skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes - I was just reading the other article on the front page of HN which gives a summary. Pegged to fiats and traded in for fiats, so... Facebook is creating its own fiat which it wants to profit off, use its existing user network as a leap pad to do so, and to be considered the global fiat? Is that fair?
Yes, in Swedish. I'm Danish, though, so felt more comfortable making a Danish example.

I also felt that many might not understand just how incredibly close our languages are, and that adding the language I used to the comment would likely distract from the point as a result.
> simple global currency and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people.

This is the material anti-trust lawsuits are made of, there is no way that nation states will allow private enterprises to gain that much power.
I’m skeptical, but it’s too early in the morning to deep dive into the white papers. Will save it for later.

Based on what I have read though, this digital currency isn’t really a crypto coin. The users are verified through government issued identification and it appears the coin is issued by a centralized system.

Seems like the companies invested into this system are trying to act like the Federal Reserve in the United States.
Ban fucking cruise ships.
> Is anyone using it

of course, many people are

I make a point of "living" each day on a different virtual machine of my farm, and the days that it's the turn of DragonFly are the most pleasurable. While openbsd has a sweet spot in my heart, the slight divergences to posix become a bit annoying at times. On the other hand, DragonflyBSD gives you probably the cleanest streamlined unix experience.
Found the problem, Facebook Container extension blocked the js file.
Schools charging the same amount to each student is an issue. Why should someone getting taught in an expensive engineering program pay the same as a British lit kid?

People want to do away with all the "useless" majors, which seems like a mistake to me. Colleges weren't about finding jobs until recently when companies decided to outsource training workers to these places. For our entire history colleges were places where people can learn about the world and different things. Suddenly shaming them for teaching literature when they have been doing it for hundreds of years is dumb. The answer is to just charge tuition relative to the cost of the particular education.
Is anybody denying that? I found a study by Mikhail Chester and Arpad Horvath suggesting that total life-cycle energy inputs and greenhouse gas emissions contribute an additional 63% for onroad, 155% for rail, and 31% for air systems over vehicle tailpipe operation. However, even than rail generally appears to be less damaging than air by far. What are your sources?
It's not really a crypto coin. It's a stable coin. The value is backed by hard cash in a vault somewhere. And not anyone can mine it, only the 10 million buy in organizations can process transactions on their nodes. But essentially it's pay pal labeled as a crypto coin. So they can get away with skirting some laws because "it's not actually money man".

Just a sleezeball move in my opinion to capitalise on the hard work the crypto community has been putting in to make safe trustworthy decentralised systems. That's in no way saying there isn't sleeze balls in the community, but there are real believers about the whole idea that have been working hard.
Normally they use break discs only at speeds of about 0-10 km/h.
So is it a bit like "weekend" or "website" in the sense that those were originally two separate words that were combined enough to create a convention that they should be one "new" word?
Is this....a troll comment on HN? Well set up, if so.
Move – Programming Language for Libra Blockchain
I wondered if that was a typo and they meant VAX/VMS (DEC's OS that ran on the Vax)
I’m with you on this... guess that makes me a pessimist.
The headline of the website is "helping founder craft successful VC pitches". Emotions and controversies aside, Theranos did raise capital.

No, I don't think it's nice to do what they've done (or smart, for that matter). But you want to see both ends of a spectrum, otherwise we'll fall prey to the survivorship bias. Hence, we've put up the "failed" category and didn't really want to give Theranos a category in itself called "fraud".

Again, controversy aside, I think there are lessons to be learned from them. People can misinterpret what I'm saying here and say I'm pushing them to commit fraud, but from my end it's more of a "This is how you should not do it"

We need to know both ends of an interval
Interesting.

The Republic of China's most recent request for admission was turned down in 2007,[1] but a number of European governments—led by the United States—protested to the UN's Office of Legal Affairs to force the global body and its secretary-general to stop using the reference “Taiwan is a part of China”.[2]
Tell that to visa and mastercard or SWIFT
I still think,that this coin could replace a lot of African ( unstable ) currencies ...
If you see White Rose, tell her goodbye.
Let's see if they will allow non-custodial wallets for libra, that might make them the catalyst that enables real world bitcoin payments. There could be a service that pays libra invoices for you if you send them bitcoins. If this happens automated/transparently in wallets that would be a big step forward. Let the POS terminal tell you which currency it wants and your wallet will send it. If they want USD send libra, if they want BTC send BTC via lightning. Switching from accepting USD to BTC would become seamless (e.g. in case of increasing inflation).
But how can you keep even a single picture safe? Are you able to read today any of your files from 20 years ago? Not in a theoretical sense.
> But I’ve never heard or seen a convincing, coherent explanation that makes it clear this is a currency

Cryptocurrencies is a better type of money for a few reasons:

* More acceptable than other digital money (banks and payment processors might say no)

* More easily divisible than for example gold coins and gold bars

* It's sound money whereas fiat is not (nobody can arbitrarily increase the supply)

* Much more portable. You can send any amount to anyone in the world, as long as they have internet.

To be clear, cryptocurrencies are like cash but in digital form. It's a great medium exchange, but it suffers from low adoption meaning it's a bad store of value (but so is fiat) and a bad unit of account (but so is gold).

> For one, a currency can’t be reliant on an internet connection for validity. My 1$ bill in my wallet absolutely does not rely on that

So you don't consider digital fiat currencies then?

Me not having internet for a period of time doesn't invalidate my cryptocurrency holdings. I just need internet to spend it (a fair constraint for digital money).

> A gold coin essentially answers the usual doubts in fiat currency.

Except for the fact that you can't send gold coins digitally.

Also, it's much more difficult to check for gold coins. And difficult to transport. It's easy with cryptocurrencies.
Ads based on metadata reveal message contents (people, location, time, and potentially message summarization).
dude, that sounds pretty intimidating. Does MZ want to take the absolute control over the world.
"We are working to bring Calibra to as many countries as possible, as soon as we can."

I hope my country won't allow a currency controlled by a foreign company.

The power of companies is already influencing democracy in a bad way.
The extra tax in Europe is only for Switzerland, which is actually not EU and that's why you still go through custom controls.

There is no passport check if you are an EU citizen, but the border still exists.
Their "customer commitment" document claims otherwise https://scontent-frt3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.2365-6/65083631_3...
> From some discussions about this letter I gather that it can be easily dismissed by court because it reeks of "bad faith" and not a legitimate concern.

Do you have more details about which particular sections "reek of bad faith"?
Work as a consultant. As a management/IT/data/process consultant - it doesn't matter. You'll soon learn to ask the right questions of your customers and figure out different problems they face. It is a nuanced skill but can go a long way in learning how to find and solve real business problems.
Thanks a lot, this has been a most helpful reply!
I grew up in the GDR (East Germany).

We only had a few kinds of bottle designs, standardized across the whole country. I worked in a brewery over the summer, in the filling section. The whole day trucks would arrive full of empty bottles collected from various stations. They would go through a large washer, with a visual inspection afterwards (the most boring job there was, that was before that could be reliably automated, 1980s). Occasionally new bottles were fed into the system, but very few, <10% I would say.

I also had a relative who owned a recycling station where people brought paper (mostly newspapers and magazines), cardboard, and lots and lots of bottles, and got money for it. The amount (of money) was significant enough that those shops were pretty busy, and especially the young (like me) could quite significantly add to their pocket money.

The main point was the standardization. Germany today also has lots of stations to receive cans and plastic and glass bottles in exchange for a bit of money - but it is a PITA because not just have the bottles to fit, but even the labels!! The machines at the retailers only take back bottles of brands that they sell. Crazy!
> It is not exactly clear whether passenger flights are less environmentally friendly than various other options. Driving for long distances can be worse for the environment than flying commercially[0].

There might be some question whether cars less efficient than planes, but I am not aware of any such doubt w.r.t. trains, which is what we are discussing here. Also note that few people would drive the long distances that a plane or train enable them to cover.

> but it is unclear how the method of calculation (ecopassenger.org) works, whether it considers that rail and road infrastructure requires far more energy

The methodology is available [0]. It considers direct emissions, so no maintenance or manufacture. Can you make an argument why these should be more than a low percentage of the direct emission? I mean sure, it might require 1000x more energy to maintain, but its not like that is a large part of the final emission per kilometer.

> since you cannot change the load of plane and train separately

Why would you need to? Of course people who take the train instead of the plane reduce demand for planes and increase demand for trains. So there are fewer plane trips and more rail trips. Assuming that rail trips are environmentally advantages, why would that be a bad idea?

> even though it is clear that flight operators often overbook planes, while trains often run with pretty low loads.

The model considers rail load factors based on real world data where available, substituting 35% as an approximation where no data is available. Do you have any reason to object to that?

0: http://ecopassenger.hafas.de/hafas-res/download/Ecopassenger...
I am curius how refund works? Is there a "master key" that allows Facebook customer service to reverse a transaction or create a transaction from an arbitrary account?

And how does this play with current financial legislation. Do they have a banking license?

And where is the blockchain stored?

Otherwise great news; I am looking forward to something that probably has a very good end-user experience compared to what else is out there.
I'm personally not a big fan of Go due to the weak type system, with lack of generics as the main offender. And as a result, the ubiquitous `interface{}` pattern, stringly typed annotations, ...

BUT Go offers simplicity, incredibly easy concurrency, decent performance, a good standard library for networking/http services, very quick compile times and a stricter type system than many other languages like Python/PHP.

For many teams, especially coming from more dynamic languages, Go fills a sweet spot of performance, concurrency, type safety and ease of use.

I love Rust, but it is much more complex, boilerplate heavy, adds more friction, is harder to learn, and concurrency is much harder to get right, even with the upcoming async/await feature. Not to mention the immature ecosystem, that will still need years of catching up to achieve parity with Go.

Kotlin is also a great language, but has it's own downsides. You need to learn and understand Java (due to the many Java dependencies that you will pull in), there often will be a mismatch between Java libraries and idiomatic Kotlin code, concurrency is harder than in Go, and the JVM is a much more complex beast then the minimally tunable Go runtime.

Go definitely has a place, even though it often wouldn't be my own first choice.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/specific-co2-e...

Rail: 28 kg/passenger km
Air: 144 kg/passenger km

2014 figures.
Offshore Wind Farm tariff well below 50 euros/MWh
Can anyone TLDR; the smart contract capabilities outlined in the first paragraph?
Proper link:

https://github.com/sjwhitworth/golearn
Obviously if you ignore the test results then the test doesn't make any difference. But if you assign some weight to whether their solution to a test problem worked (which is culture-independent, or at least less culture-dependent) rather than how well they explained themselves to a person from a particular culture (which is easier for people from that same culture), then you end up with a process that is much fairer across cultures. And similarly for non-culture aspects of a person's background.
I guess, you might have enabled "Facebook Container" add-on while browsing this site. It is very restrictive in terms of blocking content that comes from Facebook Inc. addresses.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-cont...
Welcome to the Green Zone (2004)
Hi Tim, glad to see you here. In other places where I've posted this, I've also added the following bit "We've added the "early days" only on some of them, let us know if you find it valuable and we can cover the rest as well."

Wasn't sure whether people would want it. Glad to read your comment and to learn that people do want it.

@Buffer — For MySQL or Monzo, for instance, we've added how it wasn't the seed. I understand what you're saying — I guess if someone does believe that they would... assume... by themselves that they're all "seed stage pitches"?
BTF is slow depending on how many nodes you're running. generally it can't support more than 100 validators
I don't believe either of those have introduced their own currency.
10nm Intel Core I7-1065G7 “Ice Lake” Has 44% Higher SC Perf V/S Ryzen 5 3500U
Initial performance in the technical part:
- Throughput: 1000 transactions payment per second
- Latency: 10-second for validating a payment
I did not use Alipay but the fact that it was available as an option and it was a sponsor heavily featured on materials even inside the stadiums made me think it must be available.
Facebook Presented the Details of the Libra Cryptocurrency Project
> This is just extreme whataboutism.

No.

> There is a vast difference between China spying

No.

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

careful, long page.
I think you're going to be surprised.

A Boeing 747F has a fuel capacity of c.200,000kg, 200 metric tons (http://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=738927).

It's mostly heptane (C7H16) and octane (C8H18). Rough calculation, that's 15x12 : 34x1 ratio of C to H (180:34).

So let's say 86% by mass, of 90% is Carbon.

But CO2 is mostly Oxygen from the air, about 12:32 ratio. So the Carbon is a quarter of the total mass.

This gives us (0.86 x 0.90 x 200tons) x4 as a ball park figure.

That's 600,000kg of CO2 produced by 200,000kg of fuel.

With 400 passengers that's 1500kg of CO2 per passenger if they burnt the full fuel capacity; ie that's a top bound estimate.

So ...

Meanwhile you might be surprised to find trees are made of CO2 with the oxygen removed. A large oak tree weighs c.5000kg and half of that is Carbon.

So very, very roughly you'll want to plant and grow to full size a large tree for every couple of long haul flights (to account for fuel only).
Sounds about as decentralised as my private collection of cloud servers I get to make all the decisions on. Decentralised is supposed to mean individuals are both the caretakers and the users.
Lockheed's F-35 Parts Often Aren't Ready to Use, Watchdog Finds
I dunno about PKD. His books are often lifeless to me, and I have other reservations but about blade runner, I read the book (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) many years ago and IIRC there was virtually naff all in the films that related to the book.

So has anyone read the book and can say I misremeber, that the film and the book were at all similar? Honestly curious.

I watched the original again recently and it stood up rather well. The one thing that really dated it wasn't the curved CRTs which I can overlook but when Deckard had Rachael in his flat, and pushed her hard against a wall when she apparently wanted to leave. Such an action and attitude wouldn't be acceptable these days.
Nope, he is a man, nothing interesting here.
If you don’t feel comfortable letting the nsa run a node and not care, is it really secure?

I’m not sure we can push the envelope that far, but it’s worth trying to get there.
Lol tell that to my dad who is still painting houses at 63. Or his competition who is still painting at 70. that is preposterous. In fact most laborors I know are well above 45. Yeah it takes a toll on your health but most of the health issues I see in labor intensive jobs is because of alcoholism. Its good for your body by and large to get up every day and do physical work. Yes your back will hurt, and your feet and your joints. But you'll be in good health.
https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/consumer-topics/finan...
Is this the face of technological liberation or domination?
"a programming language for people who are sick of programming languages" is nonsense.
There are a few, such as this one https://www.argos.co.uk/product/8159898
The rise of Kubernetes will likely enhance go's presence in devops.
So did they finally show you how to remove that app? What did that entail?
>The reserve allows users of the system to enjoy a relatively stable medium of exchange from the start. At the same time, it also represents a centralized function. For the network to be fully permissionless, the association will have to explore ways to further distribute and decentralize the reserve, including automating the verification of the assets in the basket and the process of minting and burning of coins. Increasing market competition in the custody and management of the reserve will also be explored to improve the efficiency of this service, and the costs it imposes on users and custodians over time.

So this coin will be backed by a centralized reserve, and you would have to trust Facebook that the coins you own are backed by real money, with no way of verifying this. Tether works the same way, and they are just creating money out of thin air without actual dollars backing them up. I'm curious how Facebook will decentralize this reserve, or if they will even do this in the first place.
Planning a nuclear plant, getting the necessary permits, fighting challenges to those permits from NIMBYs etc takes at least a decade. Constructing a nuclear plant takes another decade. So the earliest expected benefit would be in 2040. Also nuclear plants are extremely expensive to build. On that time frame and with those capital expenses basically any other solution would work just as well with much less opposition.
No, being opinionated by itself isn't a good enough reason to belong in new code.
Ask HN: How to take readings from circuit boards with code?
I interviewed for a job at a robotics company that needs a software engineer. They are small but doing some amazing things. Its really exciting. They make their own boards and parts, etc.

They want software to control the robot, read signals it sends, send signals to it. The user interface will allow normal people to control it with no technical background.

I was honest and said even through I am very good at c++ I don't have any experience in this work. I have built Pi and a small Arduino based project. They still are expressing interest in having me work for them saying I can learn.

Can anyone give me pointers on how to get started learning about reading from boards, sending values, etc? I'd like to start learning now.
Nice find, I didn't see this before! I think the conversation should be left up so this can all be found, though.
The most important property of Go for me is that the language is not red/blue. [1]

This enables I/O interfaces to be truly universal, covering just about everything from files on disk, to pipes, to in-memory buffers, to sockets. This feature facilitates a style of, for lack of a better word, generic programming that is hard to come by in other systems.

I find basically any other language or platform except Go lacking and unpleasant in this regard, due to the viral nature of asynchronous functions, which never disappears entirely, no matter how much syntactic sugar is sprinkled on top of it.

Things like mismatch between event reactors or asynchronous frameworks do not exist in Go. Interfaces Just Work, and the entire ecosystem uses them.

[1] http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-y...
decentralization and trustlessness I would say are the big two.

With Libra its pretty clearly controlled by large tech companies so validating on the network isnt open to anyone. This means it not decentralized in my book. You also have to trust that the dollars or dollar equivalents are behind every token on the Libra network, this isnt the case in bitcoin/ethereum since there isnt an attempt to use dollar backed tokens at the base layer
Maybe not relevant to the piece but something not mentioned is that not only would the builders of Levittown only sell to whites but home buyers had to sign a contract not to sell their house to any poc
Well, those things stink.

If you like smells then we maybe should unban the bureaucratically banned pooping on the streets.
As first reading the title I thought: “Really, that’s very interesting” Then I realized that almost everything about dogs have changed since humans befriended them. They literally went from wolves to pugs. Taking that into consideration it’s not at all surprising that the eyes changed too. Of cause it’s still interesting to dive in exactly how they’ve changed.