skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article is called "The Why of Y", but there is no discussion of "why", just a derivation of the Y combinator. Pun aside, it should really be called "The How of Y". In fact, "how" is used four times in the first two sentences:

> Did you ever wonder how Y works and how anyone could ever have thought of it? In this note I’ll try to explain to you not only how it works, but how someone could have invented it.

Is there a "why"? That is, why would anyone care about the Y combinator? There's theoretical interest, of course, if you're into that kind of thing. It's also a great party trick, particularly if you're able to quickly reproduce it in Python or Javascript. Beyond that there is just one real-life, practical use I have ever found for the Y combinator. I was messing around with Smalltalk and I wanted to write a basic recursive factorial function. But Smalltalk requires some keyword to be able to do recursion, and I didn't know it. However, I did know how to use anonymous functions (I think they call them blocks), and I also knew the Y combinator, so I was successfully able to implement my recursive function without actually using recursion.
the author is making a point about the comparison to a transaction on a visa network. transaction on a visa network cannot happen without the rest of the traditional financial industry. I think the closest blockchain tech to a visa network will be lighting network, which is still WIP.

EDIT: Lightning Network potentially will be able to process much-much more transactions per second than visa network with the same usage of underlying bitcoin blockchain. Essentially Lighting Network allows you to create easily scalable and distributed version of visa network.
Well they also gained much of that value in the same year—looks exactly like an asset getting overvalued by a lot of people followed by a dump. I don’t think this is contrary to a deflationary currency—it’s not like they only move in one direction.
other things applying downward pressure to high priced RE markets nationwide: the new tax law that reduces a taxpayer's savings from mortgage and property tax deductions, and rising mortgage interest rates
Inside Rust's Async Transform
How about VCs? Don't they fund projects based on future value?
It's something many of us don't really think about, but it ends up being quite convenient.

For example, citizens of most countries cannot book a multi-leg trip (not single booking) without a visa, simply because that would require going through passport control to board the next leg.
Practical advice for teaching kids how to program https://opensource.com/life/15/6/6-tips-teaching-kids-code
Sorry to hear that. I just tried on firefox 63 and it works. Which OS?
I'm glad you found it useful
While the stats are accurate, the self selection may not represent the pop at large.
My example of one determined woman even in the 1800's shows that an interested, determined person can contribute, hell if she could back then, then it has only gotten easier.

I think the under representation of women in science and engineering is more down to gender biases and the way parents have traditionally raised boys and girls differently.

As a society we have been more willing to support males in daring endeavors of exploration and science. This meant historically, scientifically inclined women were less likely to be funded by some benefactor, as was common with the scientists and mathematicians of Europe between 1500-1900.

There is for sure a natural set of interests different genders are encouraged to do by society, and this has meant less women are doing things that contributed to science.

we can opine about the state of the past or we can encourage and support the future. I know which is more important to me.
That also shows why fusion power always centers around exotic isotopes like deuterium and tritium rather than plain hydrogen. The reaction paths needed to fuse plain hydrogen are so improbable that they don’t happen fast enough to be useful.
I had no idea about this. Thanks! For anyone, curious here are the countries you can travel with a US visa.

https://www.visatraveler.com/blog/travel-20-countries-visa-f...
I think Fission would be great if we had somewhere to put the waste, if it didn't cost $10 billion dollars to set up a plant and people weren't phobic of it.
Overall Nuclear makes more sense than coal and arguably more sense than wind and solar. But then there's the risk of the meltdown. No politician, no utility CEO, no corporation commission is going to take the risk of a meltdown when the political cost of pumping just a little more CO2 into the air is very small.
More succinctly than most of the replies:

They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- Carl Sagan
Not currently but that in my plan. Stay tuned!
Maybe the disagreement is over what "free and open internet" means. Imo,it does not mean an internet governed by rules that supersede local laws and norms. Free means additional restrictions on lawful self-expression should not be imposed and it also means freedom for site owners and content creators,not just content consumers. It means content providers are free to exclude anyone for any lawful reason. I think you might be confusing free as in freedom from free as in no cost to consumers.

Open means initial access to content should not be for a select group of people but for everyone. It also means content producers have open access to content consumers. Both consumers and producers can restrict access at will(for example content moderation or DNT requests).

For media companies,a free and open internet means a wide reach to consumers. If you meant free as in financial cost,it all depends on their business model. Ad supported is one model,another would be to use the free content as bait that lures consumers to a revenue generating product,be it premium content,premium experience and features or goods.

For the whole "russian trolls" issue,being free and open isn't what allowed the problem. "Russian trolls" can pay for oremium content and find ways to access restricted content and post messages masquerading as allowed users. Imo,user targeted advertising is the problem. "Russian trolls" would not be all that effective if they were not able to target specific groups of people and exploit their biases.

I think content-targeting (see what duckduckgo does) has a strong case against user-targeting. It maybe less profitable but it is stable and most reliable in the long term.

I see a promising future for content being supported by premium users and content targeting and a bleak future for the dystopian corporate surveillance madness.
Does having more passports work "additively" or "subtractively"?

For example I can imagine that a person with only a UK passport can enter the US more freely than a person with both a UK and Iraqi passport.
Americans killed native Indians and Mexicans. We made a lot of Chinese and African immigrants suffer for decades. The foreign policy is one of the sources of many troubles world wide including terrorism.

It's very easy to pointing fingers on others but self. Double standard is the weakest and most stupid culture characteristics from the West. No one will follow a leader like that.
I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that people believe "tech deserves to be paid but writers and musicians and filmmakers don't".. people release cracked software all the time, I'm sure a lot of HN readers has used a cracked version of Windows, or Photoshop, paid .apk file, an AAA title, you name it..

There's also plenty of evidence to suggest that these industries more often than not benefit from the increased publicity the unauthorized content brings.
Indonesia is visa on arrival for US citizens
> But where to invest instead?

There's literally nowhere you won't lose money when investing in a recession, the point is to find the place where you'll lose the least amount of money -- a.k.a. the place where you are most certain the price has bottomed out -- and go for it. Then wait 5-10 years.
Predicting who controls Ethereum addresses with machine learning
We only remember those who ended up working. Remember color.com? Remember Theranos? There are probably hundreds of others in old HN posts we have long forgotten. Sometimes skepticism is warranted.

Instead of playing on our heartstrings to convince us that cryptocurrencies are useful, how about actually making something useful? We've been told for years that it was about to pay off, that "it's still building time". You've had billions poured in ICOs and pre-mined coins and you have nothing to show for it besides glorified pyramid schemes and currencies that are useless as currencies.

Comparing cryptocurrencies to the early internet is frankly absurd. Maybe people didn't imagine how huge is was going to become but the practical usefulness of being able to share data across the USA (and then the world) is obvious. Besides the Internet grew fast and was useful almost from day 1, even though it involved a complex and expensive hardware infrastructure. By the 90's the Internet wasn't mainstream but it was definitely very useful. Sci-fi writers had expected something like the Internet long before ARPA, it's just immediately obvious that being able to connect to the entire world in real time would be greatly valuable.

Furthermore what prevented a more mainstream adoption were mainly hardware limitations. Internet on dial-up wasn't fun at all. Remember having to wait for a full minute to have a progressive JPEG load up? I do. It was clunky but there was nothing else like it. Once technology improved and got faster and cheaper adoption exploded. What's slowing down progress in CryptoCurrency? The infrastructure is there, yet hardly anybody wants to use it. And unlike the Internet, there are plenty of alternatives for the vast majority of the services offered through a blockchain.

>I would bet that we see something truly unique come out of the blockchain space that we never before knew we needed.

That's faith, not reason.
Within the Euro area only the Euro has the status of legal tender but businesses settle in USD all the time.

The link I provided is jurisprudence in Germany but it doesn't impact the whole of the EU. Malta might soon join though.
Those IBM keyboard clicks and printing sound from the video brings back good memories.
I'd argue Trump is a product of an already one party system, at least when it comes to the most important issues. With respect to anything of real substance HW, Clinton, W and Obama were more or less indistinguishable.
Uber is a “bezzle,” doomed to disappoint the suckers who buy into its IPO
Not all cryptos are the same in this regard. DAG-based ones such as Nano use an absolutely tiny amount of electricity compared to Bitcoin: https://cryptodisrupt.com/nano-is-found-to-be-significantly-...
How to Build the Next Uber or Lyft
Is there any way (other than the chrome bug tracker) for devs to talk to you guys about Dev tool bugs, or suggestions?

There are definitely some lingering low pri bugs in the issue tracker that would improve the QoL that would really help the dev tools experience.

Example: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=771144

This happens every time. So I just stopped moving the tabs, but if the dev tools are not wide enough to show the (ever increasing) number of tabs, it’s always the 3rd party ones that get pushed off.
You fail to mention that Herbert Inhaber's article was published in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Bulletin in 1979 [1] (before Three Man Island), drawing from his study published the same year which was heavily criticized even at the time [2] and does not take the problem of nuclear waste into account at all, and otherwise dis-ingeniously cherry-picked number of deaths associated with each energy source up to that point.

The second article you quote is just a blog, and the conclusions are just as dubious, for example trying to weigh falls during roof construction into the risks of solar etc.

edit: removed confusing statement about fission/fusion

[1] https://www.iaea.org/publications/magazines/bulletin/21-1

[2] "Perhaps the most damaging criticism was that the study was inconsistent in applying the methodology to the various energy technologies. For example, while Inhaber considered materials acquisition, component fabrication, and plant construction in his analysis of unconventional energy sources and for hydro power, critics have claimed that he did not follow the same approach for coal, nuclear power, oil, and gas. Furthermore, critics claimed that the labor figures for coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power included only on-site construction, while those for the renewable energy sources included on-site construction, materials acquisition, component manufacture."

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267817006, page 31.
How do you handle some of the more obscure cases? For example, citizens of some countries, including the US, can do a short, visa-free stay in China if they’re transiting through the major airports (https://www.travelchinaguide.com/embassy/visa/transit.htm).

I saw Beijing this way coming back to SF from Taiwan. It was a pain to find all the details about how to apply, and a site like this could help people find out about such opportunities. e.g., you could match trip itinieraries to interesting stopovers.
As a poor person who's always been surrounded by poor people, you are wrong.

Poor and less educated people know nothing about nutrition and don't have the money to buy good food.

When you don't have the money you are forced to fill up with cheap calories like bread, rice, pasta, sugar, etc.
Nice looking site. As others have pointed out, it's important to be 100% credible so that people can trust that the results are correct and up-to-date. The overall look of the site is consistent with this, but having "by 1HaKr" in the lower right would be a red flag for some folks who think of "hackers" as exclusively black hat.

It would help the site's credibility if you linked to authoritative source documents showing that you do/don't need a visa for a particular country, so that folks can trust that your third-party site is correct.

It would also be handy if you could include requirements related to international driver's license, IMO.

Lastly, the button "LETS GO!" needs an apostrophe.
Your facts appear incorrect.

Renewables consistently produce more than 60% of Portugal's energy needs, and have topped 100% on occasion. The figure for Spain is more than 35%, and more than 35% of electricity consumption in Germany.

I'm not sure how you get from 60% to "no impact". It's really quite a puzzling statement.

As is the suggestion that windfarms cause some kind of ecological blight to farmland. Not only is there no scientific basis for that claim, but if it were true, anti-wind propagandists would surely have jumped on it and made sure they mentioned it at every possible opportunity.

Perhaps you have some independent evidence to back you beyond the "couple large wind farms in Spain" you visited?
Well no one actually uses that status code... because there was no solution to guarantee that a digital payment is ever truly "done" until Bitcoin was invented.

I posted a link that people who are familiar with the development of the internet and HTTP will remember that there was a big problem back then.. we didn't have a digital native representation of value and all digital data structures can easily be copied so the fear of double-spends is what caused Digicash, Bitgold and a few other earlier digital currencies fail.
I understand the need for people to feel like they have a choice by using free software (the choice to modify it if they want to), but at this point it is just an illusion unless you are prepared to dedicate a huge amount of time. If you practically couldn’t do it even if you wanted to, does it still mean you have a choice?

It’s a different time today than it was 40 years ago when RMS modified printer drivers, and software is much more complicsted than it used to be.
Dollar Stores Planning for Permanent Underclass
Yeah, “housing boom” sounds like increased housing construction whereas “housing bubble” is the term I’m used to for higher prices.
Sure, so I would strongly recommend against it for everyone else.

That said I feel it gives me a more stable machine, the time between reboots is typically 3 to 6 months.

I try to use as little software by MS as possible to keep the 'attack surface' to a minimum, ideally only using the OS itself. Even my home LAN only has IP enabled these days.
Wow this is an insane view point, I actually thought you were going to suggest the opposite...

Frankly the potential capability of nuclear far outweighs anything else.

If the gen public were more on board with it, nuclear could be rolled out and be the main source of power in the world in 30-40 years, removing the need for fossil fuels for power generation.

Even building them in remote locations and taking the transmission losses would be better than diving head first into wind and solar, do you have any idea how destructive the mining is to get the elements required for some of the solar and wind solutions?
Anyone interested in this topic will enjoy Scott McCloud's groundbreaking book, Understanding Comics. For a real example of documenting complex projects with comics, check out Bjark Ingel's Yes Is More, a graphic nonfiction book in which he shows his architectural process.
At Canadian solar intensity levels? I'd be surprised if it's only 3.5x. You can't count on average intensity for the year either, you really need to look at the lowest intensity and go with that number. You can use battery storage, but you are not going to be storing electricity from the summer for the winter.

Anyway even at 10x, Canada has a LOT of land, that's totally viable and wouldn't even make a dent in land-use compared to say agriculture.
The German source you provided explicitly states that it is not legal tender, but "just" treated similarly as other currencies: buying bitcoin is recognized as exchanging other currencies, it can be used similarly in contracts, ...
You won't know for sure, however, until you check with an official Government source. I don't know what the utility of a 3rd party version of this is. Usually people only go to a limited set of countries on every trip, so it's not a big burden to go.

And I found an error on the first country I checked USA -> Belarus.

You don't need a Visa only if you're entering through the Airport and staying less than 5 days. If you're crossing the border from Lithuania by car, you do need one.
I always feel apprehensive about ‘region X’s diet is the healthiest’ articles. To me, the strongest example for this is the Japanese diet. Whilst their diet is healthy in many ways, it also raises your risk for stomach cancer by quite a lot.
What about a basket of really promising startups or VCs?
The trains in Sweden and Denmark are generally much more reliable.

For example, in this case the trains run every 20 minutes anyway. If you're familiar with which platform the train leaves from (it's always the same one) then arriving just a couple of minutes before departure time isn't a problem.
The german article just regulates sales / value added tax IF you do business in bitcoin. It nowhere states that bitcoin et. al MUST be accepted as a means of payment.
Ask HN: Protective patent to endorse open-source
Hi,

As of recent, I met with representatives of multiple multinational companies to whom I told about my project. These companies were excited about it. They also wanted to know whether it is patented or any papers published about it. I told them there are not.

These companies know how to replicate my idea. Additionally, the space is regulated and controlled by just a few companies worldwide. I think there is reason to think that these companies will try to patent my idea. It is based in software.

Now, I do not really care if these companies replicate the idea. I wish they would. However, I do not want these companies competing with each other about it. As such, is it possible I would file a patent first, release the source-code, and thus block these companies from competing with each other about it? I would want to do my best to try to create an open standard on how to utilize my idea.

Additionally, I am currently working as a researcher at a university. I told them what had happened, and they also want to patent it. However, the idea was not conceived during my time as a researcher, but university resources were used to test the approach in the regulated environment.

Should I care whether the university files the patent? Should I go through hoops to do it myself? What do you think is my best plan of action to do this all very fast?

Thanks!
Countries usually don't know which passports you have (If you enter for the first time and they don't have some kind of data-sharing agreement) so you'd just enter with the one that's easier not by showing all of yours.
Sure, that's a fine criticism to keep in mind. However, I believe the idea is that although the ingredients come from agricultural sources, they have been purified to such a degree that it doesn't matter; they're chemically identical to synthetic ones. (The key question was whether truly synthetic diets are nutritially satisfactory, not whether they are economically efficient to produce now...which they are not.) Of course, it's still conceivable that some secret molecule is needed by the body in minute quantities that was insufficiently filtered from the agricultural sources, but at some level of effective purification that worry starts to bleed into homeopathy.
Not disagreeing with you, and those are all "noob problems" from my perspective as I've done all of those things wrong before myself, and I myself am a noob. But they are some actually very complex problems (and you can even have them on your managed platforms once in a while, too.)

Self-healing is great when it works, and those items you listed are all real problems. But they are not problems that you should expect to encounter on a managed service, at least hopefully not more than once. (YMMV, amiright?)
Hate Amazon? Try Living Without It
which country passport you hold is what makes the difference, not your home country (residency).

Example: One can hold Srilankan Passport, but home country now is USA (Perm Residency Greencard)
Wait, what? Amazon is a monopoly. They aren't charging a fair competitive price. Your "argument" only works if the author has other options for distribution. Otherwise it's not a decision.
> Its more than just audio. Watching movies sucks; you now pay full price to effectively indefinitely rent movies, and have them taken away at any time.

This has always been the case, even when you "owned" the physical media. Owning a CD, DVD or even vinyl copy of audio/video did not mean you owned the content. It was always just a delivery mechanism. It always came with legal wording to state you didn't own the content, and were only allowed to listen/view in a private setting. You were not allowed to take the music and play it in public, you were not allowed to show the video to large groups of people (including in your own home).

Your OS is the same way. You don't own the software. You only pay for a license granting use of it on one computer.
>>Even if we were to grant that these claims are true, we still have to ask what classes of application benefit from slower, more expensive distributed systems

Nobody denies its slow, its a waste of resources, its buggy, its hyped. its a lot of things many early systems was. Its all challenges that people try to solve. What is interresting is if those things can be solved. And i dont understand Why so many dont see a benefit if we could one day build true decentralized systems... its not the distributed or avalibility thats important. Its not like goverments or companies always have the peoples best interrest when they make decissions.
The op claimed that Amazon operates with healthy profit margins which isn't really the case... "your margin is my opportunity"
Very useful feedback. Will add it.