skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In Canada, organized crime holds on to the $1000 notes. They're the largest value banknote commonly used in the West in the last few decades. They were last issued in 1992 and then officially withdrawn in 2000 for concerns over moneylaundering. They're not legal tender anymore, but can be exchanged at the bank. There's about $1 billion in circulation, and that will likely remain true for a long time yet. They move in a closed loop in the drug trade, stuffed in briefcases and in safes of criminals who effectively act as banks settling debts. No one wants to cash them because of the risk of being traced, but because they can be cashed in theory, they retain full value. The €500 is slowly displacing them, in Canada and abroad.

I saw one as a child. Most Canadians have not, as far as I know. An acquaintance of a friend of my father's had several, and my father was interested in numismatics, so he traded one for $100s. The implications of the man who had some "pinkies" (called so for their colour) being a biker with a facial scar didn't click into place until I was much older.
The Rationality of Extremism – Is There a Place for Quantum?
IBM could snap their fingers at any moment and dissolve the entity now called “Red Hat” into dust.
I'm commenting on an article that made it to the front page and is related to an organisation I deeply care about. Otherwise I wouldn't give RMS the time of day ;)
I don't think anyone has mentioned this.

The Forbes list of 100 wealthiest people will exclude people that ask to be excluded. All of the excluded people have inherited their wealth and all of them are so wealthy they would push out anyone without inherited wealth.
I wasn't really picking on the point, I was just noting that Airbnb seems like an increadibly bad example.

Also, using hyperbolic language like

> But this level of wealth concentration and inequality is detrimental to the fabric of a society. We’re not better off, we’re not more innovative, we’re not healthier or more cohesive or happier when this happens.

is definitly a dog whistle and not simply "noticing some consequences".
In other words there is a brand identity associated with the articles. And brand identity is a time/effort savings device employed by human minds when making a determination on what to consume.

You see this with consumer products all the time; for example the audiophile world may turn their nose up at Bose, but in the consumer space Bose is recognized as a known quantity (may be over priced for the quantity of quality you get but is recognized as not being extremely subpar generic).
This is a statement by the board. RMS's own statement (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26780192) looks like it does what you say you want to see.
Excepting the WWII memoirs (because I'm not sure how I want to count either Anne Frank, Elie Weisel or Winston Churchill in terms of "authors from the 1940s"), among authors whose nonfiction works are still read, there are a few names that do occur to me:

George Orwell, Friedrich Hayek, Simone de Beauvoir, John Maynard Keynes, Jean-Paul Sartre

For fiction there are obviously many more whose works have come through to frequent readership: Hemingway, Shirley Jackson, Albert Camus, C.S. Lewis, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Ayn Rand to name a few.
I don't think this article makes the argument the author thinks it does.

If I take the author at his word that more people are creating large new fortunes at a higher rate, and I assume that the large fortunes of 1982 have not become significantly smaller (I admittedly don't have a citation for this, although I feel it's a safe assumption), and finally take into account that wealth inequality has been steadily increasing in the USA [1] since 1982, I come a reasonable conclusion:

"Winners" from the middle class are being promoted to super-wealthy status by consolidating wealth from their peers in the middle and lower classes, and it's happening at a much higher rate than it was 30 years ago.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
Square, Fidelity and Coinbase joined together to start lobbying group [1].

1: https://seekingalpha.com/news/3679495-square-fidelity-coinba...
In this particular economy, absolutely - where else is your money going to go?

However, part of the way we got here is specifically due to neighborhood segregation and zoning laws. People don't like their housing going down in value, so they protest anything that might cause it to do so. Whether or not upzoning would actually harm property values is not material: the fact that people believe it to do so is enough to get them to protest increases in the housing supply. This means that every local government is blocking housing supply and working to keep prices high, which makes housing an artificially safe investment, and thus encourages infinite speculation.

This will continue until we break the idea that home ownership = retirement plan and that dense housing = cheap housing = crime. Once that happens, then it makes far less sense to speculate on real estate and we can start unwinding this long con. The reason why maximum mortgage amounts are so high is that banks can't lose - if the the debtor pays off their investment in full, then the bank wins; and if they default, then the bank repossesses a house that is likely worth more than the principal of the loan, so they win. There's no default risk - if that were to return, then banks would be more skeptical of who they lend to, and that would put start quenching demand.
They recommend against using their licenses for software.

https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm...

It is only for example one way compatible with say the GPL. GPL projects can integrate your work but may choose not to due to unfamiliarity but you may not integrate their work.

It also expressly reserves patent rights for yourself vs gpl 3 which disclaims them. If your software doesn't represent anything you intend to pursue patents on it may still put off companies who fear to be sued by anyone who buys it.

It looks sort of complicated.
Can I run Linux on it ? I almost feel like being able to completely rebuilt computer technology from raw materials should be encased in a book somewhere. Hypothetically if we dropped you and 100 other engineers in the woods with metal working equipment could you get something resembling a computer working in 5 years ? Or in this post-apocalyptic landscape would it be more practical to dig in landfills for old GameCubes to retrofit
These: https://www.devolo.co.uk/magic-2-wifi-next
No, the real challenge now is how do you minimize the amount of processing power needed, or bandwidth needed, and how do you do all this while minimizing translation time to under 0.5 seconds.

Obviously accents and irregularities are also areas I'm sure they are focusing on, but I imagine that optimizing for real time, mobile and low CPU power devices is a huge focus for them.
The Exposure Notification FAQ: https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/cu...

Relevant quote from the FAQ doc: There will be restrictions on the data that apps can collect when using the API, including not being able to request access to location services, and restrictions on how data can be used.
As usual, it's a well-written article. I wonder about a few things:

1. Why look at the top 100 people? It's an incredible small sample size. Those 100 people represent a huge amount of wealth, but a small number of people. What are the trends is we zoom out to, say, the top million wealthiest people? Does his thesis play out?

2. By extension, looking at the top 100 makes Graham feel myopic and elitist, which is what I think a lot of the comments in this thread allude to. By definition there can only be 100 richest people. The odds of breaking into that group are extremely small.

3. Graham's job is to convince people they have a chance to making it big. That's not a bad thing: we need those people. But it doesn't speak to broader needs of society.

So, honest question, because I haven't researched his essays in recent years: does Graham write about the situation of the bottom 100 million, in addition to the top 100?
Didn't know about the string interpolation. Don't see a reason to use that over built in JS string interpolation (i.e. `var is ${var]`), but still interesting.
Linear Data Imputation
Do you happen to have details of the story?

Looking around I see he has donated $1000 to banning gay marriage. This whole opposition looks kinda dumb to me, but qualifying it as hatred is definitely an overkill.
> Modern homomorphic encryption schemes only have a ~100x performance hit.

Really?! Now I'm curious. If I have a simple program for an 8-bit CPU @ 1 MHz, when can I run this program on a virtual machine using homomorphic encryption, under a reasonable runtime? Is it possible yet? If the performance hit is only 100x, the runtime should not be much longer than the actual chip. But the last time I checked, the hypothetical runtime seems to be still impractical.
A better URL to look at is https://github.com/enterprises/amazon.
> and we don’t ask for a contributor license agreement (CLA)

Makes me wonder what these are for (copyright transfer) and why they decided it’s not needed. It also makes me wonder if this sort of thing has ever been taken/tested in court or if it’s paranoid friction with little value add.
It is the other way around. The concept of public domain only works in countries (eg. US) that have the common law for-profit copyright approach. In civil law jurisdictions where the copyright legislation more closely follows the idea of Berne convention the only way how something can enter "public domain" is by its copyright protection expiring.
>Though it sounds similar to "The Air That I Breathe" By The Hollies

Wow you are right[1][2]. Very similar tone progressions.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7duPNQCp-w4
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFkzRNyygfk
> But if he had also just said nothing and quietly stopped being toxic, people would still be mad about his prior behavior. You need both messaging and action

Well, I thought we as humankind had spent almost a whole century to get wiser about these things, learn to read between the lines, to stop being overly judgmental and prejudiced, and oftentimes we the software developers consider ourselves to be somewhat wiser and intellectually advanced than the common folk, being able to reason on topics reaching way beyond our own field of expertise, as can be witnessed here on HN as well.

Guess these bits about wisdom and intellectual advancement are blatantly false. We're centuries away from being insightful by default.
The app itself looks great and I agree with the need to free your data. I don’t know what your long term goals for the project are, but I would suggest a different art style for the landing page. The tiny head people are generic and overdone at this point and I don’t think it really jives with the style of the app or the logo.
It's funny how this post subtly buries the lede:

> In 1892, the New York Herald Tribune compiled a list of all the millionaires in America. They found 4047 of them. How many had inherited their wealth then? Only about 20% — less than the proportion of heirs today. And when you investigate the sources of the new fortunes, 1892 looks even more like today. Hugh Rockoff found that "many of the richest ... gained their initial edge from the new technology of mass production."

I agree with PG, 1892 is a lot like today. And just like today it was characterized by the formation of huge monopolies that consolidated control of new technologies, as well as rampant inequality and exploitation of workers[1]. The reaction among those that didn't get to benefit from the excesses of this era is also notable - Communism - and not the kind where hipsters complain on the internet but rather the kind where people were willing to violently overthrow governments.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age
You can also use $0 to get the currently selected element in the inspector.
I had the same feeling skimming through the post. What a despicable person this PG turned out to be.
> Facebook’s main issue is having a revenue model dependent on advertising

Good news, that changed last year.
> In my opinion, "I'm sorry you were offended enough to stop supporting me" is not a sincere apology.

I'm surprised at the lack of empathy towards what seems a pretty genuine attempt at introspection.

To me it seems obvious that RMS is a person with a handicap and deserves at least a little understanding and support, especially since he is openly acknowledging his difference.
I didn't call you a liar, but when you start with "there's no shadow profile" and you end with "information your friends have about you is totally legal to store" you've said things out of both sides of your mouth, apparently without any feelings of espousing a contradiction.
I was responding to the parent comment that claimed Giuffre was a "terrified and led" witness.
Don't get me wrong, I like the internet. It is almost free to record and publish material now, which probably far outweighs the value that is captured by the fat cats.
I'm super excited about RDF as well. It's going to be the next big thing as we finally start connecting our machines and data sources together in semantically meaningful ways. I added relationships to CE because of this: https://concise-encoding.org/#relationships

c1
{
// Marked base resource identifiers used for concatenation.
"resources" = [
&people:@"https://springfield.gov/people#"
&mp:@"https://mypredicates.org/"
&mo:@"https://myobjects.org/"
]

// Map-encoded relationships (the map is the subject)
$people:"homer_simpson" = {

/* $mp refers to @"https://mypredicates.org/""
* $mp:"wife" concatenates to @"https://mypredicates.org/wife"
*/
$mp:"wife" = $people:"marge_simpson"

// Multiple relationship objects
$mp:"regrets" = [
$firing
$forgotten_birthday
]
}

"relationship statements" = [
&marge_birthday:($people:"marge_simpson" $mp:"birthday" 1956-10-01)
&forgotten_birthday:($people:"homer_simpson" $mp:"forgot" $marge_birthday)
&firing:($people:"montgomery_burns" $mp:"fired" $people:"homer_simpson")

// Multiple relationship subjects
([$firing $forgotten_birthday] $mp:"contribute" $mo:"marital_strife")
]
}

RDF is gonna be so awesome when it finally hits the mainstream!
People keep focusing on the Minsky thing, but if Stallman hadn't spent the last 40 years being a creep (the "emacs virgin" thing), being a creep ('tender embraces'), being abusive (the FSF unionized to protect themselves from him), being abusive (https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/1174044770546659329), being abusive (https://twitter.com/mattblaze/status/1374460763910201350), being a jerk ("These birth announcements also spread the myth that having a baby is something to be proud of"), then he might have been able to weather the storm a little better.

This isn't a 'oh, he said one thing one time about one person' situation, this is instead a lifetime of behavior that for anybody else would have had consequences long ago.
Weed Customers Are Everyone’s Dream Demographic
If you have a billion dollars to hold, you don't want the volatility that could turn it into a hundred million, or ten billion in a few weeks, just because.

Also, holding a billion dollars in a form protected by a single private key is effectively putting a billion-dollar bounty on your own head.
In many places it isn't.
>Why all the focus on income/wealth "inequality". Shouldn't we be looking at the absolute baseline quality of life? Hasn't it been increasing dramatically despite increasing inequality? Due to technological advances, hasn't the baseline quality of healthcare, education, sanitation, nutrition, shelter, comfort, convenience, etc. significantly improved from the 60s or the 80s?

If people are feeling more volatility, and that it can all slip out from under them at any time, then all that baseline quality improvement is not worth much. Also, just like many other animals, we are playing a game rooted in the mechanics of mating involving social hierarchy and various tribal mechanics that are key to securing desired resources and reducing the aforementioned volatility. I do not imagine vast gaps in income/wealth/security help the tribe as a whole in this game.
Your post is just a bunch of empty accusations, too. You're trying so hard to be snarky but everything you said might as well be applied to your own post. You just had to talk big hiding behind a throwaway, didn't you?
Classic PG. Summary / TLDR: https://www.kontxt.io/document/d/q4Jpm8Kft2ZNa5I5wzdNonRuaCF...
Yes, EV. I certainly think tech entrepreneurs go into a startup opportunity impassioned by their ideas, but knowing they could IPO or exit at some point in the future for a sizeable amount of cash is certainly a motivating factor.

EV = Probability * Outcome

Probability is very low of an IPO outcome - but EV is probably still higher than FANG work.
It reveals site structure but more importantly, it acts as an architectural foundation (location) for the future.
The questioning was about the high powered men Giuffre was trafficked to. To say it was only about Maxwell asking her to do so, is taking that quote out of context.
The ones that were new and interesting to me were towards the end:

console.table(obj)
console.time('x'); console.timeEnd('x')
console.trace()
Sorry, I meant it a bit tongue in cheek (as a German I only ever heard of most of these measurements in old cooking recipes), didn't expect it to turn into... this.
CHF still has 1k banknote (and with negative interest rates this with a safe might be a better option than a bank account).
Not sure about that. Let’s say you have 10x cheaper tools, but 1000x more competition can you still make it?
That is a 404, so not better.
It looks like he edited his comment to add this info. His original comment didn’t include info. Thanks!
Hmmm... good point. It would be nice if the article clearly confirmed whether the suggestions would appear for those with third-party default browsers.
Sadly, I'm inclined to agree with your assessment, from my utterly amateur legal armchair.

We need new laws for this. GDPR is a good start, if one happens to be an EU citizen, if a bit toothless.

We need new laws because automated collection of vast amounts of personal data, at scale, is a thing different in kind from manually collecting personal data about a specific person. Due to the expense and difficulty, the earlier system would tend to scale broadly with someone's fame, or at least wealth, which matches our expectations: it's not surprising that, say, a gossip magazine would have a fat file on Leonardo DiCaprio, and we figure he has lawyers on hand to deal with any consequent fallout.

In fact, we all used to be quite grateful for the unsung laborers who would collect and publish a doxxing book, called the white pages, which would list the names, phone numbers, and addresses, of most local people. Of course they were legally obligated to unlist those who requested it...
Show HN: An open-source tool to track your product SLO and ErrorBudget
Judging by the market's non-reaction to this, I'm going with the latter.
That's an interesting point, thanks. I only looked at income...
He is rich, and makes people rich. All the kids starting their tech company want to suck up to the man with the golden touch.
Yeah, I don't think that is true.
> If people are feeling more volatility

Do you think this feeling is reflected in actual risk though? If so, how would you quantify it? If not, shouldn't we expect/teach people not to feel so volatile and be more grateful and content?
> valid contracts depend, among other things, on informed consent and on the legality of what's being required

Yes, and they also depends on power dynamics.

That's why there are a lot of restrictions on what can be written in a contract between public utilities and users. An electricity provider could strong-arm users into signing draconian contracts otherwise.

Social networks have the same negative externalities: if most of your friends move from using emails to using Facebook to communicate and you are not on it your life gets provably worse. You are cut out from a lot of your social circle.

Having walled-garden social networks is anti-competitive by design.

Unfortunately legislators turn a blind eye to this.
> Dishonest reporting, and amplifying of dishonest posts on social media is not something you will ever get an apology for, because those efforts were never meant to survive scrutiny. They were meant to create "pressure" to cause reputational damage.

Exactly.

The correct way of handling these instances of bad behavior is to block, shadowban and ignore.
Every time there's a major Windows update, I trawl through ALL the settings disabling marketing profile-enhancing 'features' like this. I find my online life is considerably less cluttered without them.
The same reasoning that says it's bad to murder someone. I would say empathy and a modicum of human decency.
I think the language of the post was rather hyperbolic; I have quoted this line a few times now:

> But this level of wealth concentration and inequality is detrimental to the fabric of a society. We’re not better off, we’re not more innovative, we’re not healthier or more cohesive or happier when this happens.

When you give Airbnb as an example, I fixated on them mostly because it doesn't jive with the rest of your point.

So Airbnb is part of a group of companies in one geographic area that happen to be successful. Why does it matter? Should we choose to not do business with them, for the sake of geographical monetary equity? Whether group fiat or government breaking them up, it is the same result.

Sorry if all of this came off as too aggressive. It is monday, and I have had too much coffee already :/
This is exactly why i love projects like MobileCoin and its integration in Signal. We are going to desperately need anonymous, secure and privacy focused payments very very soon. Signal needs to open up payments worldwide as soon as possible. The last problem to fix is making it all decentralized.
The cash argument is not a good take at all. When you travel with large amounts of cash people ask questions, you are obligated to declare it when crossing borders if it’s over certain amount(over 0,25BTC as USD will make you fill out declarations and it may be confiscated until you can prove that it is legitimately yours) depositing it to your bank account rings all kind of bells, the banks can refuse to work with you and can trigger law enforcement interest.

We can be cynical about it but actually number of banks paid fines in the billions of dollars and they take it seriously now. Some hard hit banks like BNP that got fined for $9B would even refuse to work with cash intensive businesses.

The criminals need to go through trouble of creating shell companies to launder or transfer money, cash is no good anymore.
This isn't an app I'm likely to use much (Team EMACS :) but as someone learning Rust, it's great to see the code for a full application out there. Kudos to the authors. :)
GPLv3 came out in 2007 so that’s less than 20 years. They also sue people [0] who break the license, so that’s good.

I’m not sure how relevant FSF is supposed to be. They seem more relevant than ever, but aren’t a huge deal. They just run GPL and promote open source. And they’re one of many groups. So it’s ok, I think, to just do your thing and not blow up and be huge.

They are small ($1M annual budget [1] and 14 staff) and think that’s ok when compared to stuff like Mozilla where their CEO makes more than the entire FSF budget. The ROI from FSF compared to Mozilla seems really good and impactful.

Also, RMS isn’t “in charge” he’s on a board that includes four other people.

[0] https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2016/fall/the-role-of-lawsuits-...
[1] 1.4M in 2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation