skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a cyclist and driver in a city, cyclists running red lights is one of those things that people talk about like it's a massive problem. It's not cyclists blowing red lights at busy junctions, if they did that they would be killed here instantly. It's cyclists trying to go when there isn't any traffic going, or they're competing with pedestrians. Yeah you get the occasional asshat, but you get them in cars too, and they're way more dangerous there.

The focus needs to be on getting cars under control, period.
I love this. A lot. Thanks for sharing.
*and here is what you can do to help it improve:
And griefs.
> continued attacks ... practically impossible

I agree that continued attacks makes a complicated situation, given the cartel participants would probably hold a significant amount of coin and would risk devaluing themselves against some other currency (though in the end-game scenario, what other currency matters?).

Let's imagine that the majority of domestic and international trade is conducted in Bitcoin, with maybe some alterations to the protocol to enable hundreds of thousands of transactions per second at essentially zero cost from the perspective of an individual actor (non-miner), even bursting up to tens of millions of transactions per second, somehow. Suppose then that two large governments, say the Unites States of America and the People's Republic of China, get into a little tiff about some boats hanging around the Taiwan Strait. Would these societies (in aggregate) prefer that their domestic and international trade be conducted in Bitcoin, or in a domestically-controlled currency?

A cartel could lock out a set of accounts from the Bitcoin network. Perhaps only temporarily, but long enough to have serious effects.

> power themselves off-grid through renewables

That'd be cool, but I doubt that off-grid will ever reach the efficiency and scale that on-grid will provide, due to fluctuations in the power sources and the economies of scale. It's hard to make a currency choice by betting on that technology, especially as the calculation could swap as the technology changes.
I agree. In fact, the moment someone tells me I can't do something that I want to do is the moment I say "fuck you, watch me"
At market comp with market frustrations?

Most reasonable people might wanna work for their government for a 20% discount in either, but my fear is that it’s much much more and in both.
I believe Mark Francois is to be used to train an AI to have CaaS - there's hope yet!
Yeah sure, as long as you get your paperwork ready and book your visas ahead of time
Interesting story.

Question: was there any possibility of escrow here? What if the phone never showed up?
This Person Does Not Exist:
https://thispersondoesnotexist.com

This Waifu Does Not Exist:
https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net

These Lyrics Do Not Exist:
https://TheseLyricsDoNotExist.com

Complete list:
https://thisxdoesnotexist.com
This was not tribalism. The vote was on a knife’s edge, and only after many years of anti-European sentiment stirred up by conservative and other Euro-skeptic sections of the media. We can squarely blame Rupert Murdoch for this, even if he did not directly pull the strings. People routinely vote against their best interests because they are convinced to do so by a pervasive, aggressive, psychologically damaging mass media, which is now exacerbated by social media.
How to learn programming so quick
At least your representatives are not about to have a vote on if your democracy should pay attention to the results of its own elections.
wow, considered worse than Neville Chamberlain
wait... what? Do you have any resources where i can learn more about this? There's enough radiation in the atmosphere to forever alter the composition of steel going forward?
Except Bitcoin has no way to “stabilize”. Without central banks’ intervention and governance, even regular currencies would fluctuate like crazy. Unless the bitcoin world can come up with a Federal Reserve / ECB equivalent, it will continue to be a wild ride, which will effectively impede further uses. It will always be a speculation vehicle rather than a store of value.
I have definitely made searches on google on a 2015 macbook pro, only to see every link above the fold be an ad.

Google still offers utility but their dominance will be challenged by niche players (in aggregate) over the coming years.

I do not put a value judgement on their behavior. I merely comment on the opportunities presented when they become too big to innovate from the bottom.
As a freelance programmer/UX designer I offer my clients to pay in Bitcoin (yes, as a currency).

So far over the course of my decade-ish long career most invoices are paid via fiat but actually my record sale was paid in Bitcoin. The client paid for approx 500 consulting hours in BTC (and is still a client to this day, paying for many more hours than that batch in subsequent purchases albeit sometimes in fiat).

I prefer Bitcoin over government fiat currency when doing large transactions like that because of the risk that a bank will freeze the funds or hold the transaction arbitrarily without warning and on either side of the equation; ie- you don't know if the party sending or receiving may be subject to the freeze.
After the quality of care that I just received from one of America's top hospitals, I think we need to raise the standards for becoming a doctor quickly.

When I have more time I'll be creating a blog about it.

Medically unnecessary surgeries are a HUGE problem in our system and I'm worried that creating more doctors could possibly exacerbate the problem here.
The Euro has done huge damage to the EU project - because of it Greece is stuck in debt, smaller countries can't support their economies in the middle of the pandemic, etc. Even the most ardent europhiles have come around to realise gow problematic it is.

The real sovereignty of a country is not in it's armed forces - its the currency. Without control over the press and interest rates, all you can do is tax and spend in a region with no borders, its like running an oversized city councill. However the amount of solidarity and coordination in EU is not high enough that you can rely on it - you can see that in Dutch ministers refusing to back COVID bonds, and the amount of EU-level economix stimulous being miniscule for the economy size
> Most people take it for granted that they need a bank to do anything, and they don't really consider how powerless they are over their own money

People use banks because they provide financial services. You don't have to use banks, if for some reason you want to avoid them, but then you're left without access to those services. As far as I know, Bitcoin doesn't provide financial services, so it's not a replacement for banking.
Skål og godt nytår!

Greetings fra Aalborg, Denmark. :)
We've banned that troll account, but it's absolutely not ok for you to post like this. We've asked you several times to stop breaking the HN guidelines in comments here, and it looks like you've been continuing to do a ton of that. If you keep doing it we're going to ban you. Regardless of how shitty another comment is or how strongly you feel, it's not ok to make things worse like this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Right, but then you have to ride a mountain bike around. Which isn't really the best for longer distances of casual transportation…
In reality bonds are rolled over so not really.
People on Hacker News, being in general the knowledge workers and (at least in our minds) the intelligentsia that we are, have particular disdain for democracies doing things they disagree with.

I remember the day after Brexit passed my high school friend who was then working on her PhD in international theory asking how the government could revert such a decision. It seemed like the most out of touch ivory tower thing to say, and made me suspect of what educational institutions are teaching people these days.
Ask HN: Is 1Password a Relational Database?
Yes. Let's try to blow your mind. Is it organisms all the way down? Where do atoms come from? Literally I don't know, just a shower thought for you.
vertical landing isn't new, either.
Perhaps the most powerful thing about Bitcoin is that the guy who created it is unknown (if Satoshi was a guy or a lone person at all) and that it mostly runs on autopilot and at this point is not governed by a single body. It can't be sued. The creator of it can't be sued. And yes, more of it can't be made and there is deflation built into it. Genius.
That's harsh (I would rate the failure of the Russian experiment after '91 as worse), but it's certainly the worst thing we've done since Suez.

David Cameron - what a legacy!
No SSH keys, passwords, etc. Use Kerberos baby, SSO in!

SSH and Kerberos has been around for decades, but few companies have it implemented.

It completely removes the need for SSH keys and their related management, user/group management, etc., which is a huge security and administration win.
Bitcoin doesn't solve any trust problem outside of how many bitcoins are in each wallet.

Even in the very basic ecommerce use case: buyer purchases item online with bitcoin. The buyer must necessarily trust the vendor to deliver.

There's no recourse outside of the good graces of the vendor. There's no chargebacks or third party mediation.

Thus Bitcoin actually reverses the risk assumed by online purchases from the vendor to the buyer.

This is the reason why Bitcoin is a failure outside of niche grey and black market concerns. It is far worse for the consumer than existing solutions that isolate them from transaction risk, and will usually kick back a small percentage in cash back.
Gut feeling says you're right, but their financial performance is extraordinary and based on selling not just ads, but so much more. Google Maps has literally the entire US mapped out in terms of street view, GSuite is such a bargain, GCP is up there with the three big cloud providers. I don't know what Verily life sciences is doing, there is also Waymo (no revenue), and Google X (moonshots).
Why are they using bitcoin rather than dollar stablecoins? Too new?
Litecoin is extremely similar to Bitcoin.

The fact that some of the currency's "fundamental constants" have been tweaked to make it slightly better for certain situations does not change the fundamentals.

It's kind of like the multiplicative constants in algorithm complexity theory.

And while there are many other alt-coins that claim to have solved the scalability problem while remaining truly decentralized, I have yet to see one actually deliver.
Happy New Year HN!
Not wanting to be in the EU makes you a racist how exactly? Are we using the word “racist” in the same way as it was applied in the last four years in America?
To expound on the disassembly, the debug symbols are not just easily accessible but also actively used in Windows app development.
That's a lot of temptation to fulfill someone's own prophesy. I hope Elon takes his security as seriously as he does batteries and rocket nozzles. If he left the helm the intellectual and visionary capital of Tesla might not change much, but the social and financial capital would drop fast and far. I kind of hope he watches too many Bond movies and decides to seal himself in a hidden lair and run things from there.

But Apple is still Apple after Jobs. Hopefully the same is true for Tesla and Musk, and we don't find that out for decades.
I agree that governments can manipulate their monetary policy in ways that are not in the best interests of their people. But I also don't see how widespread crypto currency would 1) have prevented the '08/'09 financial collapse, and 2) it appears that fiat monetary policy has more flexibility in responding to such crisis by inserting liquidity, facilitating the controlled dissolution of defunct financial institutions, etc.
That makes sense.

Not to criticise but... Isn't the IP of a transaction initiator being public a bit of a design flaw? Is it just assumed that users will obscure their own IPs (vpn, tor, etc)? Otherwise my isp/government can see my transactions and infer wallet ownership and I'm suddenly very un-anonymous...
Well, there are signed distance field fonts for one thing.
What we define as a good currency doesn’t. A currency that inflates or deflates dramatically is foundering.
A fair point. That one is a blind spot for me because I do not use the social aspects of the platform.
Good for an EU-E.U. agreement.
Never heard of crypto mixing obviously
According to https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/g... Berry still, as of 2018, did not own a computer, a cell phone, or even an answering machine!
This still holds for C# and the .NET ecosystem today, especially amongst SV startups. If only they knew how much faster and better they could be building instead of avoiding it for ideological reasons.
how much counterparty risk does the rapid price fluctuation result in? Can't imagine pricing a contract in bitcoin, as someone's getting screwed at payment if the BTC/fiat rate has changed during the lifetime of the contract
Nice write up. There should be a section on MQ gotchas. Here's my war story:

Back in the days when we didn't know what we were doing, we had a system where MQ was used in Request/Response style for querying databases. On the beginning of this was a web endpoint. Frequently we end up in a cascading failure whenever we hit an overload situation, because the web client would time out, and retry another call. Meanwhile, there's a bunch of query messages enqueued to be executed against the DB despite the fact the client had already disconnected. If you are trying to web scale, you'd end up paying for IO twice, first to query the DB and second to persist the results in a queue. The big take away for me was to be wary of coupling an unreliable synchronous RPC with a reliable asynchronous MQ.
Litecoin is extremely under the radar right now. With the upcoming MimbleWimble integration it could become a privacy alternative to Monero.
Because they didn't throw away 7 million votes to hand him the election?

If you think the courts haven't been overwhelmingly overloaded by GOP appointees for the past decade, you are willfully NOT paying attention.
Software Bill of Material (SBOM) will become more of a thing - where you must list the dependencies and their hash you used for supply-chain security and vulnerability management.

New law enforcement techniques using DNS and other Intel techniques will be used to track, seize and tax cryptocurrency - which will cause increased popularity of Ethereum.

A qubit will travel around the world without decohering and increase attention on quantum internet investments.
GPT4 and other ML models (maybe even with a neuro-feedback loop) will radically change entertainment for Gaming, movies, books, and music.

Smart Cities will start emerging ( and some cities which will ban the technology) with ML models and Intel systems capable of identifying all kinds of hazards (fires), threats (terrorists) and crime at scale.

A new “shadow net” will emerge from new mesh-networking protocols and massive amounts of compromised IoT devices- allowing users to bypass core internet routers and ISPs with the “shadow net”

XR with depth field scanning and smart tailoring with drastically change the fashion industry ( shoes and clothes). So people can virtually try on clothes and order perfectly tailored clothes from their home.
Wouldn't Ireland be your best bet? It's close, English-speaking, culturally similar and some UK citizens are eligible for Irish citizens to boot.
I think he meant frequent and unpredictable forced reboots. But the updates are also a disaster. Microsoft trying to shoves their shitty apps down our throat every time, resetting the default applications regularly.
>they cannot afford to pay people market rates

This is not true! On average, the federal government is paying quite a bit of money for tech people. I'd seriously estimate they're paying almost FAANG rates in a lot of cases all told.

The problem is that a lot of it gets siphoned off in the contracting process. The contracting process needs to be fixed. There's a ton of huge established players doing really bad work. IT specifically gets treated differently in government contracting, and is almost always procured through something called a GWAC which is basically a moat that it's hard for new companies to get into (the goal is to streamline procurement by having "vetted" companies in this pool already but it usually means it's very difficult for new players to get involved.)

That is changing, just very slowly. The agency that created this playbook, GSA, is helping facilitate that with things like introducing good vendors to other agencies and smaller more limited engagements.
How much electricity do you think traditional money printing and transfers consume?
crypto mining, or stacking bricks with a crane.
The chains are still on because the UK still needs to trade with said bureaucracy, and of course the fault of that lies with the EU's bureaucratic nature itself instead of the UK's decision to exit.

Ultimately we should want the EU to be eliminated entirely and replaced with a multilateral free trade treaty, and UK's exit is a very productive step in that direction.
This deserves its own post on HN. Do you know what's the going theory about how magnetism induces the current loop? Something must tell electrons that it's time to move in the clockwise direction and that something moves at the speed of light.
You have to launch the bad thing first and as fast as possible; there's no way around but through.
Not across countries.
What makes an awesome life? 3 things
1. Major earthquake on the US west coast

2. Bitcoin will hit $60K but will also touch again $5K in 2021

3. Trump will remain President

4. $VIX will hit $100
Was there an industrial demand when gold rush was a thing? Do we see significant proof that industrial use has a significant impact in gold being used as a store of value (besides theories)? Is that industrial use strongly linked to gold’s high price? Then how do you explain bitcoin replacing gold successfully?
The actual only criteria of fiat money I learned in austrian high school was "government will accept taxes in that currency". We have quiet a long history of taxes here, ranging from cows or sacks of grain to gold to gold coins to gulden to reichsmark to schilling to euro. Probably a good measure of centuries more than the US (which basically got kickstarted with the UK system at the time). Funnily enough, the above definition was the only thing holding true through the centuries. Thing is, if your government accepts taxes in a certain currency (even if it's a foreign one, that's perfectly fine too) it creates a stability by itself which fosters the usability (call it user friendlyness if you like) of the currency.
In that sense, I'm fairly sure that unless you are personal friends with the president you cannot pay your taxes in Euro the same way you cannot pay them in ₿, Pesos or ¥ because the currency the US claims their taxes in is USD.
Please prove me wrong or gib a better definition if I'm wrong :)
Happy New Year everyone!
alt-coins don't have the market depth of Bitcoin. Moving money in LTC will move the market, BTC is approaching institutional market depth.
Bitcoin is a disaster alright but a disaster for the fiat system and for the parasites who need the fiat system to survive.

Funny thing is bitcoin is only a small technology that will hurt the fiat system, there are more such disruptive technologies on the way but governments are far too stupid to see the writing on the wall.
They could use hawala, a value exchange system which has been around for centuries. Fees are reasonable, the system is extremely trustworthy and use is not limited to Muslims.
I still wouldn't bet against Elon's ghost.
Brexit was a triumph of evil men. We were foolish and naive, and did not expect these craven lies to have such dire effect. This tidal wave of pent up hatred unleashed from these deep and forgotten pools of animus and fear.

Nonetheless -- the world keeps on turning.

Evil may win a battle here and there, but it cannot be allowed to win the war. What these vandals destroy can always be built up anew.
I think you've made a good summary. And it leads to some interesting perspectives.

SSC classic, The Toxoplasma of Rage[0], explores this a bit. One fragment that burned into my mind is the few paragraphs reinterpreting the War on Terror as a parasite with multi-stage life cycle (like toxoplasma). To quote a part:

> From the human point of view, jihad and the War on Terror are opposing forces. From the memetic point of view, they’re as complementary as caterpillars and butterflies. Instead of judging, we just note that somehow we accidentally created a replicator, and replicators are going to replicate until something makes them stop.

--

[0] - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
It's simply an extra layer & bit of effort law enforcement has to jump through, and as understanding of crypto permeates society & law enforcement, even those barriers will be removed.
But look at all the no evidence!
So are we talking about "a good currency", or "cash"? Because the initial comment said "cash".
You can go to Ireland, via the CTA. Live here five years, fill out a very long form, wait an indeterminate time for the form to be processed, and you have an EU citizenship again!(You can keep the UK one, too; dual Irish/UK citizenships are permissible and common).

Also, check for any Irish or Italian grandparents; you may already have won an exciting new citizenship!
The European identity is not tied to the European union but to a shared culture and history. Or are Swiss and Norse people also not European?
The trade off there is that Apple can then perform a major architectural shift in a single fell swoop because it’s not carrying around silly amounts of legacy cruft. Endless backwards compatibility isn’t always a benefit imo.
Target Disk Mode in latter-day Intel Macs finally is reasonably fast
TL;DR Formerly unusably-slow for backups a few years ago, the built-in Target Disk Mode in Macs has actually improved in latter-day Intel models (using a Thunderbolt 3 cable), now nearly 1/2 as fast as an external USB-C drive dock.

My test: use Carbon Copy Cloner v5.1.22 to clone an internal SSD with 690GB of data. “Find & replace corrupted files” is OFF*.

Source: Macbook Pro 16″, Catalina 10.15.7

Destination: 13" 2020 Intel MBP, Catalina 10.15.7, in Target Disk Mode, using a 40G Thunderbolt 3 cable.

Result: Direct-connect two MBP using a high-speed Thunderbolt-3 cable was 5.9 GB/minute, about half as fast as backing up via USB 3 to an SSD in an external drive dock (12 GB/minute).

Keep in mind that two “trips” are required if the goal is to move the data to a new Mac via an external SSD (first from source -> external SSD, then from external SSD -> target)… so when you add the time it also takes to restore the external SSD to the target Mac (which I did not measure), the net time difference between the two approaches is less.

For my purpose, simply cloning Mac#1 to Mac #2, the direct-connect using Target Disk Mode was simpler and adequately-fast. YMMV.
Flamebait like this is not allowed on HN and will get you banned here. No more of this please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think Denmark is the only country that opts out of the Euro, the rest are on track of getting it. Although it doesn’t look like Sweden and Poland are in any rush though.
After months of frustrations dealing with JIRA, our team switched to Youtrack[1], it is more than 2 years now using it and we are extremely happy with this tool. Best yet, it is supper affordable for small teams.

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/
Well, I think it's important to keep in mind that the criticisms seem specific to bitcoin, not crypto in general, and some of them are perfectly valid observations (even if you don't consider them "bugs")