skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Commercial Unix extinguished themselves without much help from Microsoft. The Halloween documents were about Linux after all (over 20 years ago!).. the commercial Unix players have only themselves to blame. Unless we’re going to blame all the mistakes of DEC, HP and IBM on Microsoft. Like geez.... even if that’s true then frankly Microsoft deserved to win.
Apple Watch and AirPods.
I wish the crypto currency described in the second half of Applied Cryptography had caught on.

Basically, the bank issues a signed secret coin, and you (recursively) spend the money by using the secret to generate another signed secret. As with onion routing, you can only “look back” one step of the signature chain unless you collude.

It’s anonymous and supports offline spending. Anonymity can be broken via collusion by an unbroken chain of downstream recipients of the money, but that’s a necessary feature to catch double spenders.

It also integrates in well with modern day to day transactions, in that “atm”’s can issue and retire currency at will. There is not blockchain, so it trivially scales linearly, and is not energy intensive.

It could be a reserve currency, but it’s not optimized for that. Instead, think of it as allowing any bank to issue its own digital fiat currency.

In short, it solves most of the problems everyday people wish bitcoin solved, but isn’t very interesting to speculators.
That was the initial concern. It turns out, a diverse population turns out to turn up. Let me see if I can find their study.

EDIT:
ARGH. I can't find the study I was reading during the summer. But from what I remember, roughly 25% of people were 35-45, 25% were 46-55, and probably the most amazing is the 56-65 group was around 20%!
cough Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania cough

I can assure you there is no way Poland adopts Euro, we will sooner Pexit than let Germany manipulate our currency for their profit. Just look what they did to Greece.
The issue was that the dev didn’t consider why an imperfect estimate would be useful. So they didn’t understand problem solving at a basic level. Engineers not prioritizing what they work on is not a good idea. Especially when the particular ticket was something like adding a feature to an iPhone app.
I will cite this example in the future of the fact that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. I find it incredibly fascinating that almost all the "smart money" has done hedges and shorted TSLA, while the flood of casual pandemic investors has bought into it.

TSLA as a stock is a fascinating example of how price discovery can fail in times of irrational exuberance and that, in the short-to-medium term, markets aren't efficient nor rational.

In 2014, I saw the opportunity to short a broader sector of the economy, we wrote up a white paper and identified market targets etc that would correlate with my observed trend. But I did not pull the trigger as I lacked the necessary knowledge to understand and time the trades.

My prediction came true. But sadly I was unable to capitalize on it.

The TSLA situation is similar. It's clear that the valuation has become disconnected from reality. But how do you time the inevitable collapse of the bubble? How do you model something as bizarre as this form of irrational exuberance?

Do you induce it through a Pershing Square/Bill Ackman style campaign? Do you fund research into the flaws of the product, highlight it, and hope to induce the correction? Or, do you use other signals to time the purchase and mechanics of your short?

In other words, what do you do when the world around you has gone insane?
It’s a godsend to a small handful of Venezuelans, it’s not a general solution as of course a transaction fee is a few months minimum wage. It does literally nothing to solve the problem more broadly. You’d be better off holding value on their behalf stateside.

Of course the government could shut it off in a heartbeat. How many North Koreans does Bitcoin help?
ncsa mosiac

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)
That was my first thought. Is the M1 the result of true innovation or simply vertical integration?
There was a rumor on Twitter that he died on Halloween and I don't think anyone thought anything of it.
Bentonville has no mountains :)
Un felice anno nuovo a tutti voi e che sia il migliore!
> You are correct, but unlike with banks, at least there is an escape hatch: "not your keys, not your coins", which is a lot simpler to implement than walking to your bank and withdrawing all your savings in cash.

To be clear: "Not your keys, not your coin" equivalent in the fiat world is not putting your money in the bank, but holding on to it instead. So you put all your fiat in a safe eg.

> Sadly, the vast majority of Bicoin buyers just leave their coin on the exchange (or worse: in the case of Paypal, they can't do anything else), thereby opening the door to all kind of shady practices, including FRB.

In order to short bitcoin on the exchanges, the exchanges need to have bitcoin to lend out. Naturally these lent bitcoin come from deposits. Exchanges are already practicing FRB on a large scale, but somehow nobody is calling it that (mostly because FRB is not well-understood by the bitcoin community.)
People complain about forced updates because updates have come down that inexplicably break things. For example there was one update in 2020 that caused appeared to delete any files placed in the users Desktop folder (although the files weren't really deleted) and another which caused running chkdsk to corrupt users filesystem in a fashion that typically required fixing the filesystem offline.

Furthermore such updates which usually require a reboot can easily interrupt important work or a long running task.

Just yesterday my Windows install which exists solely to run steam and steam games updated and then committed suicide in a fashion that can't be automatically repaired and requires a reinstall with zero explanation. For reference the hardware is fine as is the Linux install on another drive. The windows drive is a ssd less than 6 months old. I can even mount the ntfs filesystem which appears to be just fine.

There is absolutely no excuse for not letting users pick when or if they would like to update their OS especially when their QA has completely gone to shit and they cannot realistically promise that their update wont break your install.
> However that seems not be happening, nor does there seem to be any will towards it.

I don't know about your other examples, but there is definitely some will toward Scotland voting themselves out of the UK. There was already a referendum about it a few years ago, and there has been more talk again recently since Scottish voters didn't want Brexit and many would love for Scotland to be able to break from the UK and rejoin the EU.
> deflation

You are making a lot of assumptions. But yes, a productive enterprise has to outperform doing nothing to be successful. And no, it is not possible to generate unlimited wealth simply by investing in a deflationary currency.
Most of the problems of Bitcoin are solved by centralization. Reversibility, transaction speed, increasing and decreasing the supply. The problem is that centralization creates an investment contract. We already have a medium for exchanging those. It's called the stock market. Bitcoin operates out of the control of any government or regulation. Thus, the decentralization imposes limitations on its design.

XRP tried to make a centralized cryptocurrency that solved those problems and now the SEC is basically telling them they have to give all the money back because it's an investment contract.
Again, what the hell are SIM cards for? Skip the alphabet soup, please.

On some level, a SIM card must authenticate you to the local tower operator as authorized to place calls, and identify what other carrier gets billed for that if you're roaming. They also identify (in an authenticated manner) what the phone number is for your cell phone, so that the local tower operator can start routing calls to that number to your handset. This seems sufficient for the local tower operator to ensure that you aren't using your smartphone to place tons of robocalls with spoofed numbers, using only infrastructure that is already universally implemented.

I don't see where a landline telco on the receiving end of calls originating from your smartphone needs to know anything about any of that process; the mobile network operator that's connecting the first hop of your call can be and should be the one responsible for preventing you from abusing the network. I want my phone company to hold the mobile network to that standard before letting calls from that network make my phone ring.

> This goes back to the suggested shaken/stir method of authentication. There is really no other way to determine what is valid and what is not. The carrier can attach nearly any number and that number can be entirely valid.

This sounds again like you're deciding ahead of time that the problem can only be addressed by a technical solution that turns out to be basically intractable. You're saying that solving the spoofed robocall problem requires every telco to be able to fully validate in realtime who owns what number and is roaming where. I'm pointing out a relatively non-technical solution where each network is only responsible for restricting the bullshit the let into their network, at the boundaries where it seems practical to enforce without overhauling the entire protocol stack for the whole industry. And lax enforcement would get a carrier blacklisted, or at least make all calls originating from their network readily identifiable as suspicious and trivially blockable.
I've been reading through Berry's "The World-Ending Fire" for a while and find his stuff absolutely fascinating. I highly recommend it.
It's unclear whether the collapse of the European banking system will have the effect of boosting support for rejoining the EU, but it's not impossible.
Which is less than we had before. Also we now have non tariff barriers including a load more red tape bureaucracy even when sending things from one part of the U.K. to another thanks to the Irish Sea border
Depends how expansive you want it. At a certain point, to ease trade, you need common standards and rules and an enforcement mechanism for both, and, oops, suddenly you’ve got a government. That’s essentially how the EU came about in the first place.
This deal is available to most countries. That's the whole Canada deal thingie. Tariffs are usually pretty low anyway in today's world, and not a huge burden. What's unique about the internal market is the absence of paperwork. Regulatory harmonization and recognition of each other's authorities massively simplifies trade. No customs, no immigration, you load stuff on a truck, drive it to where the buyer is, and that's it.
Good luck to everyone!
Government isn't a monolith. There are individuals within the government that have altruistic goals. It may be helpful for certain analyses to simplify and consider a government as an individual, but for other analyses that's counter-productive.
> You don’t need most to agree. Just the basic majority (50%+).

This is a common misconception about how consensus works. Everyone on the network has to agree, anyone who doesn't agree by definition won't be on the same network. They won't be able to receive the same fork of bitcoin that everyone else is sending.
I think the early innovation of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad were a happy confluence of technology reaching a maturation point. We were in a place where batteries were good enough, low power chips were good enough, and everything else could be miniaturized enough to make a compelling and competitive product. I don’t think we’re to another inflection point like that yet. They also weren’t first in a lot of these pursuits, they just did it the best and delivered the best experience.

Today, Apple still delivers the best-in-class experience with their devices. They make measured improvement. AR isn’t to the point where glasses are viable. Foldable displays aren’t to the point where they’re viable in the mass market. When they are, Apple will make a big leap forward and “innovate” again. In the mean time, their innovation is simply to continue delivering the most polished experience possible in the marketplace and they continue doing that.
The Apple Watch now generates more revenue than the entire Swiss watch industry combined. Apple is the largest watchmaker in the world both by revenue and by units sold.
I don’t get the drama. Coaster brake, shielded chain and automatic transmission are extremely common in the cycle-friendly parts of Europe. Though they are now being quickly replaced by electric.
You are correct. Thank you for catching that.
Ask HN: What do you wish the new year will bring?
doesn't have to be about technology, society or health; fire away what is your wishes for the year 2021 and beyond?
Thatcher wasn’t perfect, but England was an economic basket case before her premiership. Visceral Thatcher hate is a meme for nonthinking people.

The great irony is that one of the most significant effects of the EU has been to replicate many of her reforms across the continent. But the europhiles still reflexively hate her.

And why should I or anyone else care about what a fiction author thinks?
I apologize
Yes, and the "total compensation" is no longer good either. "The pay sucks but you get great benefits" meme is no longer true of most state/federal government jobs, those benefits have been drastically shaved down over the last 30 years.

The other major recruiting problem is marijuana prohibition. Government has a lot of problems retaining high-skill IT people because a huge number of computer-touchers smoke. iirc FBI has commented on their inability to hire good technical staff because they can't find anyone who doesn't smoke.

And it's not just a question of willingness to smoke or not going forward, for most public-trust positions you're going to have to abstain for at least a year before even applying.

What are you willing to give up for a job offer that you might not even get? For computer-touchers with lots of other options, that answer is "not much". And federal jobs are basically low-paying, highly-competitive, and high-bureaucracy, when you could be making bank and having a reasonably satisfying work experience in the private sector.

And thus you filter out a huge number of the exact people you're trying to hire - young techies who are familiar with modern IT and development practices.
Bitcoin is crypto version 1.0.

Don't ever buy version 1.0 unless you want to be a beta tester.
There are a lot of ways to communicate to someone without interrupting them. If you are communicating about a bug in code, a ticketing system is a good one because it communicates that something needs to be done, the person you are communicating to can handle the issue when it's not interrupting their current work, and gives them an effective way to let you know it's complete. In most cases the issue in question will get handled quicker because usually multiple people can take care of the task and the one who has free time first can handle it.

An atmosphere where interrupting people randomly is commonplace is almost never good for productivity.

> The best teams I have worked with tend to be more collaborative.

Collaborating doesn't require interrupting people in the middle of a task.
read my answer, it's pretty well explained there
Without a layer of government, the free trade agreement can’t adapt itself to a changing world. One of the bigger criticisms of the EU is that it adapts too slowly, so this would definitely be the opposite of an improvement.
Why not just take it a step forward and have the user select the right time once a second?
I feel like some weird hawk that swoops in for a lot of these Godel comments.

No Godel's incompleteness theorems prove nothing about truth by themselves. They are only statements about proofs and can be independently paired with other statements (as well as their negation), both philosophical and mathematical, about truth. That is the incompleteness theorems are silent on the matter of truth as a direct consequence, but require other theorems or philosophies to further mold statements on truth (the incompleteness theorems do have important indirect impact on those statements).

For example there is Godel's Completeness Theorem , which in a vague sense proves that "all true things are provable" (I can explain in greater detail if so desired). Godel's Completeness Theorem holds independently of Godel's Incompleteness Theorems (that is all four possible pairings of holding/not holding can apply to different formal systems). Notably Godel's Completeness Theorem holds for first order logic, the most common formalization of mathematical foundations (which includes ZFC and Peano Arithmetic).

> Can you give an example of a statement that is independent of ZFC yet useful/often-used?

Very briefly, the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem used an axiom that is independent of ZFC (it used a large cardinal axiom). It was later found that the proof did not require this axiom and could be fully formalized within ZFC.

There are separately simple-sounding and useful-sounding, but not actually used, statements which are independent of ZFC (such as if the set X is smaller than the set Y by cardinality then X has fewer subsets than Y).

But almost all of mainstream mathematics is perfectly happy to remain in ZFC.

There is separately an interesting empirical/philosophical question of whether there might still be a "practically complete" set of axioms to do mathematics which is not definitively settled by Godel's Incompleteness Theorems.

> And are you saying formal proof assistants like coq and isabelle are fools errands, in the sense that mathematics is in principal beyond formalization? If not, then why not?

Ugh this is why associating Godel's Incompleteness Theorems with truth can be so misleading. Godel's Incompleteness Theorems, in contexts where Godel's Completeness Theorem holds, has little overall consequence for formal proof assistants. Whether the conception of abstraction in a human mind in principle is beyond formalization is a deep philosophical question (but this is not specific to mathematics, this is really just the age old philosophical question of whether qualia and the human consciousness are reducible). However mathematics as practiced by working mathematicians and laid out in theorems and proofs is formalizable essentially by definition.
Actually the real problem is that the iPhones are not produced in the US so any profit that accrues goes to well paid Apple engineers and Apple shareholders. If you are not a highly skilled worker you are not going to get a share of the profit. That's the general problem first world countries are facing, lack of demand for low skilled labor unless it is illegal immigrant labor because that is the only form of labor that is cheap enough to compete with foreign countries. You can either train everyone (very hard) or make sure there are enough low skilled jobs (government stimulus).
What set the AirPods apart from other wireless headphones at the time?
Isn’t the issue exactly that money supply is increasing decoupled from the real economy? This is why quantitative easing hasn’t particularly increased consumer prices, which are one important indicator of value.
Technically, all precise clocks are always wrong ;)
ACH is US Banking only. You can not do Direct person to person transfers, you must go through a US Bank for ACH

ACH is also SLOW and painfully insecure relaying on the banking institutions to stop gap the security and its built in slowness to allow for reversals of fraud or error transfers

ACH is not a model people should be promoting as good method to do money transfer
No, the government can't "just shut down the internet".

If any government did that, then the country would suffer extreme economic damages, if such a policy was maintained for a long time.

Your argument would be like if someone were to say "actually, the government can stop all theft, now and forever. All it has to do is launch 1 thousand nukes, start world war 3, and kill off 99% of the population".

Like, sure. The government could end the world, by launch a nuke at every major city in the world. And it is true that by doing this it would end all theft .. because everyone is dead.

But you are kinda missing the bigger picture if you are seriously suggesting this as a counter argument to anything.
> Why would one person want to reduce the ability to apply economic policy in their country?

It might not be good for the people as a whole, but preventing your money from being inflated is very good for any given person taken individually.
>No one treats Bitcoin as a currency.

I wouldn't necessarily say that most of its market cap is coming from people treating it like a currency. But I most definitely think it is effectively a currency in some places and in some special circumstances.

I take it that the point of the post is that, by and large, due to the fact that the blockchain is public and analyzed and mining is conceivably traceable to special purpose hardware, it's not for many practical purposes usable as a stateless, institution-free vehicle for transactions.

I'm not sure how to square the circle on this, but it certainly is a currency in some cases.
今年もよろしくお願いします！
Salaries are publicly posted for many USDS jobs. They aren’t particularly competitive as far as I’ve seen. But - only 20-30% low. It might be worth it for the good one could do.
Sure, if that short seller research isn't fraudulent itself. For example, there was a video floating around "proving" that Tesla was storing massive numbers of vehicles in desert parking lots that were on the books as sold. I feel that the "good" short sellers like Hindenburg Research tend to be more the exception than the rule.
Only if you presuppose that the 'small clique of miners with specialized hardware' represents the same interests as the system that bitcoin is slowly starting to displace.

Perhaps I should have specified anarchy to the system as it currently exists. It's a time bomb built and released to destroy the economic status quo.
It really is a currency, however. It's not a matter of perception but rather of how Bitcoin functions. The biggest difference between a commodity and currency is that a commodity is essential for some process or product. A currency is just one of many ways of funding that process/product. You can't build a computer without gold, copper, and some rare earth metals (commodities) but you can pay for it with USD, bitcoin, yuan, GBP, etc.

Aswath Damodaran has written a lot more on this topic.
https://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-bitcoin-boo...

He does agree with you in that Bitcoin will be judged as a currency, so its strengths and deficiencies as a currency will determine its fate.
Fair point about state/local. My statement about FAANG was based on some napkin math I did with regard to published rates for certain labor categories by some big contracting companies on some vehicles they were a part of.

But even doing a quick comparison, levels.fyi estimates about $160 - 180k cash compensation for new hires for FAANG. GS-15 Step 3 in DC is 150k. Plus excellent government benefits. It's spitting distance at least.
Sorry, the USD price of bitcoin is tracking the inflation of USD in theory? What theory's that?
Bag-holder usually has the connotation of holding a worthless asset, bitcoin is currently at an all time high.
For individual humans that’s like saying ”My net worth is $100k and that is more than most people earn in a year”. Yes that is true, it is larger. But it is meaningless comparison and misleading at best.
Yes, I feel the same way (about rap music and about DOOM). It almost subsumes all other genres because any of them could be used as a beat.
I guess we’re just establishing that Bitcoin doesn’t fit the definition of a functional currency of which cash is a subset.