skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Other than previous work experience at DHS, bidding USCIS solicitations was the biggest difference I had observed with USCIS/way I became familiar with their practices. They’re pretty unique/developed with both their acquisition and DevOps practices.

It kind of sucks being on the bidding end, as their tech challenges cost a ton on top of the normal costs with a proposal. But I can understand why they do it and from an acquisition perspective, it makes total sense. I think they will need to strike a balance at some point though - some of their tech challenges are too complicated for the timelines provided.

In terms of development practices, it is pretty much all DevSecOps and they make heavy use of independent verification and validation/QA, and even more importantly, are pretty mature in their adoption of it.

So to answer your question, you guys are pretty far outside the norm in a good way :-).

Not sure the best way for you to be able to learn more other than to do some networking in the DC area (post COVID). If you get the opportunity, there’s a ton of great meetups in the DC area, although if you’re taking the MARC those can be a challenge to attend after work due to train schedule limitations. Other than that, move around to/visit different agencies and get exposure to their work. Work with your PM to see if you can do some site visits to other agencies/organizations as part of professional development and such.
> A central bank implements quantitative easing by buying financial assets from commercial banks and other financial institutions, thus raising the prices of those financial assets and lowering their yield, while simultaneously increasing the money supply.

Quantitative easing increases the money supply. They've injected trillions. Who got it is a separate question.
There won't be another artist like him, his rhymes are legendary.
There are plenty of funny optical artifacts that can happen, and I guess they may have their radio equivalents.

Just today, when shooting our traditional New Year's Eve photo with my wife and kid - us with sparklers in hand - first few images were ruined by ghastly green circles appearing out of nowhere. After quick investigation with a flashlight, I realized that they're artifacts of a bright point light (like a sparkler) hitting the camera - I'm guessing an undesired reflection inside camera's optics. I wonder if something similar may be going on here?
Hope every has a great new year too!!!
The FPTP voting system is destroying western democracies.
Hasn't happened to me. My start menu always remains the same after updates. Maybe use an alternate start menu if that's the problem. There are no ads anywhere else IIRC.
Could you give some use examples? As of 2018, Bitcoin still appeared to be basically useless as a day-to-day cash substitute: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/nyregion/new-york-today-l...

I guess it's not impossible that things have gotten better. But at least in my neighborhood and in the online merchants I frequent, Bitcoin adoption has declined. I think the last time I saw a Bitcoin logo on the street was August 2019.

I'd also be interested in statistics demonstrating that the consumer transaction volume is now nontrivial. Last I looked, M-Pesa had orders of more magnitude in use despite launching around the same time as Bitcoin.
It's not that the structures are inherently bad, it's that such structures are, philosophically, the exact sorts of things that many early (and current) proponents of crypto wanted to avoid. In that sense bitcoin hasn't failed as a system in & of itself, but it has failed to achieve the philosophical goals of those people.

Bitcoin & crypto also might not be sovereign in origin but they have plenty of sovereign influence, basically as much as any sovereignty wants to impose on it. Especially as entities like the SEC & IRS come to terms with it, it will be just as vulnerable to government control as fiat currency. This is especially the case because any wide-spread adoption will require adoption by large financial institutions, which cannot avoid regulatory regimes of their local jurisdictions. From the US government's standpoint, US citizens holding bitcoins is not much different than US citizens holding Euros. How that money enters into the US economy & interacts with US financial institutions or changes hands from person to person are basically subject to the same rules & regulations. If you're conducting a a transaction in excess of $10,000 then whatever mechanism facilitates that will still be subject to CTR's, and any "suspicious" transaction of lower limits will still be reported, by law, to the government.

Basically, if you want to convert bitcoin to the local currency to buy something, you'll need to use some sort of off-ramp that will be a regulatory bottleneck. Want to build a "shadow" economy purely driven by crypto exchange? Well, you'll still have to deal with the IRS knocking on your door & saying "You have things of value that you are performing work to receive. We don't care what currency or form you received them in, you received things of value. Give us our cut."

In short, it doesn't matter that it wasn't created by a sovereign authority: The control a sovereign authority can exert over it is, contrary to many of the most philosophical hopes for crypto, indistinguishable from sovereign currency in everything but name & source of origin.

Let me be clear though: I'm not anti-crypto. I'm probably a little ambivalent, and a little optimistic that it might replace high-friction mechanisms that exist in current financial infrastructure. What I do believe is that crypto cannot both go mainstream and fulfill the philosophical hopes that many had wanted for it.
>Bitcoin, though, mainly seems to solve problems for speculators and people engaging in light financial crime. Is there a niche I'm missing?

Do you have a source for that?
This could be very bad or it could be very good. The chains of EU centralized bureaucracy are off, now the UK can chart their own destiny (hopefully for the better).
Good on you for checking in on the needy tonight, especially in the cold. One of the lessons I learned this year is that "the system" is nowhere near as good at helping people as an individual willing to give real help. (And also that "the system" in the US is mostly lip service. If you get evicted, and don't have family or friends to stay with, you will be on the street. Homeless shelters are either closed or packed. This is a very tough time for those who are already on the edges.)
I have a third party dock about the size of zippo that plugs into the USB-C port, and has another USB-C port for charging, HDMI for picture, and a 'regular USB port for pairing and whatnot. it's great to bring along to friends so we can play on their tv without having to package my entire dock!
I have been buying small amounts of bitcoin since around 2015. I have a very small portfolio, but growing?

Recently I have had friends that are very far from the tech scene, but well versed in investment risk pick up BTC as institutions announced the onboarding of coins.

I have no idea if $30k / btc is reasonable or insane, but I think we will know when bitcoin gets to the final price as the correlation to gold gets closer to 1.

Housing price is up, but not rent (all over US), that is driven by lower rates rather than inflation.

All that said, a ton of money was dumped on the market. We won't know until later in the year what the result of that is.
Dude. I've tried to point you to the answers of all your questions. Is it that you can't stand any FF/Mozilla criticism or you deliberately want to ignore the suggestions I've put across towards answering some of your questions?

Glad to see you can put emotions aside in your arguments though. Above remark on Google's funding wasn't meant to be an insult.
Whatever form the CANZUK fantasy takes, it’s absolutely certain that it will be no substitute for the single market.
Ironically I like EU better, kind of sounds like an ambulance approaching.
Please note: the source code of Windows 10 can be requested if you are a large enterprise or a government already (as long as you agree that you won't release it). The only possible significant difference here is the lag - you can read the source code of the internal builds, whereas you can only access the corresponding source code for stable builds officially. So, if you are a government, you can actually request it for a legitimate purpose and pass it into the other side of that government if you really want to.
he also posted it as a blog here today on HN
The Disorders of Our Collective Consciousness
A kernel breach happened on iirc an SVN server in 2013 but was detected almost immediately.

If I were a nation state I wouldn’t try to poison mainline kernel - there would be far easier sources along the stack for both local and remote attacks which would more easily go unnoticed. Tools that come to mind are systemd, openssh, http/ftp services, GNU tools and common non-gnu shell utilities. Failing that, distribution level kernels would be my next bet purely because any commits would be less scrutinised.
It seems that the UK will still have to abide by EU rules in order to trade with the rest of the Union.

Based on laws they will have absolutely no say in.
Does it keep reloading batch.js? Is it because the URL is changing or is it just not getting cached at the browser? Answering these questions is a first step to speed up Jira.

See also my comment from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18511497
Indeed, trade deals and international relationships are bipartisan issues, labour’s last leader was anti EU for decades. The party lines in the UK are drawn along class and aspirational values, not policy decisions- although when a referendum is called 2 sides always step out to divide up the electorate in their favour
It's very jarring for an inanimate object that you are trying to wield as a tool, to suddenly have its own agency and its own priorities that it treats as more important than yours. "No, I'm busy for the next 40 minutes" and "Sorry, I have to go now" are things you hear from your friend, not from your hammer or or your toaster.

I don't mind Chrome's forced auto-updates, because they've never gotten in my way.
> I think people in many white collar jobs highly underestimate their ability to set boundaries and make their work/life balance healthier.

This is something that took me 1.5-2 decades to figure out. My first "worst project" was around 2007 and it was hell. It cost me a lot (health, it became a large factor in losing a good relationship). I couldn't see the forest from the trees. I couldn't say no to the sleazy sales manager who would ignore me all week only to become my best friend for a 60 second conversation every Thursday: "Maaaate! Can you work Saturday?"

The wounds were very expensive but after some time to heal became something to laugh at, lightly. When someone in a room full of developers at 9 PM snaps and says, "This is the worst project I've ever been on!" half the room will immediately agree, only for the the other half to grin politely and disagree. "Really?!" At best sharing these stories can be a bonding exercise. Some of the anecdotes are now quite funny jokes.

Then a decade past my worst ever project and it was happening all over again! Only this time I was cognisant of the machinations around me. While being older might mean more capable, it also means we can't do the same long hours any more. The absolute worst thing was I saw it coming. I gave my manager (who had all the authority) unambiguous advice to avoid this project. After it went bad they needed me. I said no, but then they weren't asking and suddenly I was involved. Deeply. Drinking after work was no longer 2 beers on a Friday, but 2-4 every day at our desks (but after 8 PM when the place was mostly abandoned). Other negatives I was putting up with for the $$$ also broke the threshold (mostly the insane daily travel, but the place was generally a crap client site all round).

I'd work hard to the deadline then be done with it. January became February, March, then April. I was burnt out. I quit before it was done and became the bad guy. I didn't care. I never wanted to see any of these clowns ever again.

I went overseas for a year without working. Didn't work for another year after returning, and very casually waited for the right, quite different, role to come through my jokingly tiny social network.
I've been pondering the same. It's called "working from home", but it often feels like "sleeping at the office".

My work/life balance depends (or depended) on physical boundaries: Being at home gave some distance, then traveling gave me some more. In 2020, it's been difficult to separate work from non-work.
Bitcoin isn't going to be a currency. It's a digital store of value. It will never be anything other than that. People may build new currencies on top of it in the near future. As the volatility fades from Bitcoin over time and it becomes extraordinarily boring (ie quite stable), some small nations will experiment with linking their fiat to Bitcoin for stability (seems laughable today, it won't be in a decade).
> Here's hoping our kids manage to vote us back in

New old people are created every day. So I wouldn't necessarily count on it.

I hope you're right though.
Well, I was like that until I realised that nobody else is. I still haven't figured out the sweet spot, so I am now too repetitive and too verbose.
Personal experience: not only bitcoin was the only practical way I was able to receive funds in Russia from an Indonesian client, it was cheaper than just one leg of converting Indonesian currency (to USD).

Think of it. Buying bitcoin, sending and selling resulted being cheaper than just buying USD. The spread was that much lower. (It was in a relatively static price period in summer 2016)

And regular banks just didn't do such transactions between Russia and Indonesia, like, nope. And PayPal was somehow banning the client for some reason.
Correct, and those countries' economies also give us little to no signal about US dollar inflation. The proposition was that BTC prices somehow inform us about that.
The Structure add-on does a great job of rolling up. The Portfolio product was way too difficult to use--they rebuilt it so maybe things might be different now.

I agree there are/were the best in class for the money--but with Atlassian throwing all their resources into cloud now, raising the prices on on-premise, I worry for its future. I suspect we're only going to get timid features--nothing bold that might improve the UX/UI, or anything that will break the migration path to Cloud, which is their end-goal.

If I was starting out again, I'd probably examine YouTrack where there's at least some assurance they are investing in its future.
I had an Acorn Atom (still have it, though I can't get it working any more). Nothing in there suggested 2 spaces after a full stop ;) And the manual used to talk about the "computer programme"!

I guess it's down to teacher and style, as you say. I find it interesting that I never met this until post 2000 internet forums with Americans, though. I wonder how widespread it is.

And like tabs vs spaces, I get that there's a "this is the way" answer. Tabs are the right answer, and anyone who says spaces is an idiot. But 2 spaces after a full stop is clearly the right way, but I'm buggered if I can bring myself to do that ;)
Bitcoin's value prop isn't in its anonymity.

Early adopters weren't enthusiastic about bitcoin because they hoped it would end fractional reserve banking or any other financial product. Rather, it was incredible to see the entire financial industry quickly rebuilt on top of sound money.

I agree that small transactions and mining can be (and are being) improved, but not for the same reasons. It's silly to blame bitcoin for government corruption and people taking advantage of government subsidies. Bitcoin is simply doing what was always done more efficiently.

I would expect that an individual like Bear would be more in tune with what bitcoin was trying to accomplish.
Right? One of my peeves with a lot of developers is when they treat every programming project like it's a commercial start up. There's no reason "learning to implement custom buttons" can't be on your list of goals.
https://my.fsf.org/join?pk_campaign=frfall2020&pk_source=ban...
Please note: the source code of Windows 10 can be requested if you are a large enterprise or a government already (as long as you agree that you won't release it). The only possible significant difference here is the lag - you can read the source code of the internal builds, whereas you can only access the corresponding source code for stable builds officially. So, if you are a government, you can actually request it for a legitimate purpose and pass it into the other side of that government if you want to.
Exactly what China and Russia want.

This weakens the UK and the EU.

We should be coming together, not fracturing into scared, nationalistic islands.
I don’t think that would get even 5% of the vote in the UK
Well, yeah. Why else would Elon want a Mars colony so badly?
Well Labour will just waste another decade campaigning to rejoin the EU which has so far has been nothing but a complete failure given the last 3 consecutive election defeats since the referendum vote.

Here's to another decade of Labour being out of government. (Again).
Western Union is also very useful, but the vast majority of transactions are not made by Western Union because it has tradeoffs that make other things like credit/debit cards and checks a better option.

Bitcoin Evangelists are trying to pump up the price by advocating that bitcoin will be the best method of making payments for a huge variety of use cases.

I'm not going to call it a pump and dump scam because I think that a lot of these people truly think that it is going to 500k and beyond and that they will never need to dump it all.
Agree. I personally think Labour blew it, big time. But: the lies that got us out of the EU were pretty unstoppable. Selling an out message on the back of sensationalist, shock messages was an easy PR hit.

We'll see. Personally, I'll always feel and be European. I reckon we'll be back.
Permits and encourages are quite different things though.
Remain high on the inequality index, I assume. The UK got destroyed by Thatcher, and hasn't recovered since.

> “She destroyed too many good things in society, and created too many bad ones, then left a social and moral vacuum in which the selfishly rich and unimaginatively fortunate could too easily destroy still more of what they don't need and can't see that everyone else does need,” said author Emma Darwin.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/margaret-that...

https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-u...
>[...] he thinks of the blockchain as an efficient payment network. It's not. Just look at the electricity expenses that are going into making transactions on the blockchain possible. Right now the network is consuming as much energy as the country Ireland?

It's inefficient, but not because mining uses a lot of energy. From a transaction point of view, the energy spent on mining is a sunk cost. It's the same whether a block has 1 transaction or 10000 transactions.
I think many people who overwork themselves really overestimate how much managers and others care. I hear stories of software devs doing like 12 hour days. But why? You're likely salaried for a 7.5-8 hour day. When your salaried work is over you don't need to work longer, log out/go home/ignore anything work related. It's really not that hard. If someone is trying to contact you and you aren't on-call or aren't required to listen, then kindly tell them that you're not at work. Emails are easily ignored too. Did someone send you a ticket at 5pm with the message "Can you take a quick look at this?". That's tomorrow mornings problem, not todays. The outcome of whatever work you do for that will not produce anything meaningful until the next day anyway, because most people finished work, so why bother?

Do you feel pressured from needing to work longer to meet expectations set by other people in the same role? Don't be. If your manager or anyone else in charge has a problem with your productivity then the first thing they're going to do is ask you about it. What things are forcing you to work these extra hours? Is it deadlines? A backlog of work? Did they overestimate your skill level? Talk about it. It might turn out that you actually are in over your head, but you're in the job and you're making the company money. Not every manager is evil and most are accommodating. You might be able to get training/help, perhaps a lower salary and therefore lower expectations/responsibilities. Yeah it might suck to lose some money, but you know what sucks to lose more? Your health.

Firing people is pretty expensive and a last resort for a company, you're almost never at risk of being fired. So long as you're not punching people in the face when you meet them and you're doing your work at an acceptable level then you're most likely okay. The people that get fired are those who are really really shitty and do nothing. Any reasonable worker will have domain knowledge and other skills that are invaluable and will take a long time for new hires to pick up.

Any company which effectively forces you to over work, even after discussing it, is not worth working for. Software devs are lucky in that the market is full of jobs. Other people might not be so lucky, but in that scenario the first thing you should be doing is gradually reducing hours and looking for a another job.
Fair to call EU big, global and bureaucratic. But with 24 working languages, 27 represented states and 8 official political parties isn't it pretty much the opposite of homogeneous?
You missed the last part of TFA:

> The more scalable the network becomes, the more centralized it becomes, until ultimately a "scalable" cryptocurrency would be doing things exactly the same way as a credit card processor.
>like not needing to comply with KYC laws

You can also not comply with KYC laws in the traditional banking system; you're just going to get roflstomp'd by the financial authorities, c.f. $200mm fine for Deutsche Bank for insufficient AML/KYC controls in 2012-2015 time period.

Why would you imagine the result will be any different for crypto-banking? FinCEN is already promoting KYC for exchange-hosted wallets.
What is the rôle of the Software Freedom Conservancy? Sometimes it seems to be a split of the Free Software Foundation due to some kind of personal disagreement (which I'm not interested in). Their "about" page mentions vaguely the "principles of software freedom" but does not state precisely what do they mean by that. I assume that they are not the same as Stallman's four freedoms, since some of the ethical licensing stuff that they push is clearly non-free.

Can anybody here add some context about the need and the main purpose for the SFC? (in opposition to the clearly stated goals of the FSF)
I'm not OP.

I looked and Chainalytics claim Venezuela is world number 3 in bitcoin use. But it's not clear what they're basing that on. My (very limited) understanding is that they can't directly see the country of origin of a bitcoin transaction. So they must be relying on figures from exchanges or apps?

https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/venezuela-cryptocurrenc...

Does anyone know if you can tell country of origin of a transaction request? Maybe the IP sending the request is public to the network?
>Fiat currency is one the most beneficial economic developments ever.

Currency certainly is.

Fiat most certainly not [1]

[1] https://ginifoundation.org/kb/fiat-currency-graveyard-a-hist...

>Goldbuggery is idiotic.

Whenever something is being thought of as useful by a sizable portion of the population over large swaths of time, calling it idiotic is pretty much guaranteed to be a boomerang.
A localized reversal of entropy.