skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google walked away from that mission years ago. More and more of their search results are not search results but rather ads.

That is not organized information as we were lead to believe.
Huh, that's interesting.

Still... the proposal by the poster I replied to basically amounts to something close enough to general AI so as to be world-changing stuff, IMO. :)
I'm working on similar at https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hofmod-server (hofmod-saas,hof)

Switched the DX to cuelang.org this year, very happy about that!

My main goal with Hof is to have code gen beyond the initial boilerplate, so that I could change design while keeping the custom implementation details.
There are problems and there are solutions.

Making sure the vaccine is monitored and distributed correctly is a problem to be solved.

The motivation as to why a someone wouldn’t want that is a thought experiment.
It's not a full show, but Key & Peele have a hilarious skit where they are terrorists in a cave, plotting to overthrow America, only to be thwarted by TSA's rules.

You might get a kick out of it.

https://youtu.be/IHfiMoJUDVQ
I also like the digital-hawala analogy for explaining bitcoin's value.

The fact that it could be declared illegal by fiat doesn't completely remove its usefulness because at the end of the day it's open source software.
The author has an opinion. This opinion has at least five debatable concerns. Each of them could be contradicted with good arguments. But discussing this arguments does not make much sense online, nowadays there is only pro or contra at all costs. So the market must decide.
There are a bunch of problems that result from contracting work out though.

The contracting process itself is an incredibly onerous burden with a huge number of factors other than mere technical ability (are you a disabled veteran minority-owned business?). And the companies with the fortitude and resources to actually make it through the contracting process tend to be the exact companies you don't want doing the work - it's not your scrappy 30 person startup that gets the bid.

Furthermore, those companies are the only ones that can, frankly, put up with the government's shit. The problem isn't just that the government doesn't have the technical ability or the culture to get the job done, they don't even have the ability to oversee a technical contract, and it inevitably results in weird and obtuse requirements, stumbling blocks injected from the contract coordinators, etc.

You can sometimes have a setup where one contractor executes and one contractor oversees, but anyone who's worked on a project overseen by one of those contracting management companies (DeLoitte, Accenture, etc) knows that doesn't fix anything either, and the contract coordinator isn't going to stop their bullshit either, now you just have twice as many layers of management shitting things up.

There's no magic bullet here, but management and IT services within the USG drastically need a shakeup, and increasing pay scales to match the private sector has to be there too. On top of that you basically need a top to bottom review of the regulations and SOPs. It's simply too hard to actually get work done, at every level. There is too much security theater, too little real security, too many fiefs, too many bosses, too many approval processes, too many dumb requirements that were coded into law 20 years ago when they maybe made a little sense but have long-since ceased to be best practices.

Also, contracts are for a specific and limited period of time. Often development and maintenance are under different contracts - which will be bid out separately. So the first contractor doesn't really care about anything except getting it out the door, then the USG will be super surprised that they're pulling the plug once they've met the bare minimum of the requirements, and then there's no money to actually maintain it on an ongoing basis. If there is, that money will be bid out again and probably goes to a different contractor.

Keeping it internal at least means that somebody has ownership of the project. Contracting turns everything into a game of hot potato with everyone racing to throw the potato as soon as they've done the bare minimum to accomplish their contractual obligations and get paid.
This isn't a very good criticism. Lots of new things recapitulate the structures they are replacing in many ways, while improving on them in just one or a few areas. The fact that ground is being retread is not itself a criticism or a sign of a lack of innovation.

Yes, Bitcoin requires many of the same structures as traditional finance. That does not make them equivalent. Traditional finance does not allow you sovereignty over your money. Bitcoin has central custody, sure. But it's opt in. That's what makes it different. You may or may not care about this property, but its undeniable that it's novel in the digital realm, and empirically many people do care about it.
Year(Decade) of the Homelab
With cash you can hand it to another person in payment. With conventional digital payments you request a trusted intermediary (your bank) to transfer that value to them. What if you don't trust banks but still want to be able to pay people?

Bitcoin was born in the Global Financial Crisis when the world was discovering the massive scam which the financial services industry had perpetrated, causing the whole problem. People wanted a way to do transactions without having to trust institutions which demonstrably couldn't be trusted. Hence Bitcoin which acts like digital cash with no trusted intermediary.
>western union

if you don't mind the usury-level fees
I appreciate the context.
No, cloud is slow and has been slow for years. On-premise is quick enough, but only if you ensure you have no slow bottle-necks (DB, spinning disks, heavily shared virtualization).

Jira doesn't use Spring--you may be confusing it with Confluence which does.
Bitcoin is pseudonymous if you take enough precautions i.e. always use tor, only use addresses once, coin join everything before converting.
Startups compete in the enterprise space all the time, [1], so I don't think your characterization is correct.

I agree that client relations is important, but that's something that happens in many businesses. Like the comment I replied to, you assert that a managerial apparatus is necessary for that. I don't think that's the case. It's true that managerialist-dominated companies often prefer to work with other companies of a similar culture. But that doesn't have anything to do with what makes for efficient software engineering.

[1] e.g.: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3412380/the-hottest-en...
It was three servers doing DNS lookups on each other.

One was Alfa Bank.

One was in Trump Tower.

One was at Spectrum Health, which is owned by the DeVos family. Notable members include Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and Blackwater founder Erik Prince. Erik Prince is known to set up backchannel meetings between the Trump team and Putin associates in the Seychelles.
This is a pretty silly comment. It's you that's cherry picking. The overall trend of Bitcoin over its lifetime has been up. Any complete analysis of its time series would tell you that. Buying at any point in its history would have been a good idea.
MF DOOM used language in such a unique way. Whenever your thoughts seem to settle into well-worn ruts, you can listen to some MF DOOM and all those weird bars and rhymes will stir things up in your noggin. There's nothing quite like it :) Glad to see the man appreciated here on HN. RIP!
> And most of all: you can’t replace trust with tech.

I'd say, you can (Bitcoin is one of many recent exercises of replacing trust with math). But it's not worth the price. Or, put another way, trust is a ridiculously powerful optimization that enabled humanity to form societies in the first place. It's very similar to how introducing a central node into a network reduces communication costs from O(n^2) to O(n). In the general case, it's stupid to not take advantage of it.

I consider Bitcoin to be the closest we've came so far to expressing trust in units of energy. POW shows us how much computation has to happen to achieve mathematical guarantees in lieu of trust. Somebody could probably derive some upper and lower bounds on the energy costs of trust in terms of information theory. I'd love to read such a paper.
You shouldn’t, but you do. Welcome to human nature.

Of course we can afford to feed and shelter our people, we do it already. But we have to work for it. And we do. Which just makes me wonder what happens if we don’t...
I'm curious how you've heard about USCIS' work / style?

I'm new to the system, so this is the only one I know (wrote about joining here: https://twitter.com/abachman/status/1217795232449859585), but I'm currently on a team of 6, all feds: 1 designer, 1 product mgr, 3 engineers and I'd say we're fairly to extremely self-directed. User-research based product development, pair programming, short iterations, deploying daily, all that jazz. Just a variation on the same sort of thing I've seen in the tech-first / software-product-company gigs I had in the past, but I've mostly worked for smaller indie or niche companies.

That is, I get to work in a way and with people and tools (Rails + React at the moment) that makes sense to me. How far outside the norm are we and where could I go to learn more about the whole system?
> No one treats Bitcoin as a currency.

Ask the people who bought hundreds of millions of dollars (without inflation) of drugs on Silk Road, Empire Market, White House Market etc since 2013 until now. I am making up hundreds of millions based on the seized Bitcoins by the FBI, the real number probably exceeded Billions a long time ago already.

The WannaCry and other ransomware folks don't sit on their millions of dollars of extorted Monero/Bitcoin either. They buy cars and fancy things with them, and that's one reason many of them got arrested.

Few real world examples of scams against everyday folks:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=canada+bitcoin+...

Safeway now has BTC ATMs and we we'll be able to drop "canada" from the query and get good results from the US soon.
BTC is incredibly overvalued. if you value Bitcoin as much as the cost of the labor it takes to create one, then it should be worth a lot less.
It’s not only QA. It’s approach to legacy features.

Apple is removing frameworks like crazy, forcing apps to update or die. Windows takes backward compatibility extremely seriously.
Fiat currency is one the most beneficial economic developments ever. Goldbuggery is idiotic.
Agreed, though the problem for me was the isolation got so bad that I overworked myself. Double whammy.

Best thing I did was move back in with family.
The miners aren't the only ones enforcing the limit, so is every other bitcoin node out there. Just because you have 51% of the mining capacity doesn't mean everyone else (merchants, users, exchanges)[1] will agree. If they decide to unilaterally change the block reward all that would do is cause them to mine worthless blocks.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority
Didnt the government ask for the case to be dismissed after flyn had already pled guilty?
word to el muerto cucaracha exoskeleton
This was done in the state of Washington (Wenatchee area) due to cheap electricity from dams.
I agree with the sentiment that there are cultural issues with the federal space, and it requires continuous diligence of dedicated people to change the landscape and move the needle. Devops take a long time to grow organically - and it's longer in the federal government due to silos, compliance, finance, regulations.

The list is a nice dream, and it is with the will of those in the federal work force who can break down those silos and bring about a common understanding with urgency that'll make it happen for their project.
I have been reading about people pining for gold standard but doesn't anyone anymore remember the Great Depression where the gold standard actually made the matters a lot worse when the governments couldn't print more money? I get the ideological pathos but gold standard doesn't seem very realistic to me anymore. Whenever a negative feedback loop happens in economy you want to have very robust means to stop it if necessary.
Actual title: At least 140 House Republicans to vote against counting electoral votes, two GOP lawmakers say

Please don't editorialize titles.

Also, these sort of stories are usually off-topic here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Is this from personal experience? And is there any data available to show that it's doing significant volume in Venezuela versus other options?
Are you primarily engaged in illegal actions for your source of income? Your other comments in this thread seem to imply that is the case. No judgement, but if so, I think this is a pertinent piece of information.

It is not difficult for most citizens in first world nations to keep and maintain a bank account.
Greatest rap album of all time IMO
The fed creates bank reserves, which is different from the commercial bank money in your account. It's quite confusing because both are called "dollars", but they can't be used in the same way.
> Curiously, TFA’s only specific example of someone who declined is someone who was pregnant.

This is false. The person you refer to, April Lu, is not the only specific example in the article, just the first. The second is Nicholas Ruiz, who I think it’s safe to say is not pregnant.
Over period of 10 years behavior of Bitcoin price was extremely predictable.

https://miro.medium.com/max/1838/1*Ao2C0phpSfknHvorWl2a3Q.pn...
dumbfu**s.
This might be the earliest case of corporations abusing (electronic) copyright laws to influence competition I know of. Clearly, there is no real basis to claim that a memory poker infringes Nintendo's copyright, but Nintendo successfully lobbied against it anyway.
Or maybe they are not mentioned because nobody thought of it? Like, the OP study happened, and it's nothing but "wealthy people are less likely to want wealth redistribution, even if they are tall".

From personal experience, I'd say it's far from negligible when you put it down on paper. Only people outside the average size (5-95th percentile usually) have to think about these.

I'd go on to say that everything in life is on average 50% more expensive for me (eg. custom bed is 2-3x more expensive than those available in stores of comparable quality, my custom height kitchen-top as well, or baby changing station... But plenty of things are the same price, thus only a 50% increase). For the same amount of money, "average humans" are getting more out of it. If that should not be accounted for when it comes to "wealth", I am not sure what should. But I guess without properly accounting for all the things I've "had" to pay extra for just to get basic comfort, people are going to continue to claim costs are negligible.

Not saying I'd change with anyone, and I am probably lucky to have ended up in IT (otherwise, my feet would be dangling off my bed :)). And sure, it's way better for males to be taller than average than shorter than average in the society today, but there's a whole lot of average in there that simply don't have to think about any of the things I do.
An underrated DOOM favorite of mine.

https://youtu.be/xmPmtYRB1TE
> Medium is awful - why do people choose to use it?

I used it recently because of two reasons - the network effect, and it is the best in its category that's available. A competing platform with as nice of typography and layout would be welcomed.
Disaster , disaster, but if not for Bitcoin (or cryptocurrencies in general) I wouldn't have any option for paying online.
try
&*my_str
An Optimistic Outlook on 2021
>Isn't that the same as printing money

Yes, if electricity was FREE, at which point printing money is the best next logical step as you've achieved free energy with utopia just around the corner.
IIRC, AWS had the free tier first. Which is what brought me in. I wasn’t trying to change the world, but I’ll take free server space if they’re giving it away.

Then they sealed the deal when a little Echo skill I wrote for myself gave me (and continues to give me) got me $100/month in AWS credits.

Combine that with every place of work using AWS, and I’m pretty much married to it. I at least know the UI, and for a programming who hates configuration, that means a lot (as far as getting in and getting out quickly).
Thanks, thunderbong.

I hope you have a great 2021 as well.
One of the true greats, very deeply saddened to hear this. Growing up he meant a lot to me. It was just the other day I was trying to find out if he was going to drop a new album.
Cute but it wasn't Google who attempted to take down the youtube-dl repository.
Ask HN: I wish I knew before I launched my project
For 2021, I was planning to launch my first project to the public. I have gone through a long list of consideration points concerning technical and legal aspects but I still feel that I am missing some points (which I am not aware of because it‘s the first time). So I was curious if there are any people out there who had similar experiences which led to “I wish I knew at that time“ moments. Happy New Year everyone!
I'm REALLY not looking for a debate on what technical changes are needed to make this accessible but I tried changing it to a button in the page (with border: none;) and immediately I notice it's larger and the underline hover effect is broken. It's also floating verically by a pixel. I'm sure there are other effects I haven't noticed immediately. This is exactly what I'm talking about on how it's not just free, there is work to making it work exactly the way the developer wanted it for the project.

Maybe you think a button shouldn't look like that. Maybe you think a button should prioritize <list of things> before style. Maybe you just like to do something your own way. That's great, go ahead on your own project or hire this person for it. None of that has anything to do with why this person built this tool the way they wanted or makes it any easier for them to do so while adding better accessibility.
I can't believe he's been dead for months, the Instagram post that announced it says he passed away on Oct. 31st.
Godt nyttår! Let's hope we get to chalk 2020 down as "annus horribilis" in a few years time.

Scandi language decoder:

Gott nytt år - Swedish
Godt nytår - Danish
Godt nyttår - Norwegian
> t buy things in crypto only because of the reporting burden.

You should.

And then report every cup of coffe on your tax return.

And file on actual physical paper, preferably printed with a font that's hard to machine-read.
If electricity became less available the mining rate of Bitcoin would automatically adjust to the scarcity of available computation - it's not like there's a specified amount of electricity that has to be used per transaction.
What IDE do people use for rust nowadays?
Unless it’s a long term hedge for a new global reserve currency. Then this is exactly what you would want.

And anonymity is never going to be a feature for financial transactions, that’s just kinda naive TBH.
In my country (Italy) is kind of illegal. I mean, not carrying too much cash (but of course if they find you with a suitcase full of cash, they will ask you where you got all that cash from), but you can't pay in a shop more than 2.000 euros (and they will lower this limit to 1.000 and possibly less in the future). Also you can't pay your employee cash, you have to pay in traceable manners something that you want to deduct from taxes like medical expenses, and so on.

Transaction with cash between private citizens are permitted tough (like buying a used car in cash), but it's not a good idea to do so if you don't trust the other party (because then how can I prove that I gave you the money?)
Stablecoins on Ethereum are much better at P2P transactions than Bitcoin, but Bitcoin is great as a store of value.
> prions require contact with either the same or extremely similar proteins to have any affect

There is no requirement for similarity or sameness. Even if there aren't any that I know of that violate this - it's not in the definition that prions require contact with either the same or extremely similar proteins to have any affect.
Well yeah but that doesn’t mean that search engines don’t have a useful function indexing video content. Being able to find “that TikTok where __” would be nice.
Desalination Breakthrough Could Lead to Cheaper Water Filtration – UT News
Did it happen at midnight CET or midnight BST/GMT?
Bitcoin never dropped below its previous peak.

You have to cherry-pick narrow enough time period to see bitcoin dropping in price.

If you pick sufficiently large time period bitcoin always grows. This screms 'investment'.
So is EDI used by banks with other currencies. I am old enough to have used it :)
Yes!
UI was amazing and obviously you can’t beat the speed it would run at on modern hardware
Thanks, I’ll fix this. Someone also mentioned the first css rule can cause plugins to get rendered, so worth def worth changing.
I guess "I want to invest in crime, but I don't want to have to do crime to invest in it" falls under speculation.
Bitcoin is valued at precisely what the market believes it’s valued at. If you believe it’s incredibly overvalued, then you should short it.
Kicking Flynn to jail is something you should support then?

He's himself admitted to being one of those corrupt folks you're against.

What makes you think trump isn't more of the same corruption? He brags about being a donor with benefits over the past 20+ years.

The bad results from this corruption is the stuff that trump and his compatriots wanted done
To give an another view:

600bn is more than gdp of majority of countries.
Exactly. It frustrates me that the term "investment" has been stretched to include raw speculation. People are welcome to do either one, but it's dangerous when people confuse zero-sum and positive-sum games. Buying any currency, crypto- or otherwise, is like playing the ponies: for every dollar won, there's (at least) a dollar lost. That's very different than investing in a company, which hopefully uses the money to create value.
Look at the Money Velocity. It’s decreasing. You cannot have hyper inflation with a decreasing velocity.
CET, of course :)
A little bit of both!

Elm the language is different from JavaScript, Java, Ruby, etc because there is no facility for statements or imperative APIs. It’s restricted in that sense. Frameworks in those languages still have some inversion of control, but there’s nothing stopping you from making a network request in your Celsius/Fahrenheit conversion function. (And over enough time that’s usually what happens, and you have fewer constraints with which to reason about what the code does.)

I can’t speak for languages that are similarly restricted, like Haskell, but my impression is that Elm is different because you don’t have to learn extra rule-bending mechanics to do I/O.

The Elm approach is unique, as far as I know. And while it doesn’t make for a truly all-purpose programming language, it’s a great model for developing libraries and applications on the web. I’m just a bit “surprised” there isn’t a similar thing focused on web servers or IOT or whatever else.
Tesla Short Sellers Lost $38B in 2020 as Stock Surged
All governments would have to follow suit in lock step for that to work, at which point you have far bigger problems, i.e why not just nuke the internet all together, far easier.