push agendas. I highly recommend you do some more independent research before taking your parent comment at face value.
I want to add that kindness should be paired with gratitude. I know that people shouldn't expect anything back from kind acts but sometimes being kind isn't so easy. When someone is grateful for your kindness it makes things it easier. In long relationships showing gratitude is even more important.
Can you please elaborate on how you do this? I've been looking for ways to automate that.
At this point in my life, I would say I have two hobbies; Music and Netflix.

While I don't play in any bands currently, I have in the past and definitely want to again. In the meantime, I keep a guitar within arms reach at all times and frequently noodle while doing all sorts of things. I also mix the entire production for my local church. Sometimes I mix FOH, other times I mix a separate feed for the livestream online from the back. It's a decent sized production with 1 or 2 guitars, drums, 2 keyboards, percussion, violin, bass, and anywhere between 4-8 singers with microphones. On occasion we also have a choir of 30~ people. I also used to do a lot of home recording, but living in apartments in recent years has made that tough since my tube amps sound best at higher volumes.

I don't know if I should be ashamed or embarrassed about my other "hobby", but I watch a stupid amount of Netflix/Twitch/YouTube on a daily basis. Easily 3+ hours a day. In recent weeks, I have even taken up playing my guitar along to the music in movies/tv shows, matching up the key and noodling to whatever is playing in the background. That drives my wife crazy and is probably the reason she doesn't sit and watch with me.

I don't know why I watch so many videos, besides boredom, but I would like to find something more productive to do. It used to be writing code, but I quickly got burnt out after landing my first full time development job. After going remote it got even worse. I often wonder if getting out of the house to code would be more productive, but I can't justify the expense yet of a co-working space.
Does not really work... downloads the same 5 pictures over and over again.
Government bonds are stable if you ignore tail risk. Governments tend to collapse eventually, at which point your bonds are not a great store of value.

Bitcoin is however similar to a government bond in that it a) has value, b) is not directly useful for consumer transactions. Also, I dunno that behaving like money can be put in such stark binary terms.
It's Automattic, WordPress parent company. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14536410
As along as everything else is unequally shared in the world, distribution of coins will merely reflect that as it's a medium of exchange. Even if material wealth was reset and equally redistributed, the same processes that caused it to be unequally distributed in the first place, will apply again.
>Even the most critical observer must concede that these distributed networks are novel and interesting.

Frankly that's besides the point these days. Lurk in cryptocurrency subreddits for a while and see that hardly anybody talks about the technology anymore, it's all about "memes" and very dubious projections. Things like this for instance: https://i.redditmedia.com/51566F6-xO0zIBDD7HzYRZyEGhDpMqQpAr... (fresh off the bitcoin subreddit front page).

I mean, look at TFA, part of the confusion stems from the fact that many people in the community simply didn't know how PoW functions (or even what it is in the first place). It's not about technology anymore, it reads like a Multi-Level Marketing forum. Nobody cares about what it is, they just want to get rich.
Don't panic Hackers have not found a way to bypass the iPhone passcode limit
This is a completely, outrageously false version of events, and it is very frustrating trying to debunk it for non-crytpo geeks who haven't followed things.

There is a group of "altcoin" (ICO and non-Bitcoin coins) investors who have put together a terrific social media team and spread nonsense like this. They run a "The_Donald"-esq subreddit called /r/btc who's head moderator is Roger Ver, convicted felon (sold explosives online and renounced his US citizenship). Somehow Roger Ver bought the domain Bitcoin.com, and has been using it to promote a different coin, "Bitcoin Cash", and outright saying it "is Bitcoin". Of course He's heavily invested in sites like Shapeshift which allow you to buy altcoins... and I assume links like this (posted by"singularity87" who is a top /r/btc poster) are designed to spook people into switching to ETH, Bitcoin Cash, etc. It's bizarre nonsense.
>But what about the possibility that the majority of people prefer to be passive consumers?

By any reasonable measure, we're in a renaissance of creativity. Most people in the creative industries are complaining of a total oversaturation of talent - too many bands, too many authors, too many artists, too many indie game developers, too many stand-up comedians.

Maker culture and 3D printing has created a consumer market for CAD/CAM software, which no-one in the industry foresaw even a decade ago. By some measures, musical instruments and recording equipment are a bigger market than the recording industry. It has never been cheaper or easier to turn an idea into reality; there's abundant evidence that people are grabbing that opportunity with both hands.

YouTube is full of crap, but it has also revealed a huge amount of demand for deep and meaningful content. My YouTube subs box is full of artisans, mathematicians, poets and monks. Some of them have seven-figure subscriber counts and five-figure Patreon revenue, some of them upload simply for the joy of sharing something that they love. It's easy to be cynical, but YouTube is a place of boundless magic and wonder.

The internet isn't perfect, but it's not all doom and gloom either. The internet is full of assholes calling each other nazis, but it's also full of people sharing skills and making meaningful connections. Sturgeon's Law isn't going away, but we really have removed the stultifying layer of gatekeepers that controlled access to the media. There's an uncomfortable degree of consolidation and centralisation on the modern internet, but MySpace and Snapchat stand as testaments to how fickle and fragile that power is.

To quote Ted Nelson in this interview: "The computer is a projective device, it is a Rorschach test. Anyone will see in it that which is of the most concern to him." If we choose to spend our time on the internet decrying the negative rather than contributing to the positive, we will get exactly what we deserve.
If that's true, then pity the mobile users on a capped data plan.
Ask HN: Which is your one favorite Doctor Who episode, and why?
I made a script that scrape many job offer websites and send a notification email when some custom rules match.
Try to watch network requests in developer console of your browser. Sometimes there's a simple REST interface behind that JavaScript and all you need is to login and issue one request. Extra security verification steps probably won't let you do that, though, if implemented correctly.
Not all people in the cryptocurrency space are followers of the cult either, though