skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tether has been viewed as a weak-link in the crypto ecosystem and rumors of a potential Tether "scam" have swirled around since at least last year. People have speculated that Bitfinex (the company behind Tether) did not have the $2B in cash on hand to back the $2B worth of Tether (symbol: USDT which is supposed to trade at roughly 1:1 with the USD) in circulation.

They were subpoenaed, but so far no charges have been brought against them. It also looks like they recently changed banks, with Tether now using Deltec [1][2], a 72-year old Bahamas-based institution registered with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of the US Department of the Treasury.

As far as that goes, I think it's a good thing that Tether has established a relationship with a reputable institution. It also shows that they are committed to anti-money laundering.

As far as fees go, it looks like unless you've got more than $1 million in USDT, you're looking at 0.4%-1% withdrawal fees. Meh. I mean, doesn't sound terrible...and honestly, it seems less and less likely now that USDT will crash the market (not that it needs any help with that at the moment).

[1] https://tether.to/tether-banking-relationship-announced/
[2] https://www.deltecbank.com/
More votes? People can change their minds. That's the usual way democracy works.
They offer Lightsail for exactly this purpose.
Sounds like this was built for DigitalGlobe (announced last year they are going all in on AWS and moved ~100PB library into AWS). Satellite directly to S3 sounds perfect for them.
By emotional argument I meant an argument whose strength lies in its effect on emotions, as opposed to its rational strength. Perhaps that's a weasel term. But I tried to back up my assertion that introducing bias can't remove bias.

> mechanisms seeking to remove bias of physical characteristics will still allow bias for class characteristics.

If by "bias for class characteristics" you mean "objective standards", I call that nonsense. By definition, an objective standard will cease to be objective once a subjective-based alteration is introduced.

If an objective standard happens to favor one class over another, it's not the standard's problem. The problem lies in whatever caused that class to do worse.
Good point and this is btw. exactly where Nvidia is heading. There will be a point in the future where you just program kernels and/or map/reduce functions and/or library functions and then call them to execute on a GPU cluster, passing in a configuration for network topology, node-level topology (how many GPUs, how are they connected) and chip-level topology (grid+block size).

The address space will be shared on the whole cluster, supported by an interconnect that’s so fast that most researcher can just stop caring about communication / data locality (see how DGX-2 works).
Short examples aren't indicative of how fonts look in longer text or even in different short lines (headings and such). It's a persistent problem when evaluating fonts on font sites: e.g. I can't try a longer text on Google Fonts.
> I do not morally condemn anyone who works at Google.

How can you say this when those that build, even small parts, of surveillance technology are directly contributing to oppression?

Workers absolutely have a moral obligation to what they work on. This notion that they're not responsible for this is horrifically wrong.
> depositing USDT into Bitfinex has always immediately credited your USD balance

This doesn't mean anything if that U.S. dollar balance cannot be redeemed for actual U.S. dollars. Saying "I have 1 USDT" or "I have 1 U.S. dollar on deposit at Bitfinex" is roughly equivalent--both depend on Bitfinex honoring its end of the deal.
The app's always connected to the network. There are many attack vectors which cannot be predicted. Vulnerable dependencies are only one of them, we should try to see the bigger picture.
>Does a user benefit if Google facilitates government spying?

This is irrelevant because Dragonfly is about bringing search to China, not handing over access to user data to the government.

The Chinese firewall blocks 18k websites. The Right to be Forgotten is censoring way more information than China's firewall because it is allowing government officials to specifically target and censor all information about themselves, not just generic websites.
If you want to send Rich a little bit of money, and get some swag, you can buy it here: https://clojure.org/community/swag

The far more important and long-reaching gestures would be: expressions of thanks, and standing up for creators whenever unwarranted demands are made upon them.
From |0 to |1: Why quantum technology is bound to rise
Ya this flowchart really presents a false dichotomy between a Bitcoin style block chain and a traditional database. There are many other crypto currency data structures that could be used in different ways to achieve various goals. (Directed acyclic graphs etc)

One implemtation I would like to see is a consensus algorithm applied to a multiplayer p2p game to prevent hacking.

Another implementation could be for digital assets like textures/skins, 3d models, and animations. This could take something like steam workshop and make it distributed.
I can see how you might have parsed it that way, but I think he meant "(API for everything) renaissance" rather than "API for (everything renaissance)" (which makes a lot more sense if it was an API that related to 16th century paintings or something).
> they cashed out everyone's Tether balances to fiat?

"Cashing out" means receiving hard currency. It appears Bitfinex plans on converting Tether balances into Bitfinex brokerage balances. This still depends on Bitfinex paying out dollars for its obligations, regardless of whether they're cryptocurrency Tethers or broker balance entries in a spreadsheet.
I saw a video the other day with Mark Wahlberg's daily schedule. The dude goes to bed at 7:30pm and gets up at 2:30 am to workout. That's insane!
Professor Iris Bohnet of Harvard wrote a fascinating book called "What Works" that you might find interesting. What I really like about the book is right from the jump Bohnet basically says all this "diversity training" and "PC culture" stuff is a waste of time and an uphill battle. We all like to pretend we're unbiased but Bohnet tells the truth from the outset: everyone has biases. The book focuses on systems that emphasize equal opportunity and remove some of those inherent biases we all have.[1] Bohnet's premise is that we'll get better results if we stop designing systems with the faulty assumption that most people/systems/institutions aren't biased in some way or another.

There's a chapter about "blind auditions" that Orchestras began to implement in the 1970's that you might find interesting.[2] After reading that chapter I remember wondering how much we're overthinking a lot of these issues and whether we might be overlooking some pretty easy changes that could have a significant impact.

One interesting fact from the blind auditions study was that even without being able to see the musician they were able to demonstrate bias (likely unconscious) when women wore high heels to their audition because the sound gave away their gender. It's really fascinating some of the ways we unconsciously "judge" those around us.

[1]https://hbr.org/2016/07/designing-a-bias-free-organization

[2]https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/...
Always how they got away with that with the Eu's Data Protection laws and now GPDR.

Do I have an overriding "need" to know what my neighbour is earning and its certainly open to abuse eg other UK media organisations using it as a stick to beat the BBC with.
Liver: the only internal organ that can fully regenerate
“In some buildings, there are more ‘Black Lives Matter’ posters than there are actual black people...”

Those posters are divisive in and of themselves.

Best to have no racially themed posters at all.
Optical drives take up lots of space, use a lot of electricity, and have moving parts that can break easily in a portable device like a laptop. A computer like the Macbook Air would simply be impossible with an optical drive.

I'm willing to make that trade, especially given how uncommon DVD's were even by the time the MBA launched. (Although I'll note that my desktop has a BluRay drive and I wouldn't have it any other way.)

What benefit am I getting in exchange for the loss of a headphone jack? An extra couple millimeters of screen real estate?
""Magnitsky act: behind the scenes" where Bill Browder allegedly laundered his corporate holdings for tax fraud through various handicapped people, and eventually gangsters who were conveniently murdered."

Look, I'm not saying that's a bullshit documentary, but that's literally the kind of smear campaign Putin would execute to try to get talks of the magnitsky act thrown out. I wouldn't take any of that information as factual.
There is hashbase, which is open source with a hosted option: https://hashbase.io
I made an argument about removing the headphone jack, not about making one thing easier or another thing harder. My argument was about a consequence of removing the jack.

I know no one was being forced to use wired headphones before. That has nothing at all to do with an argument about the consequences of removing the jack.
You don't have to go far back but yes, its not infallible logic.
I largely share that point of view, but I view leaving the EU as a bad thing since I think it's extremely unlikely that the UK parliment will unilaterally abolish tariffs after we leave. We're likely to end up with more tariffs than when we started.

Brexit is a step towards the global optimum, but we're going to get stuck at a local pessimum.
Lightning App Security and Architecture
1) If you need metrics to answer those questions you have a larger problem than metrics can solve.

2) That's an argument for literally any possible metric. You could make an equally passionate argument that looking at and keeping track of free/busy times on calendars or soda consumption or how full the garbage cans are on the floor as an indication and early warning sign that something changed. It doesn't mean those are good things to track. Pay attention to the things that matter. Align whole teams and organizations around those things. Don't let them get distracted with metrics that don't matter.

3) Metrics are a double edged sword and influence behavior. If you're tracking the wrong things, you will get the wrong things.
I've been deploying Rust to AWS Lambdas for months for a side project. I chose rust because it's just my favorite language to work in - I'm very productive in it. I also really wanted predictable, solid performance, and Rust is a great fit for that.

I don't really like any of the 3 languages you mentioned though.
We're not getting stronger as a country.

A handful of corporations are gaining massive influence over our political and legal systems. The "small farmer" is precisely what our country was founded on and was considered our strength. It allowed us to be something closer to a true democracy as opposed to the functional oligarchy we're running at this point. You're not an independent citizen if you have to depend on an employer to keep you fed, sheltered, and healthy.

It's only more efficient if you consider "generation of theoretical GDP" the ultimate badge of efficiency. If it's sitting in some banker's pocket, extra productivity doesn't really benefit anyone.
Right - and so you get same situation that you have in C++-land (if I'm understanding you correctly) where compiling arbitrary rust programs with the distro compiler level may benefit you if you want to depend on the system-provided rust shared libraries.
Interesting. At first I thought you meant Bentley Descartes, the CAD/BIM/GIS/photogrammetry reality modelling software. It's entirely different, though, and interesting that the two are sort of related and have the same name.

Labs looks very interesting, very lofty yet achievable goals.
I don't think walking away from all your stock vs. a company walking away from a deal that would account for a small fraction of its profits is a fair comparison.

A more fair comparison would be asking if employees would be willing to have their stock decrease in value 10% in exchange for their company being more moral. I expect many employees would take such an exchange, although not all.
NOAA has (though it may have changed recently) had regulatory control over some types of data collection, such as for any imaging data captured, and indeed had requirements on encryption, both on the link later and even on disk and data encryption for groundstation sites not owned by the operator. It's not a standardized specification for how things are encrypted and it doesn't apply to all data, but there is a process.
This is my biggest problem. Even across Apple's own line, you have iPhones with only lightning ports, and iPads with no lightning ports. If I use headphones across those different devices, I'll have to unplug and replug the adapter constantly. Which means that adapter is going to get lost.

This is all such an unnecessary problem.
fighting it gives it attention and validity, its the streisand effect. And Julian Assange lives in the UK but was still a tool of the kremlin's propaganda wing. what's your point?
Cryptocurrency Portfolio Rebalancing: Bittrex Analysis
none of those links support your insane claim about genetic experimentation on babies
Allegedly the secret to Google's success is hiring (and more importantly, retaining) the best of the best. Presumably Dragonfly work can be done by any H1B, but all the people who no longer want to work at Google would impact plenty of other projects.

There's a difference between your coder who can build you a chat app and a coder who can keep you on the bleeding edge of innovation. In theory.
I'm not an expert, but I think nuclear "waste" that's radioactive enough to be dangerous can be recycled to generate more electricity.
It's just a factual question.

And it illustrates a basic concept, which is that redistributing money isn't value-neutral. Some distributions are better for society than others.

You can't just say free trade takes money from this group and gives it to that group and perhaps ekes out a modest efficiency gain and conclude your analysis there.

It matters who wins and who loses, and by how much.
Test Doubles in Swift: Dummies, Fakes, Stubs, and Spies
The number of participants in these efforts are so small and unrepresentative, to a point where it is not material and these companies should not change their direction. It is unclear to me why the media gives these stories so much attention. I have to think it starts with these activists secretly working with 1-2 journalists who are similarly politically-motivated, which then leads to the story being given prominence on a couple media outlets. And from there it makes the rounds, even though it is an undeserved amplification of a non-story.

There are FAR more employees who either do not share these same views or are OK with the company pursuing its own profit-maximizing agenda independent of employees' personal political views. For example with workers not willing to build image recognition algorithms that assist/augment the capabilities of joystick-drone-operators, I bet there are a much larger number that are totally willing to work on it, and they are signaling that by not participating in employee activism even when it is socially/professionally safe to do so.

As for the others who are not just indifferent but are for the company's actions in pursuing new opportunities - they're just not screaming about it due to the intolerance exhibited by far-left progressives at these companies, especially with all the purposeful/malicious leaking,the Twitter outrage machine, and other vicious tactics used by the intolerant activists. And as a left progressive, I think that sort of behavior undermines all of us, and should not be tolerated.
Then you re exaggerating it. Yuo can't even do that between EU countries, which are literally a single market. Imagine spending your next mediterranean vacation with just your Swish app, you 'd probably starve. The thing is, whatever good infrastructure sweden has built, it will take a looong time for similar tech to be adopted throughout much of the world (and i m pretty certain it will meet a mountain of resistance from rent-seeking banks). Instead, cryptos only require that the other party can download a wallet app, which is arguably easier.
Ask HN: Are grants sustainable for supporting open source projects?
I posted the other day about how to sustain Open Source projects via donations and you guys gave great feedback:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18527510

After that post I'm considering applying for grants from organizations like Mozilla, Alfred P. Sloan, Knight Ridder, etc.

The app I'm developing doesn't really lend itself to being financially supported by corporations like the way Google supports Kubernetes.

Polar (https://getpolarized.io) is a personal document repository for PDF and web content and supports offline caching of pages locally for annotation and syncs with Anki for flashcard support. It's designed so that students and researchers can maintain their own personal knowledge repository for their entire life - not just while they're in school.

Most people forget 80% of what they learned while taking classes. I want to change that - mostly because I want to be the smartest guy in the room and I dislike forgetting things - which is only human.

The problem is that the grant application process is LONG. I suspect if I applied now I'm not going to see any money to support Polar for at least six months.

There HAS to be a middle path here. Technology just moves too fast to wait six months and it seems like there must be a better option.

Additionally, I would LOVE advice from anyone who has gone down the grant application process before. Specifically:

- Can I apply for more than one grant at the same time?

- How much work is involved in the grants. Many people were saying that you have to network and basically get your grant pre-approved by networking before it's actually approved by a committee. Seems like a ton of work.

Raising angel funding is another option but it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation right now as our initial user base isn't big enough to attract and angel. This might change soon (hopefully) as I'm trying to grow the community as fast as possible.
Include the password in the URL fragment like mega.co.nz does.

I built something similar actually, you might want to look at it:

Source: https://github.com/CGamesPlay/ipfs-fileshare

Published version: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmaP8v2wzJjbcvnhkJRaecCrHDGAQdYHcr6MH3Y...

Example encrypted file: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmaP8v2wzJjbcvnhkJRaecCrHDGAQdYHcr6MH3Y...

(I wrote this a while ago and it doesn't seem to be working at the moment :-/)
That's not uncommon. Only very high-profile Putin opposers disappear.
Agreed, though a bit provocative. ;)

I worked with some numerical analyst/software people before. Although their C++ code looks modern and fancy, the effort to install all the dependencies and finally utilize those is not worthy of the trouble. Eventually, it's all about solving the problem efficiently, not the appearance.
NPR's Book Concierge (2018 Book Recommendations)
I also forgot to post the links to Polar:

Here's the main site:

https://getpolarized.io/

And our Github (give us a star!)

https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf

and our Discord:

https://discord.gg/GT8MhA6
There's also the B2C communication side of things. Businesses would be willing to pay to communicate with their customers via WhatsApp. Disclaimer: Until this year I worked for a company building apps to let businesses communicate with their customers via SMS and Facebook. Support for WhatsApp was the next most asked-for platform from our customers and prospects.
The difficulty is you have to achieve traction and scale to compete with a company that's making tons of money exploitatively and user-hostilely strip-mining their own system and running on low margins with high reinvestment due to their scale and (stock market) reputation. Good luck.

See also: voice interfaces. Your nifty paid version that's entirely local? Good luck competing against free, cloudy, and data-stealing, especially when the data-stealing helps the competing services get better. There's a reason local voice-to-text seemed to be getting really good for a while then suddenly dropped into obscurity.

See also also: any paid (or even free and volunteer-based!) website or service that might compete with ad-paid and/or information-harvesting and free. Uphill battle to gain user-share. You'll almost certainly fail, because information-harvesting is a possible business model and no matter how much people hate it they can't organize to stop it, realistically, because game theory (ahem, which is we have governments, in the short-short version)
It has increased the speed of wireless headphones uptake.

You can call it dumb all you like, but whether something is dumb or not is completely separate from whether it is courageous or not.

I'm amazed by people hating something so much that therefore, in their minds, makes it impossible to have other qualities that might have a positive connotation.
Just an FYI that the funds for the NIST time service (including radio stations WWV and WWVH and their associated data streams) are possibly in jepoardy for the 2019 Federal budget:

http://www.arrl.org/news/nist-fy-2019-budget-would-eliminate...
Welcome to the Satellite Hoax - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6iXxaRjfEY
Right now if you buy a macbook and an iPhone, you will get:

An iPhone with no headphone jack,
a pair of lightning headphones,
a lightning to usb charging cable

A macbook with a headphone jack and no usb ports.

Out of the box you cannot charge your phone with your laptop, or use either headphones for either. They could very well be made by separate companies. They have Zero out of the box connectivity with each other. I don't care what anyone has to say about usb-c and the future: this is a step backwards for those of us in the present.
Are you arguing against intellectual property?
You know that wasn't his point, at all.
5) The housing crisis affects the business finances too: You need to pay your workers enough to live in the area of your business. In California, this is a major burden.
I am mystified as to what people are buying that they have such problems with fakes and knock-offs on Amazon. I've had Prime for around a decade, and I can remember exactly once where they screwed up and sent me a wrong package.
Yeah I just didn't see any box to put in a frequency on that page though, although you can pick any NORAD ID. Maybe this is part of the "contact us" procedure. I'm also guessing that the USSPACECOM will tell Amazon to not let you try to follow anything classified.
That was my reaction from the get go... none of it was legally binding, why make more if it than it was? The reply I usually got was that politicians would have to do it to not "lose credibility" (the one they don't have in the first place), or to "get re-elected" (which is not actually anything they technically have to do).

To me it seemed like people hypnotizing themselves to sleepwalk into (IMO) pointless, useless harm, and that also came from people who said they were against Brexit. "This really sucks, but there's no going back now". Most of the (online) discussion (I saw) was about whether a Brexit would be good or bad, but that it would happen seemed a foregone conclusion.
> T3s are probably a faster and cheaper option for the "RPi in the cloud" use-case.

Cheaper? Yes. Faster? Only in bursts.

The advantage of the A1 instances is you get a full CPU core that you can run at 100% usage 24/7 for ~$18/month. A t3.small is ~$15/month, but you can only use the CPU at 100% for a fraction of the time.

If you're frequently pegging the CPU and so a T3 doesn't work for you, your cheapest option is a C5 which runs ~$61/month.

A1 fits right in between the two needs.
At what point do you consider it acceptable to speak out against something you consider ethically wrong?