skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I predict that Libra will work for a while, but will eventually be overshadowed either by competitors or by the new markets that it enables.

There's this pattern I've noticed where every major tech company, once initial traction has been established, gets three pivots. You can think of them as adolescence, mid-life, and rebirth.

The first pivot happens when the company is 5-8 years old (since the 1970s at least; older before then), and serves to define the company. The System 360 for IBM, defining it as the provider of mainframes for enterprises. MS-DOS for Microsoft, defining it as the dominant PC OS. The Macintosh for Apple, defining it as the most user-friendly consumer brand out there. GMail and Maps for Google, defining it as the conglomerate of the Internet age. Mobile for Facebook, defining it as the service that connects people regardless of where they are.

The second pivot happens when the company is 10-15, at the height of its dominance, and usually results from it entering the hottest new technology wave with a vengeance. It looks like it succeeds for a while, crushes early entrants, serves to legitimize that technology wave, but ultimately peters out as the company can't keep up with the changes that it introduces. The IBM PC for IBM, which legitimized the PC market but ultimately fell to clones. Internet Explorer for Microsoft, which legitimized the Internet but ultimately was eclipsed by Google's many products. The Newton for Apple, which legitimized the PDA market but ultimately was too early. Google+ for Google, which legitimized social networking but ultimately failed to gain traction.

The third pivot is when the company realizes that they basically incapable of innovating, and returns to the roots they established with the first pivot to live out their old age. Open-source consulting for IBM, leveraging their massive installed base of enterprise customers. VS Code, XBox, and Azure for Microsoft, recognizing that they are fundamentally a platforms company. The iPhone and iPad for Apple, refocusing on their strengths in UX and delivering top-quality consumer electronics products. Alphabet for Google, realizing that they're fundamentally a conglomerate that lets a thousand flowers bloom (and cancels 990 of them).

Libra is Facebook's second pivot. It'll look like it succeeds for a while, it'll legitimize cryptocurrency, but it'll ultimately end up eclipsed by what it creates.
A month is not a well defined unit. There are four different month units: 28, 29, 30, 31 days. If you do calculations respecting this there will be no problem.

Complex numbers and vectors are not a good analogy.
The Evolving Infrastructure of .NET Core
One Day of Work a Week Is Most ‘Effective’ Dose for Mental Health
They're rather young for Merchant Princes yet then. Hmm.

Jonathan Stroud's award winning Bartimaeus Trilogy (in 4 parts with prequel) is younger - probably around 8 or 10, and is one of those children's series that there's a good chance parents will enjoy too. More alternate history and fantasy than sci-fi though. There's an adult layer in things, and a deliciously acerbic and sarcastic main character, so a good series for reading to them. I think I would have bought the rest of the series even if the kids hadn't enjoyed the first! Hugely recommended.

His other series, Lockwood, is similar but perhaps less for the adults though there's similar humour. They're a group of kids who are ghost hunters. So more squarely in the Harry Potter vein.

Younger still and I draw a blank, sorry - it's been a good while since our kids were in that age bracket. If I do remember anything suitable I'll update.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartimaeus_Sequence
Sounds like the one penny tip people like to leave to make a point.
Why are Westeners always criticizing other cou tries? I think its great that there are different competing systems. The best ones evolve. It's not a good idea to have all eggs in one basket. It would be sad if all countries were like USA.
Not sure if matters but at least to my understanding, DanKort is a debit card, so I would expect it to have a flat rate since the cost of transaction is less dependent on the total amount vs a credit card transaction where there is more clearance and risk involved?

At least in some jurisdictions I lived, debit card is as good as cash (well, not exactly the same but because handling cash has also its cost, most of retailers treat them equally)
Show HN: Communication-Free Distributed Graph Generators
Ask HN: Would you use new Facebook cryptocurrency Libra?
Naughty Dog games (up to Uncharted) used to be written in a Lisp without garbage collection. The same guy then wrote the ITA flight search system. I think he may be the only productive Lisp programmer in the world.
Indian central bank (RBI) is rather conservative and cautious. Also, its policies don't always agree with that of indian government.

I have a strong hunch it just wouldn't let Libra be legal currency.

Besides, given that currently government is run by a ulta right wing party, so it might be possible they wouldn't agree to Facebook plans.
Mind you, weak && bad does not imply inconsequence.

Try to put the PC for our time aside, and think about this again. In the cold and cruel universe, what would survive?

Advance, advance at all costs.

Edit:

You don’t have to save the universe in bold to become a character.

Being paper thin and then destroy the 3 dimensional universe, on behalf of the will of mankind?
It's not just a modern trend, either. Most of the North American megafauna went extinct ~10,000 years ago, around the time when humans first arrived on the continent. We lost the mammoth, mastodon, saber-tooth tiger, dire wolf, giant beaver, ground sloth and more.

New Zealand was the same. Humans arrived around 1300 and we lost the moa and Haarst's eagle (the world's largest flying bird) by around 1400.

Incidentally, the largest species of bird that ever lived was the elephant bird of Madagascar. It weighed up to 730kg (1600lbs) and stood 3m (10ft) tall. It went extinct around the year 1200.

There used to be a lot more interesting animals around, but our ancestors hunted them to extinction. Nobody misses them because nobody alive today ever had them in the first place.

It's sad, but even the extinctions of the coolest, most amazing creatures are quickly forgotten. When the giraffe or blue whale is gone, it will just be another story like the elephant bird.
It's a completely separate argument than what I was responding to.

I personally agree with you, but thats my specific lifestyle, and I put my money into other investments. But generally, owning a house is a good place to park your assets if you live a "typical" life.

One of the biggest reasons I want more landOWNER residents? So that my neighbours actually care what's happening in the neighborhood+condo, and do something about.

I'm renting from a Chinese investor. He doesn't speak English and doesn't have a clue what's going on around here, and doesn't care to get involved with helping things run better.

I can communicate my issues with the real estate agent who handles the unit for him, but he's just going to shoot off a short email and move on with his day.

Over 50% of this building is this way. The board of directors has a huge accountability issue because of this, and residents and owners are suffering for it.

If you rent, you care what happens locally, but you have no say.
What is dynamic programming? Some quotes in the lens of reinforcement learning
So companies being successful and paying well is a bad thing?

Of course there are bad side effects, but only because we've collectively decided to not solve the housing problem. It's not some obscure issue, we know how to fix it. We just choose not to.

> Decentralizing the workforce would help decentralize the problem.

If it was that simple, they'd have already done it because it would save them money.

Organizationally, there are advantages to physical colocation that you're just ignoring here. It's the triumph of the city.
Because no one uses it, or not? Transaction prices are determined by supply and demand on Bitcoin Cash, too, AFAIK.
SRI is such a cool idea (in theory) but the approach fails in practice. Also very few sites maintain a solid Content Security Policy (CSP). What's the point of all these controls/tools when nobody uses them?
The problem with this sort of reasoning is that it relies on the benevolence of a dictatorship (and I don't use the term dictatorship pejoratively). It's all fine and good to have a system where people's needs are provided for and in general the populace is taken care of (for example, the housing situation in Singapore is very good and much better than places where people have to pay through the nose for shacks, like for example Hong Kong and SF).

But the real problem is that this system is by its nature fragile. On the one hand, this means that you never know when leadership will no longer be so enlightened and shit will hit the fan with nothing you can do about it.

From another perspective, because of this fragility, it's not capable letting its crazy people reach their potential. Can you imagine what the system would have done to creative hippies or even Steve Jobs if he didn't toe the line? If you don't give free enough reign to these people, your society will hit a ceiling where you don't produce the most innovative culture or people.
Cool! Just started using it for two of my websites, thanks!
Deepfakes may be a useful tool for spies
Truckla – World's first Tesla pickup truck
> Yes, but how far do you take the rhetoric of name-calling people "entitled" down the slippery slope?

As far as it takes to make humans live in a sustainable way. If we value unnecessary comfort and people's feelings over Life we'll simply never get out of this. We either all swallow our pride and take responsability, or we do as half of the comments here, blame China/big corps/whatever as an excuse.

Talk to your great grand parents and grand parents, ask them how life was back then, humanity is degenerating in am uncontrollable thing that's collapsing under its own weight.

> for wanting to live their lives, in the environment they were born into, doing the things they learn from people around them.

That's a non argument as you can defend _any_ human behaviors with it. We have to be the change, not lament on the human condition.

> it is because we are in love with our vices; we uphold them and prefer to make excuses for them rather than shake them off. We mortals have been endowed with sufficient strength by nature, if only we use this strength, if only we concentrate our powers and rouse them all to help us or at least not to hinder us. The reason is unwillingness, the excuse, inability.
>Add Enchanted Security's JavaScript to your website to prevent data exfiltration attacks, protecting passwords, credit cards, and other sensitive information.

>Install Enchanted Security's tamper-resistant JavaScript snippet on your site. The inline snippet is designed to be small, adding only a few milliseconds to load time, and does not require active configuration on your end.

There's a lot of marketing copy on your site, but it doesn't really tell me what it's really doing, or even how Enchanted Security itself is secured.
> GET request is meant to be side-effect free

Meant, yes, by somebody, but a web service creator can decide otherwise, for some reasons, like simplicity.

If I remember correctly, there was a good story about Viaweb, how they figured that sending requests to follow links can be used as commands - and I wasn't sure they didn't use GET for that... but maybe I'm wrong.
It happens with linens for hotels, why wouldn't it work for dishes?
How about impact of Facebook on energy compared to the current banking system?
I can't watch the video, so maybe it was covered, but it can also have the opposite effect. Applying a reward or a fine pegs a "price" to the action and can produce something opposite to the desired outcome.

The common example is if a daycare has parents frequently turning up late for pick up, so they have to stay open late. So they decided to apply a surcharge for latecomers in a study. The problem got worse, since the the value of the fine was less impactful than the guilt felt by most parents. It was now seen as more acceptable to be late.

Example write-up: http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/23/what-makes-people-do-what...
Yes, and the reason housing prices are so high is that the residents have chosen not to solve the problem. It has nothing to do with the tech companies.

We can look at successful models like Tokyo or Vienna, but instead of doing that people just throw up their arms and go, "what could possibly be done??" as if this was some novel, inscrutable problem.
usb-c cables seem to drain power, at least both I have, though one of them has LED.
GitHub acquires Pull Panda and makes its code review tools available for free
I'd really like to see a web where developers stop `npm install`ing tons of dependencies, I really would!
In the US, enough people have submitted DNA to 23andMe, Ancestry, GED match, etc., that a random DNA sample can be identified by so-called “genetic genealogy” methods.

Basically because your generic relatives have submitted their DNA to these services, a small pool of potential candidates for your DNA can be identified, and traditional investigation methods can identify you in that pool.

As the density of people who have submitted DNA to these services increases in the total population, identifying random samples will be easier. (It is already getting easier.)

These techniques were publicized with the Golden State Killer case but have been used in several other law enforcement investigations.

My contact with this field is mostly through friends in the industry, but The Daily podcast’s series on it seemed like a good introduction:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/06/podcasts/the-daily/dna-ge...
I think the core problem is this:

The people who run China believe in "freedom" for themselves. They think of ideas and implement things, they have a great degree of freedom and set up the systems to watch everyone, but they themselves have ways around it, connections, access to information about what's going on in the world, etc.

They fundamentally believe they are better than the other Chinese they make decisions on (bureaucrats have a tendency to arrogance and belief in their own "best ideas"). Maybe they have some good ideas, maybe they don't. But the fact that _they_ view themselves and treat themselves differently is the point. In such a system, the violent and ruthless usually rise to the top, which eventually shows in society. Humanity has tried that lots of times, it doesn't work out.

In a truly free society, you are free to _truly_ start a competing system or a different system. You can take your strange ideas and start up a commune if you want. You can start an authoritarian commune (as long as people choose to let you and can leave), or an artistic commune, or a free-love commune. That is where you get different systems, and everyone can make a different system. Yeah, it's great to have that, but that gets us back to square one: people being treated like they individually can go do something important of their own choice and different than those around them. Instead of one bureaucrat thinking their ideas are the best ones and then imposing it violently on everyone else. That's not different competing systems, that's hell.

It's all great for the homogeneous, apathetic majority, but where are the schools, education, healthcare, spacious apartment, etc. for the Uighur?
I would argue that even 'flight shame' is a new term that has a specific, recently acquired meaning in environmental context, different from what it would have a couple years ago. A great example of how language is dynamic and how reality and context shapes new meanings from existing words.
When I first became interested in the idea for the app, I quickly ran into the same limitations with CallKit. What my app, MyHumans, does is relay the call through a backend service which sends it to your phone via a VoIP call using CallKit. CallKit allows the incoming call to act nearly the same UI-wise as a normal incoming call. The backend service is then able to filter calls using salted hashes of numbers from your contacts.
I find it smug and insufferable, like someone on tumblr lecturing you about demisexual marxist theory or something.
A few ways out of these are:

- don't eval on the server side (this is a bad idea most of the time anyway);

- serve js bundles from your own domain and set an appropriate content security policy;

These hacks won't work then.
This video looks almost procedurally generated...
Hah. "Security is hard, let's go shopping (for our magic security dust)!"
No to Facebank!
If you want a good example of what people mean, here's a comparison of the trailer of atlas, the new game from the Ark developers, and actual launch gameplay.

https://youtu.be/yzDTdBsW1GU

Atlas was so bad that they actually found menus from ark in it, i.e. it was a skin. They actually left promotional models in the production game, so at one point cheaters were attacking other pirates with ww2 fighter planes left in from a demo.

Don't use a video that promises things your players won't get.
If Britain were putting their dissidents and muslims in concentration camps I would be very vocally criticising my own country - which I suppose means I'd be a dissident earmarked for a concentration camp. I already do criticise on lots of other topics, and some of our worse moments of empire in history, or the lives ruined by UK's austerity dogma. I criticise the US too, and don't want to be just like them either.

Why should I not do the same for China when they are destroying lives of people whose only crime is being an ethnic minority, or trying to bring repressive laws to Hong Kong?

It's good to have different systems when the basics of humanity are remembered.
Have you worked on a product that has had to show a vertical slice 2 years before the product is released? I've worked on a few e3/e3-like demos for games and there's a whole bunch of issues. It's not always quality - things that were considered "easy" or "we can solve that later" can come back and bite you. Things that are fun in a vertical slice demo might not actually be engaging for more than 15 minutes or so(or an hour, or three). It can be _very_ difficult to extract a 10 minute piece of gameplay that you have some context for to show people even if you have the entire game made, which means you might have to out in some temporary "features" (add a power/remove a pathway) to make the experience fit. All or these changes can have a butterfly effect. Adding X to simplify a demo can make Y seem more important than you want it to which means Z is now redundant, but you've already spoken about Z.

There had to be done realisation that things change in games over a 2 year period, (heck, things change massively in games over a 2 week period in some games) and some acceptance of that fact.
He forwarded a video
Technically applications with auto updates do load "random" DLLs from servers.

I'm pretty sure you can't make a blanket statement like this without discounting a lot of developers who do take security into account when developing. These are just some interesting holes that were reported.

Is all your code perfect?
Science.

The only culture that ever begot science was the tradition of greek philosophy and democracy that you could discuss everything, and that everyone was on the same playing ground.

Materially, China could have come up with scientific progress for a thousand years, but they didn't, because they lacked the culture for open debate and expression of ideas.

No freedom of press, no cars.

That's the historical perspective.

Now, let's look into the future.

Do we want to stop the progress of science? If then, sure, there is no strong technocratic argument for freedom.
I'm pretty unsure. I mean there are a lot's of trust issues with Facebook and even if the promise to keep there hands out of this, i don't believe them. On the other hand, a fast border less money transaction with good integration sounds promising. And Facebook has the resources for it.
The other option is to reduce your attack surface by minimising the amount of JS you use.
I also don't know it until today, but calc.exe in Win 7 does have a date calculator.
Is no one using them because there's little awareness of them in the wider web dev industry? Is no one using them because the courses being taught at the moment don't include security? Are they too hard to use? Are they not turned on by default?
Third party DNS servers are helpful in one sense - you can share your state with other users.

Turning off EDNS with your own recursor won't really make much difference. Limiting the maximum cache length will help, but will also eliminate much of the benefit of having a local recursor.

The other issue with running your own recursor is nasty networks will transparently proxy DNS and you can end up using a cache you don't even know exists.

DNSCurve, DNSCrypt, and DNS-over-HTTPS solve one set of problems while introducing different ones.
How Janet's Peg Module Works
It's not just the up front cost. They can roll out updates and patches to change the functionality too.

Maybe throw in some cheeky DLC to unlock certain features too ;)
That's a risk every time you use a CDN. We used a CDN that f-ed up JS versions, breaking sites, had downtime, breaking sites... when ever you do use a CDN, be aware of everything that could go wrong, which is a lot... On the other hand, id you add hashes to the script references you load, you are a lot more secure, check out https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Subres... if you use a CDN and would like to do so securely...
Ah yeah, another huge problem that I forgot to mention. This really kills the liquidity of the market. You see the same dynamic with sales in CA due to Prop 13 - this makes it so that elderly people can’t afford to downsize, because their property taxes would go up 10-20x for many of them if they moved to an equivalent place, and it’s economical for people to sit on extremely valuable undeveloped land and wait for it to appreciate, because there’s next to no holding cost.
Keep the DevOps Mindset but get rid of DevOps as a thing where Devs are allowed to control everything that goes into production without a technical argument (the argument has been replaced by test-cases). We need to start having hard discussion again between devs (the agents of change) and ops (the protectors of the realm). Maybe not for every case but

Note: having seen terribly rigid processes I'm very much an advocate for DevOps and welcomed this way of working. I think we threw out the baby with the bathwater when we embraced DevOps. A site that allows what is mentioned in this article doesn't have a functioning Operations unit.
Right, we should all work for FAANG companies. Likewise, why wouldn't any person who loves sports work for the NBA instead of as a gym teacher?

You'll make more money working as an NBA player, and you don't have to wait years for a teaching certificate to be approved. Jobs in schools, in particular, are pretty lousy paying compared to what sports lovers are getting elsewhere.

The fact that FAANG companies employ about 0.1% of the software developers could have something to do with this. Practically speaking, nobody works for the NBA or for a FAANG company.

So it is a silly comparison. Defense contractors can and do beat plenty of normal companies. For example, Tesla pays software developers just $78k to $147k. Defense contractors can beat that before even adjusting for quality of life. You can work a 40-hour week, or you can have Elon Musk cracking the whip. The defense contractor positions are frequently in affordable locations, making the numbers a far better deal than they would appear.
Pay $1200 for the card and get a monitor stand for free!