skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I understand that the exchange can prove control of a certain amount of bitcoin, but how can they prove the amount of credit they have extended? By definition the credit is uncoupled from any blockchain, right?

Solvency has two parts: Assets and liabilities. The 'prove control' is the assets part.

The other side of a solvency proof is that they can, without breaking anyone's privacy) show that every user's account balance adds up to the sum of Bitcoin they control.

In fact, they can prove solvency (that is, that each user has a balance and that they control at least the sum of distinct balances) without ever revealing the total amount they control or even how many accounts they have (other than a log(n)-ish lower bound). http://www.jbonneau.com/doc/DBBCB15-CCS-provisions.pdf

But forget privacy for a moment:

Imagine they were to publish a list of all accounts, all coins, signatures with all coins, and then timestamp that list with Bitcoin. Then the login JS that their site hands out (and which can be checked js pinning extensions) could at login make sure that that document checked out-- that the signatures were vaid, that the coins existed, that the totals summed up, that it was stampped in Bitcoin, and that your own balance was reflected in it. Presumably you see that that approach would essentially work. The only fanciness needed is making it communications efficient and private.
I find that any major service pack install inadvertently resets preferences around defender/other settings. I’m not a daily windows user currently, but i definetly don’t appreciate opening a laptop after a month in 2019 and it being unusable for an hour while it auto updates.
If you are not heavily dependent on softwares that run exclusively on Windows, I would say user experience on any mainstream GNU/Linux distribution is far better than that of Windows(which still insists automatic update before a reboot/shutdown). Also, community support for linux is much better. Places like AskUbuntu and community forums of distributions are much better than microsoft's support forum. Try a distribution like Kubuntu or Linux Mint for a few weeks :)
I kind of agree, with distros like Ubuntu you get the Windows convenience and most of the people just use a browser for everything nowadays anyway.
I wonder if these probes may rather be captured by humans in a few hundred or thousands of years and placed in museums back on earth. With faster space travel techniques that is a possible scenario.
And a lot of things I feel cross the line into just not "fit for purpose". I read a lot of reviews where person after person describes a fundamental design flaw with a product, and I can spend an hour reading about different ones in a category and they all seem to have a similar issue.

Really, if 5% of people get something that is broken or breaks quickly, I'm all for rolling the dice. However, if 95% break, I don't think there's any chance that 5% will last 10 years because it's not designed to.
Unless you damage the car, the owner is probably going to be fairly uninterested in the footage, and it will probably get overwritten.
If you only trust facts that you verify yourself firsthand, you can’t really live on the accumulated progress of human expertise. Your level of technological sophistication will max out at “can make a thatch hut and gather pineapples.”
The Early History of Usenet
> Apple never wanted the enterprise. Hardware sells to the enterprise are low margin, require babysitting and they require backwards compatibility forever.

I agree with much of this, except the idea that enterprise sales are low margin. Once you lock in an enterprise customer, the cost of switching to another provider becomes a large barrier. Your margin is dictated largely by the cost of your product, minus the cost of the competitor's, plus the cost of switching. If the cost of switching is high, the margins can also be high.

Apple does not derive its margins from the cost of switching (changing phones is relatively easy). They do generally have a better product, but they also provide incredible branding around being the best. Apples margins are dictated by cost of Apple's product, minus the competitors, plus value of affiliating yourself with their brand.
I’m a long term Matlab user and I’ve been using Matplotlib more and more recently. This is partially out of frustration with recent changes to Matlab graphics and also a desire to use more open source tools.

Matlab plotting is extremely powerful and versatile. Sometimes the output could be nicer but the interactive figure hierarchy is great. Matplotlib on the other hand is, at least to me, a lot more clunky to work with. But it gets the job done and the output often looks nicer and solves my gripes with Matlab.
I've always supposed he had some affective care for Deckard and didn't want him to eat too much junk food.
When a clean install of Windows 10 ""Professional"" had prominent ads for Candy Crush in the Start Menu, is when I realized MS had lost their dignity.
An ad based model is 100% progressive though unlike any normal scheme. For example a homeless guy pay basically nothing for browsing Facebook on his phone even if he lives in USA since his attention is not worth anything.
You blew it out of proportion. It's more like you badge in a certain cafe. No one knows what you ate in that cafe.
افتتاح مهرجان الزيتون في مكتبة فيلادلفيا
I am also a CUL refugee who is using JabRef after trying Zotero. Would be interested to know if there are any other options.
I'm interested in data sciences and coding (Python) for research, and I am/was involved in two startups. I visit HN at least 4-5 times a day ;-)
> If you only trust facts that you verify yourself firsthand, you can’t really live on the accumulated progress of human expertise.

Arguably, the differentiating factor between humans and animals is our ability to organize on large scales. Monkeys and killer whales can coordinate behavior in groups of sometimes up to 50 or maybe 100 individuals. However, humans can coordinate behavior across millions of people. Building a modern automobile, a computer chip, or the social security system requires coordination across so many individuals, no one person can fully and deeply understand the entire system.

The ability of humans to believe information that they do not fully know is true, is probably one of the defining traits of humanity.
I wanted a particular USB adapter, from what I thought was a "real" brand and as far as I could tell from the manufacturer webpage, it's only sold on Amazon. And the only option on Amazon was a third party.
How is this comment downvoted? It’s true.
Seems like Larry and Brin have re-created Soviet factory in full.

> The best way for a man to advance in the Communist hierarchy is to make speeches constantly at party and public meetings. [1]

* Workers' councils
* Factory committies

Google in 1930 -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3draTawRFas

[1] https://books.google.pl/books?id=mNexJrn4wmgC&pg=RA4-PA4&lpg...
> For instance, the just build it and ship it mentality is something you won’t find in any book -- as it doesn’t discuss testing, finding product-market fit, etc.

I think that's essentially what This is marketing by Seth Godin covers.
/r/askscience is well moderated.
There's lots of options. You can write an implementation in Coq (it has its own functional language you code in), prove it correct in Coq and then "extract" (like transpiling) it to another language like OCaml for executing. There's ways to map C code into Coq to prove it's correct as well. All of this is machine checked. See the sel4 kernel to get more of a feel for it.

Property based testing sits somewhere between regular software testing with unit tests and theorem proving on the spectrum. It's much less time intensive to do but much less rigorous.

My point isn't that formal verification is better than everything. It has its trade-offs, just like TDD.
You overestimate the skills of moderators... I doubt very much that true experts in their fields would spend any time doing moderation Reddit... most likely, people doing that would be recent graduates trying to learn and impart their recently gained knowledge upon laymen.
How do you crack the code to a lost ancient script?
Ubuntu is very user friendly. Competition is good for the consumer and result in better products.
You can still have laws preceding APIs that are abstract enough to also apply for it well enough. In Germany for instance we have a special clause that specifically allows reverse engineering for making something compatible with another product.
A little bit irrelevant to the article:

Unpopular opinion but, is opt-outtable telemetry that bad?

Of course using tracked behaviors for add targeting is bad (which is why my opinion is irrelevant to the article) but using telemetry to do AB-tests, UX-tests, finding bugs, etc... what’s really bad about it?

Every comment about telemetry in HN reads something like ‘Telemetry with opt-out is bad, so GitLab is bad, VSCode is bad, brew is bad, etc...’ but personally I really can’t see the problem.

For people who can’t believe the company enough for processing one’s data can turn off telemetry right? The fact that one is using the application from one company (for example, VSCode) implies that they trust the company (in this case, MS). If one doesn’t, one can manually turn it off.
Like most articles on this site, this is an uncredited verbatim copy-and-paste from the originating site with author and origin credits removed:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/bbc-new-files-allegedly-conne...

Please flag blatant plagiarism.
Is that a sensical definition of waste here? The difference in externalities has to be greater than and opposite to the delta in cost, in order for their decision to be wrong, I think.

Just because externalities are ignored doesn't prove anything in particular if you don't know the relative change.
Sure, you could do that. But honestly, as a worker drone it all sounds like corporate bullshit to me. No one says things like, "Lets do this well so we can make more money so we can get paid more" or anything actually truthful like that.
Ubuntu isn't the only user friendly distro either. It depends on what the user wants to do. For example Manjaro, while not perfect, has an excellent hardware detector, and I sometimes recommend it for people who want to game.

I have many times wanted to really dig into the "windows skins" for a few different DE's and experiment on users to see if they even noticed the difference. I suspect done correctly you could have a windows lookalike with linux underneath that many of the browser only users wouldn't be able to tell apart. I also suspect that Microsoft knows they have hurt themselves with 8/10 and their recent pushes into Linux Foundation are hedging their bets, trying to find ways to keep people on doze who might otherwise leave the ecosystem. I do get frustrated at how many people at HN ignore MS's history of anti-foss and now deride anyone who brings up EEE, but I disgress. I went gnu/linux only years ago seeing this coming after years of sysadmin'ing Win/OSX/Linux, and haven't regretted it at all.

Beyond that, I remind people that they had to learn how to use windows, and even it keeps changing things (umm where did local account creation go at install, oh wait, I have to unplug ethernet to get that option? thats bullshit), so why not learn to use something like linux? It's really not that hard, especially with all the gtk frontends for cli stuff.
They still make those??
Life, Uh, Finds a Way.gif
You sound like an exceptional person!

I don't want to live in a society that requires everyone to be as exceptional as you are in order to live comfortably.
This guy Peter Vessenes is holding thousands of peoples' trading accounts hostage in a frivolous lawsuit against a now-defunct exchange.

Multiple people have committed suicide because their life savings are locked up in this lawsuit. All because Vessenes here thinks he should be awarded half a billion dollars for making a half hearted attempt at opening a US based branch of it.

It makes me sick just to see your name on here. You should be ashamed of yourself, at least own it and make your comments under a pseudonym. Or do you actually feel you are somehow justified in robbing us?
What finally got me on Linux for good was Regolith (an Ubuntu distribution with a tiling WM preconfigured). The window manager is just better, faster, and I can use my vim shortcuts to move between windows and desktops. And, crucially for Linux, it came ready to go so I didn't have to spend days getting it working how I'd like.
HBO’s “Watchmen” is weird and dangerous, just like it needs to be
> An ad based model is 100% progressive though unlike any normal scheme. For example a homeless guy pay basically nothing for browsing Facebook ...

A system in which a poor person making $30k/year and spends $500/year on products or content advertised via Facebook versus a rich person who makes $1M/year and spends $10k on products/content via facebook is not exactly progressive. The poor person ends up paying 1.6% of their income, while the rich person spends 0.1%.

The poor person spends 16X of their takehome earnings than the rich person, not exactly progressive.
> My idea is that if you do e.g. a taxi app, then the only ‘routes’ you should care about are routes on the map.

There are no routes on the map.

As a backend developer, your job is to define what are the valid routes and how to handle non-compliance but valid requests.

Take for example content negotiation. Do you honour the Accept header or do you serve content based on the request path, such as the resource extension? What should you do if you receive a request where both approaches are used but in a contradicting manner?

Now, keep in mind that API versioning is handled as content negotiation.

Now, let's add auth to the mix. Do you intend to hand-roll a few OpenId connect workflows by hand, which involve 3 or 4 HTTP requests behind exchange between 2 or 3 actors? Are you intending to hand-roll token expiration checks? Or do you prefer to use an API key or session cookies, or any other, or a mix of all of them put together?

And what about caching? Are you expecting to check and tweak cache control and etags headers each and every time you receive a request?

Or do you only want to receive a request and act upon it's request body?

If you use one of these web frameworks, all you need to do is configure your middleware to specify how you handle auth and cache and content negotiation, define routes based on the outcome of your content negotiation process, and proceed to implement your web API.
We still don't have fully hardware accelerated video playback in browsers under Linux. To check this, watch a 4K video in the browser and look at the CPU usage.

Edit:
I can block ads in various ways (pi.hole, etc.) but I can't fix laggy UI. I'm always using Linux on one of my PCs so that I can follow how it's progressing, but Win10+WSL2+VcXsrv gives me the best of all worlds.
US Army tests new wonder weapon that could change warfare forever
they travel slow enough that future space travel technology may have the potential to catch up with them and bring them back.
Ogmo Editor 3
Yes, and Walmart has a lower quality/price ratio. And people at Costco are nice to communicate with. And Costco treats them well.
Do you know if old.reddit doesn't do the horrible trick the "normal" Reddit does when you hit the browser's back button, where it fucking reloads the page or something so you get up to the top of the page instead of to the part of the page where the link you'd clicked was, so you could go to the comments? Specially on mobile, that makes me hate Reddit!! Trying on desktop, old.reddit seems to not do that.
> We now live in a different economic universe than we did before the crash

I think "this time is different" thinking is dangerous. Yes, maybe the world is different now, but it's only been 10 years since the big crash, not so long.

Expecting the world to keep being the same as it is now is just as dangerous as thinking it will always be as it was for the last 50 years.
> Why don’t we see numerous both-side frameworks which make http (rest, ws, etc) completely transparent?

Fulcro[0] has this story. It's a full stack CQRS library that works by sending queries and commands over a single /api endpoint. You don't write HTTP plumbing, you write queries and mutations on your data (and any resulting change in state is reflected automatically in your view, leveraging React).

It also has great functionality to normalize and manage your front-end state, but that's extra.

[0]: http://book.fulcrologic.com/fulcro3/#FullStack
Linux people keep peddling this, I'd say it'll never be the year of Linux on Desktop if you keep denying you have problems. Last I tried to dual boot my Windows gaming rig to Ubuntu Desktop earlier this year, it can't even do fractional scaling on my 4K monitor, making it completely worthless. You'd think HiDPI support is pretty basic stuff in 2019. Granted Windows HiDPI is still craptastic compared to macOS, as least it has been usable since 2015.
"the mammoth 500 cu. in. (8,194 cc) engine in the Cadillac Eldorado fell from 400 gross horsepower (298 kW) in 1970 to only 235 net horsepower (175 kW) for 1971. The real decline wasn’t quite as steep as it looked; the 1971 engine did have a lower compression ratio to prepare for the adoption of unleaded gasoline, but the 1971 gross rating was still 365 hp (272 kW), so the actual loss was about 10%, not more than 40%"

https://ateupwithmotor.com/terms-technology-definitions/gros...
Advice is good, I don't want to seem like I'm critical of the post or anything, I just thought it's worth pointing out the differences in goals of the folks who tend to give the most popular startup advice from your specific situation.

That difference might help explain why there might be a perceived gap in what's here vs. what's on pg's blog, for example.
> And, Apple has lit this torch.

Too bad this ends on this line. So you recommend trusting another corporation over Microsoft to be virtuous over the long term? The only OS you can truly control is well known, and it's Linux.
> what does that even mean

to me it reads like a description of "marketing accessibility" in more words. So, making your ads work well with screen readers. Truly a devilish conspiracy by M$
/s
Wizards of the Coast – Notice of Recent Security Incident
Dear Wizards Community:
We are writing to let you know about a recent security incident at Wizards of the Coast.

What Happened?
On November 14, 2019, we learned that an internal database file from a decommissioned version of the Wizards of the Coast website login had inadvertently been made accessible outside the company. We believe that this was an isolated incident, limited to a legacy database and unrelated to our current systems. Based on our current investigation, we have no reason to believe that any malicious use has been made of the data. However, in an abundance of caution, we are sending you this notice to let you know what happened, what steps we are taking as a result, and what steps we are encouraging you to take to protect yourself.
what do you think ?
https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=21551630
Chrome books are definetly worse when it comes to tracking!

It's sad that besides Linux, there arent that many options anymore...

Imagine the tracking that happens on phone, compared to desktop.
We have win machine at the office with latest OS. I don’t see these ads at all. Clearly there is a way to prevent this otherwise companies would not go for it.
Spotify went for a direct listing because they were in desperate need for money
Do You Have to Be Rich to Travel the World
> standup actually were 5 minutes like it should be according to theory

Jeff Sutherland who invented scrum thinks it should be 15 minutes, so according to theory they should be 15 minutes:

> The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute time-boxed event for the Development Team. The Daily Scrum is
held every day of the Sprint. At it, the Development Team plans work for the next 24 hours. This
optimizes team collaboration and performance by inspecting the work since the last Daily Scrum
and forecasting upcoming Sprint work. The Daily Scrum is held at the same time and place each
day to reduce complexity

https://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2017/2017-Scrum...
I received this email in the middle of the night. I haven't played Magic for about 15 years, so every detail on their records if (understatement) outdated. I wonder how many of us had an account with them that is dormant.
Brief and Bizarre History of the Baby Cage
> What is the alternative for average consumers ? Chrome books ?

The answer is obvious if you care about what the article is about. It's Linux. ChromeBooks are controlled by Google whose entire business is ads, so they can't be trusted either.
A simple Python development environment
Bell labs? Xerox PARC?
Its not like this is the solution for everything. It's not even about ease of use, its mainly about the availability of software. About 80% of the software my colleagues use on a daily basis is not available on Linux (not including MS Office, although LibreOffice is definitely not a sufficient replacement)
Sure, this is an issue of users in an enterprise environment, but your average PC user is more likely to use the same OS he is using at work rahter than trying anything else.
"People should work on things which provide value to themselves, their community, and the world at large. They shouldn't be working on things that actively destroy those."

Unfortunately, lots of folks are working on things whose sole value truly is to put food on the table at home. I think there are few janitors that enjoy cleaning toilets, especially if they work for places where the workers or the public smear feces on the walls. Few folks get motivated to clean portable toilets or to work for minimum wage at a fast food place. Few folks are truly motivated to work retail.

And it doesn't matter that some of these give some small benefit to the community nor that things like fast food is a mixed thing (fast food both provides a benefit and destroys the community) or that lots of laborious jobs tend to destroy one's body - and it only takes one injury or heart attack to make one out of work.

It isn't because they lack awareness of their impact or anything, but more that folks need to survive. Not everyone can get a job with your description for a wide variety of reasons. Besides, at the end of the day society still needs folks to shower old folks in homes and to clean portable toilets, no matter how much they don't fit in your description.
There are lots of useful applications that are not available on Linux.
Surely you're not saying I need to provide sources for everything I say, even the most obvious, are you really that pedantic?
I wonder if you've read the novel "Flowers for Algernon"? If not I have a feeling you'd like it (although perhaps find some of it difficult going - I certainly did).
That’ not really the point of the article though.
There are also huge federal contractors (defense, etc.) that the average consumer can't name because they aren't on anything the public comes in contact with.
Google specifically has Google Research and a Research Scientist track.