skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is Tether not being backed by real $ not actually as big a deal?

It's no big deal --- as long as enough people accept the fact that they can't actually redeem their Tethers for real USD.

As long as everyone is invested in playing the game, the illusion proceeds unimpeded. But eventually, reality will slowly start to intrude on the fantasy. People will be faced with the fact that the USD they fed into the fantasy ain't coming back out.

When this happens, the exchanges will just vanish into the internet ether from which they sprang and the people who ran them will be a few trillion richer --- in USD, not USDT.
> I have an easier time getting buttons on a screen and doing things sanely (once all the fuss is set up) compared to trying to get the ball rolling in Qt/GTK/etc (especially if you're not using Java or C++)

ah, yes, the famous difficulty of getting buttons on a screen in Qt https://streamable.com/bs5fxk
This is the problem with common law. You get multiple-inheritance conundrums given enough time.
I have no idea, unfortunately. On the other hand, the trademark doesn't seem to be a problem to guys behind Racket, which has the most advanced contracts system out there; the canonical book for programming classes in Racket, "How to Design Programs", teaches you everything you need to know about DbC without ever mentioning the term itself, IIRC. Even if you don't want to touch Eiffel due to it being proprietary, there are many languages which support DbC you can choose from: already mentioned Racket, Ada, Clojure, Scala, D, Nim, Haxe, Elixir, and many more.

Also, there's a difference between DbC and simply using contracts - it's similar to the difference between writing tests and doing TDD. Many people might not be convinced that the benefits of DbC are worth rethinking the development process, and so they dismiss all contracts as "too many asserts, don't need". But, like with tests, you can benefit from a solid test suite even if you don't do TDD; similarly, you can reap a lot of benefits from simply ensuring that precondition violations are caught at the boundary of a subroutine, because it makes it easier to find the reason beind the problem.

I'm convinced that in the next 10-15 years we will see gradual typing (with type inference) embracing contracts as a way to extend the guarantees from compile time to runtime. Maybe we will finally get the best of all worlds: rapid prototyping, great performance, and verifiable program correctness.
Regulations are to blame here, not lack of skills or capabilities. The Chinese companies won’t fare any better with this type of regulatory environment.
> it hums along at about 20-22W of power consumption.

> Absolutely silent

Well which is it, "absolutely silent" or "humming"? Does this thing have fans?
As a consumer, I am not terribly displeased. Value-wise, I would have preferred that the municipality ended up owning the base fiber infrastructure and leasing it out to commercial operators. But that fantasy has passed.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Clearfix classes assigned to every element. I watched rounded rectangles built in Photoshop, sliced and exported to PNGs, then aligned with tables and a prayer. All those hacks will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to design.
Should I learn Go and if so Why?

I work with python and node.js but should I give Go a chance?
Code Refactoring: Joy and Terror
The power draw of an i7-9700 is around 100W on full load (107W, CPU only, according to Tom's hardware¹). There are relatively quiet solutions, but they're in the ballpark of 30/35 dB, and they may not even cover the 100+W requirement.

22W of full load can be cooled with a passive cooler (large, but still can).

[¹] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i7-9700k-9th...
Genius. You need to find a way to market to the right audience and up your price to $79 or something. The current price seems too low for all the time it saves (if I'm a serious vlogger).

I'll definitely check it out (and maybe purchase it before your price increase, haha).
The main function of Facebook is to spy on people, the providers of the data. All data gathered is then sold to paying customers. They make all their money this way.
If they only had a graph with persons and relations between these persons and did nothing else with it than show this to these people, maybe we were not facing this discussion now.

The cynic in me would say: store all data on EU soil ;)
An iOS app update that annoys me
It occurs to me now that this somewhat resembles the squabble over the “commons clause” and whether or not software using it is open source.
The fact that Soviet Venera 13 landed on Venus approx. 40 years ago is mind blowing!
that literally means war. I'm in Taiwan currently though I'm not Taiwanase or of chinese descent. Taiwan is a mono-ethnic country, where a good % of the population believe it or not identify with the mainland.

Culturally their are similar, speak the same language. Mainland is Taiwan's biggest trading partner. & before the Japs was Chinese territory. and China has an iron will to bring Taiwan into the fold. What would the US gain again from making Taiwan it's territory - war and more debt.

Chip fabs can easily be built in the US on a 3 year timeline. Whereas that same 3 year timeline, maybe the PRC would've taken Taiwan.
Systemd: The Good Parts
"IP addresses are logged, so you might get banned."

yah... I will pass...
Trying to understand what does SIMD intrinsics offer in a 'libc' that SWAR couldn't do? For absoultely massive values to strlen, etc sure but IIRC the average strlen was something like 10 or less.
Recent related thread. Others?

The Washington state legislature has voted to end limits on municipal broadband - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26803426 - April 2021 (112 comments)

There have been tons of threads about municipal broadband of course, but a lot of them are in the key of repetitive/indignant. But this one is also recent and also pretty good:

The number of cities with municipal broadband has jumped over 4x in two years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26970493 - April 2021 (324 comments)
Sticky Groups in the Shadows
AT&T and Discovery May Merge to Take on Netflix and Disney+
How is PIA a FOSS property?
Says you. There's an Internet draft where some guy from Mozilla basically said "Postel was wrong; the solution is to always be conservative" https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-iab-protocol-mai... However it's a draft so he only speaks for himself; it's not Internet law. He also doesn't get it. Deviancy being ignored by a parser shouldn't be interpreted as intent to support. Non-conforming use cases are accepted at the pleasure of the implementor.

Consider this. The Internet never would have become popular and inclusive like it became if it was designed to be highly strict, structured, and ordered like Signalling System 7. I like the fact that a 14 year kid can write an HTTP client or server, if they want to, and if they do it'll most likely be mostly correct. Stuff like that makes people fall in love with the Internet from the earliest ages. If we look at the history of companies like DEC vs. PC it's pretty clear technology can't survive >1 generation when there's no career track for hobbyists.

In some cases deviancy in protocols has helped standards become better. Consider HTML. If we had things Tim Berners Lee's way, we'd all be writing ugly verbose XHTML that validates. It wasn't until HTML5 that W3C embraced the chaos of the true standard and formalized the non-conformant use-cases (such as being able to omit <html>, <head>, </tr> </td>, </p>, etc.) and it made the HTML language much more pleasant.

So we should take the concerns of the "always be conservative" crowd with a grain of salt. Because they're the people who wanted XHTML. They're the people who ban numbers like 0xC0,0x80 because some version of some Oracle or Microsoft piece software had a bug once. I don't like how people who embrace policies like that invariably write code that destroys text data in some misguided effort to keep people safe from themselves. There should be better reasons for preventing things which are possible from happening.
He is in the article as an example, the article is not about regular employees, but leaders.
Could they be pulled by multiple small tugs instead? (no idea if that's feasible on the open seas!)
Still waiting for small form factor PC with built in PSU.
Because Ruby and Python force you to unit test for typos.

I like and use both of them but if you're trying to argue that the testing problem in Python is the same as that of Go or Rust, that argument will fail.
In this case, if it followed the car ahead through a left turn, then that would be so, but if it did not, and it were still in the section of road restricted by the cones, it would have become stuck again, just as it did after it made the initial turn onto the restricted road.

The thing is, the strategy of 'follow other traffic' needs exit rules, and while it is relatively straightforward to begin the strategy when stuck, deciding when to abandon it is less clear-cut. Did the left-turning vehicle do so because this was the correct way to deal with the problem, or did it have a different goal?
news.com.au is News Corp is Rupert Murdoch.
Very glad I learned it as a kid...
the "source code" is know as "stems". These days more DJ equipment has support for stems as DJ sets become more hybrid with on-the-fly remixes.
>If somebody on your flight was ever lifted off the plane by LEA (but obviously has made it through security into the plane) they are very likely the target of such a dirtbox intercept.

You'd think fugatives won't bring their phones with them, turn them off unless absolutely necessary, or use burners.
By making stock grants valuable and thus aligning the incentives of the employees with the company?
I built commandeer, a library for seamlessly exposing python functions as command line calls.

https://commandeer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

I was fed up with having to build the nth argparse parser and instead used my already existing python functions to create the cli for me.
Very nice! I'd ditch pg-promise in a heartbeat for something simpler. I kinda dislike the tagged template literal helpers magic. I'd be more comfortable with explicit references to substituted arguments.

Though it seems like I can just use the unsafe api all the time for that.

The rest of the API is very nice, .stream, .cursor, notify support, all that.
Yes, its operation on MacOS needs some attention.

In fact I've created the notepad as a demo project for Sciter SDK (https://sciter.com). The same as Sciter Notes: https://notes.sciter.com

It is just that at some point someone asked me to make distribution so I've created that web site.

Another question was to understand: donation-ware, is it a sustainable solution. Apparently it is not - donation does not even cover sums asked by Apple for allowance to develop software for their platform.
Thanks for the reply.

I don't see how LJ, who commonly writes about DNS for example, writing about a DNS project handing 136m to the FOSS community with the help of the top VCs in Silicon Valley while moving ownership of the DNS root to the commons isn't a topic LJ would cover?

As you can see many other publications covered this as well.

In terms of the shell games comment, it's definitely true I have or had a stake in many of the entities you spoke of, thru LTMH. However, I was not in operational control.

Case in point: On snoonet, I owned the cryptocurrency channel. However, I was deopped and removed from founder as the subreddit, /r/cryptocurrency/, claimed ownership over it. Snoonet's policies dictate that the owner of the subreddit owns the namespace on Snoonet.

Any other questions that you have that you'd like me to help to try to clarify?

Thanks again for your questions and comments!
It's a real bummer, as those of us who don't want our trips tracked/correlated now incur an extra $1 charge every single trip.
A lot of old book gems can be found over at archive.org

Really a treasure trove for old and "forgotten" classics.
What makes you think that? In states with the nickel redemption, I’ve often seen homeless people collecting cans and bottles to return.
This makes me suspect the average redeemer has less money than the average fronter.
This is a treasure trove!
There's an interesting tale related to this that occurred in 1993. On July 4th 1993 a plant that made epoxy resin for semiconductor packaging in Japan exploded and was destroyed by fire. As a consequence there was a significant spike in DRAM prices that summer. I happen to remember this specifically as that summer as I was on a one month work term at a software house where I got to work on the POSIX environment running under VMS on a DEC Alpha. My task was to get their test suites runing on the Alpha (mostly a bunch of shell scripts). When I went to purchase a couple of SIMMs to upgrade the memory of my Amiga, the prices had more than doubled relative to the month before. A year or two after that low profile DRAM packages started to show up in SIMMs that had no more than a millimeter of height to reduce the amount of epoxy used in each chip.
> primitive computers

Do you want your life specified and controlled by AI?
I go through several "suckless" type IRC clients - currently my own patched version of: https://c9x.me/irc/ - which is nice and simple.
On the spirit of Masters of Doom, I recommend "It's behind you - The making of a computer Game" by Bob Pape.

The author explains how he made the R-Type conversion for the ZX Spectrum 48k and provides an interesting view of the "bedroom coders" and the early video game industry in the UK back in the 80s.

Self-published and downloadable for free here: http://bizzley.com/
And less GDP than california somehow...
I cannot find anything on it - does anyone know the reason it was booted out by Google?
There are single-use paper metrocards that come out of the machines. They haven't used tokens for many years.
Building architecture to connect Raspberry Pi with Cloud microservices
That's the point, How else are we supposed to fight these companies? Take their source of money away and watch them squirm.
Show HN: I made an app to help you track and organize your monthly bills
It's definitely lacking it, but I guess this comment is sarcastic. So what do you think Python is lacking?
I'm not surprised that it is happening at all. Of course someone that paid a large sum of money for something that they no longer need/want will result in them trying to sell it to recoup some money. My surprise is that Cellebrite does not buy them back to keep the demand/supply artificial.
If you want to authentify an artistic piece, you can just sign it with a private asymmetric key.

NFT is just built on the artificial market for rarity and currencies made of pure energy use... useless.
I think the free world owes Taiwan that degree of protection of their sovereignty. It wouldn’t likely result in war - China wouldn’t risk that, since it is as much a burden to them as it would be to the US. This is just a big game of chicken, and on one side is the US and all its allies (NATO) after all. The US would gain a foothold in the region politically and militarily, and can rest assured that the capacity for semiconductor manufacturing, a specialized capability, doesn’t fall into the hands of mainland China.
Sounds more like fueled by modern consumerist triviality and greed.
No, credit card is fine. I did raise an issue via Twitter, at the launch of the Pinebook Pro, but no response.
I along with one or two others wrote a python toolkit for Palo Alto firewalls on top of their `pan-python` library. It abstracted all the XML API crap into pure python, and made it a lot easier for our team to do audit and compliance stuff on firewall security policy. Super helpful. To hell with XML! Unfortunately, my former employer had an old-school approach to open source (aka don't use it or contribute to it).

I may out myself to any potential former coworkers here, but oh well. I'm proud of it.
Covid: Health Experts Believe ‘Herd Immunity’ Exists in Pockets of SF Bay Area
> unique error codes

Today those are not necessary. With how good search is these days, what works great are crafting the message strings so they are search friendly.
>If you're trading crypto, [...] you're probably doing something shady.

Seriously?
What you find futile I find the strength of the Markdown workflow: I really like the separation of writing and layout.
The funding agency with announcement is here https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2017_Phase_...

I'm sure if you email them, they can direct you to the reports. The are usually hosted on the NIAC site, but there was some dustup over accessibility concerns, I think.
I built a note taking app that's effectively an OS and inverts the relationship between data and apps.

I wasn't satisfied with note taking apps or the way apps own data when I prefer the flexibility of my data/structure having apps.
I don't think so. When the pandemic hit, the fed made the reserve ratio 0% for all accounts, so counting savings accounts as M1 wouldn't really change how much money banks could lend. However, even under normal circumstances (transactional accounts have a reserve ratio of 10%, other accounts have a reserve ratio of 0%) counting savings accounts as transactional (M1) would actually increase the reserve requirement for banks, decreasing the amount they could loan and therefore decreasing M2 overall.
The problem is right now the biggest thing going for Windows is the historic baggage. If Microsoft makes be choose between baggage and something new and possibly better, I'm also going to consider other options. In that case, Microsoft had better offer something amazing, that's worth the cost of removing history.

They've done it from time to time. The benefits of NT outweighed the loss of tools that required the windows 9x models; although not enough for many to switch to 2000; XP made some concessions to seal the deal. The benefits of 64-bit windows are generally worth the loss of 16-bit applications (although winevdm shows that they could have made that work).

But, I haven't seen much from Microsoft lately that leads me to think they'd be able to pull something like that off. If I had to make a choice, I'd probably go to something else that feels like it respects users.
I guess it's the other way around as in "does the world really need to learn a programming language for making plain old web pages"? Tbh I don't know if hyperscript is the answer though, adding yet another language construct (with hard-coded, opinionated semantics) into the mix when we have already HTML/SGML, CSS, and lots of microsyntax. I guess the ship has sailed when JavaScript entered the scene at which point HTML has basically stalled, but the basic vision - that regular users or at least prosumers should be able to make generic content documents without resorting to a Turing-complete language - is as old as markup languages and SGML itself. SGML with HyTime in particular is able to deliver generic or project-specific behaviors of the kind demo'd on the hyperscript page (plus much more) through extension vocabularies and HTML templating without introducing new ad-hoc syntax at all.
> I’d personally hypothesize that yawns, like almost all other emotional displays are simple pre-language communications

The trouble with that hypothesis that even very primitive vertebrates that have or have had almost no social history also yawn.
A couple of years ago, I built http://www.genewarrior.com

It's a suite of tools to work with DNA sequences (from simple tasks such as reverse complement to medium complex tasks such as multiple sequence alignments and primer design).

I built it because I wasn't very happy with the existing tools. It never got very popular, but after all these years I still think it's a very useful tool.
Clubhouse: Android rollout worldwide until Friday
That one was
Starting a Telephone Company in 2019, or How I Built Fiber to My Neighbors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24952040 - Oct 2020 (20 comments)

There have also been:

Start Your Own ISP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726906 - Aug 2019 (95 comments)

Launch HN: Necto (YC W18) – ISP Starter Kit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067144 - May 2018 (78 comments)

Start Your Own ISP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16160394 - Jan 2018 (193 comments)

I feel like I remember more of these too...
I routinely encounter places where I am forced to use try..except where it would be better and more easily understood if I did not have to work around the fact I am forced to goto out of the current scope.
The free version of Wordpress.com has become gnarly in recent years. They even use a dark pattern to trick you into thinking you have to buy a domain for your blog when in fact you can always just use a wordpress.com sub domain.
It means that nothing is backed and these exchanges don't have the cash reserves to back the liquidity they're handling.

The important thing to realise is once you're an on-paper crypto millionaire, you're not going to be invested in making the music stop even if you have a hand on the volume knob.

If a group decided to call time and try to cash out to the tune of a $billion or so then the music stops and every exchange will cascade fail.

No exchanges, no reserves, no liquidity to get the music playing again, crypto has no value.
> Schools have banned the snack altogether over concerns about its popularity with children.

This is the most disturbing thing reported in the article. Who cares who invented a one more type of over-processed shit? What we should care about is that it's marketed to kids.

Or to anyone. The message plastered everywhere should be: don't eat that shit. It's bad for you.

Oh and the article above is just so much white-washed corporate propaganda and advertisement. An entire article about who invented a product and not one warning about the product's unhealthiness.
Ask HN: What are the companies that offer 4-day work week
I am a senior software engineer working at one of the major tech companies in bay area. I am looking for jobs at companies that I can work for them 4-day a week.
Are you saying you meter by eye? Without using an exposure meter?
Essentially an embargo against crypto? Similarly to how the US treats a company that deals with Iran?
2021 Tesla Model 3 Performance top speed tested on the German Autobahn
There is still this one: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wilysis.ce...
(Network Cell Info).

It will reveal a catcher nearby if you are already familiar with the local area.
I also built my last PC in 2012 but I paid over $500 for 32GB DDR3 overclocked at 2400MHz which is much more comparable to the DDR4 you'll find today (mostly 2400MHz+, with some laptops at 2133)
Not a wrong price, $18k USD is downright cheap for what it does for the intended customer base.
Carbon dioxide concentrations dropped from 4,000 parts per million during the Cambrian period about 500 million years ago to as low as 180 parts per million during the Quaternary glaciation of the last two million years:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_...
In my experience, bullshit doesn’t exist in isolation. If his boldest claim is bs, then likely many other things about his story are. I’d even go as far as to question whether his career advancement was enabled by this behavior.

A bit of rant, but people like this are toxic and need to be weeded out of organizations. I’ve seen too much of folks getting away with such behavior in my career.
> edit: or is credit card at odds with your wish not to be tracked, too?

I think it's plainly evident from my prevous comment what I consider to be tracking - providing paypal with government identity documents, for it to do what it wishes with. I don't think the snarky shitcoin comment is necessary, but rather shitcoins than paypal, yes.

Do you think potential Pinebook Pro customers should have to spend an accumulated four hours of their time, telephoning some call centre in the Phillipines, just to buy a laptop?