skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Was pony really a Cadillac? Cadillacs are supposed to be comfortable and large (and not fast). Part of the design (if you believe Robert virding) of erlang's process system is that it makes error handling (an important part of being a developer) very comfortable because it just does the sane thing with little or no effort. Pony, by contrast, obsessively required you to handle errors and shoehorned you into a theory-inspired actor system , missing the point that erlang processes are practical units of composable failure domains, not theoretical actor concurrency units
Ah I was so into writing TI-BASIC (and eventually, experimenting with z80) on my TI calculator!

I would be carrying it to every class. This was before smartphones and I had a lot of times where I had nothing better than to write program on the calculator.

I wrote so many things, like a hangman game (with a wide vocabulary) and an RPG fully in TI-BASIC, with a 2D map and a combat system. You could store only a limited number of pictures, so I made up a format for mapping pictures into strings, with a corresponding encoder and decoder.

My favorite program I wrote is ELIZA, a copy of the famous therapist AI program (actually inspired by the alt-text of the xkcd linked in the article!). It had like 30 rules or so and worked remarkably well, to the extent that I would talk to it often through my problems.
Well it will happen eventually if countries go 100% electric, but I doubt it will affect the average consumer for a long time.

Fuel stations make most of their profits from non-fuel items (in my country, fuel stations sell some of the best coffee), and people will still need those when commuting or travelling. In Norway some fuel stations have started to convert pumps to EV chargers [0], however there isn't really much cost needed to keep a couple of fuel pumps around. Petrol can last a few months in tanks, and diesel can last up to a year.

People are still going to be using petrol for motorbikes and gardening equipment for a long time, and diesel is going to be used by trucks and construction machinery for even longer.

[0] https://insideevs.com/news/532464/fuel-stations-norway-fast-...
I'm not in the US (HK) but me and a quite a few people I know have a dozen cards or more. I only regularly use 2-3 of them but the rest are useful for various occasions.

eg, Card A has no overseas transaction fees and has good exchange rate so I use it when travelling. Card B is same but I set a ridiculously low credit limit so I can use it in dodgy souvenir shops without worry. Card C gives airport lounge access. Card D gives free magazine and bottled water in the airport post-security areas. Card E grants access to clubhouses that are normally members-only, which I use for business meetings. Card F gets discounts for movie tickets, Card G to H gives free coffee upgrade from different chains, etc. And then there are a bunch that was pushed onto me when I got mortgage or a investment funds, that I never bothered to cancel since there's no annual fees and occasionally they'd have a promotion where it's actually useful.

I wouldn't want to carry all these physical cards, so I don't have them "in my wallet" per se, which is why it's nice to be able to add them all to my phone.
Gah!

It's so annoying that they auto remove "How" from the beginning of any title.

I keep seeing instances where the whole meaning of the story is changed by auto removing the "How".

In this case the context changes from a retrospective learning story, to something that looks like news... except it's not news, because it happened years ago!

Cmon HN!
What does Poland have to do with this actual conversation? Seems like a bit of whataboutism
> Can you give an example?

it is very easy to find an example of censorship, not sure why you need one but let's say: "World marks 32 years since Tiananmen massacre as China censors all mention of it"

There is also daily examples of censorship on this website.
We are asking tech platforms to solve society’s problems.

I’ve said it before but people don’t ask: what if we shutdown Facebook tomorrow, will all these problems disappear?
Oh man; this is amazing (in theory).

Earlier this year, I went through an attempt to purge myself from some internet services that I wasn't using.

Many of the SaaS-type services I tried to remove myself from didn't make account deletion obvious at all. All of them had an email address to contact in their Privacy Policies, but whether you got a response back or not was a different matter.

In practice, I could imagine apps just telling their users that their account deletion "will be processed in 24-48 hours" with a 50/50 chance of it getting processed.
just to be clear - I believe the correct response is "no". Only if we all refuse, will anything be accomplished.
OS/2 was great... The Windows Networking stack was a complete mess and OS/2 has a real stack. Rexx. Multi-tasking. Imagine an alternate universe where OS/2 won against Windows - I think we'd be better off ;)

Nice boxes for OS/2 Warp as well IIRC...
I do web stuff, and part of my discipline is getting a hello world server and write the long copy for the homepage.

Or I just scramble to get something that works just for me, to make sure it makes sense, even if it clearly won't work for others w/o tons of modification.
2 hosted offerings.

From the blog post:

(Some of you may remember that we launched the first “Timescale Cloud” 2.5 years ago, as the world’s first fully-managed time-series database-as-a-service on AWS, GCP, Azure. That product is alive and well, and fully supported as before, but is now called “Managed Service for TimescaleDB”.)

Today we are announcing the new Timescale Cloud (formerly known as “Timescale Forge”), a database cloud for relational and time-series workloads, built on PostgreSQL, and architected around this vision of the “transparent box”.
Give me a few weeks
Possibly, though positive Covid tests aren’t a guarantee of an actual infection which might be why some studies showed vaccination was more effective.

Alternatively, having survived the first infection says more about the individual than getting a vaccination. Which is yet another way this stuff gets tricky.
You most certainly pay for medicine. Even for the subsidised polyclinics, where wait times average at 2h, you'll still have to pay the subsidised rate. They're not prohibitive, but to a certain extent, you pay with time rather than money, unless you pick a private clinic.

Similarly, that $2 hawker meal is rather outdated now.
Nim does it better, it can be used anywhere C can; zig cannot.
> No, national currencies too fail to fit the definition, because people do not "invest" in them with the expectation of gain.

The entire forex trading industry: am I a joke to you?
Holy cow how old was this system, circa 1975 or something?
> the middle-square method is a method of generating pseudorandom numbers

> The book The Broken Dice by Ivar Ekeland gives an extended account of how the method was invented by a Franciscan friar known only as Brother Edvin sometime between 1240 and 1250.[3] Supposedly, the manuscript is now lost, but Jorge Luis Borges sent Ekeland a copy that he made at the Vatican Library.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-square_method
> Source files dont live on their own and shouldn't be compiled as isolated units, they live in projects and need to be compiled as a batch

Rusts compilation model is projects (called crates) that compile source files in batches.

But also, this feels like a minor implementation detail...

Maybe I'm missing your point?
This is how the Pi is brought regardless of if you use SMP or AMP.
That makes complete sense, and I don’t take it personally. It’s been so cool to read all this valuable feedback!

I must say that I’m very comfortable in C, only because it’s where I landed up as a kid. I actually find it way less confusing than more “modern” languages (I kinda skipped OO etc.!), and I enjoy the “control” it gives. Maybe you can’t teach an old dog new tricks after all! ;-)
Come to Australia. Sadly we still have racism, but mostly directed towards people without good English skills.
I was referring to inserting fasteners, after drilling the hole with a different tool.
"By that definition the USD is a ponzi. No, national currencies too fail to fit the definition, because people do not "invest" in them with the expectation of gain" <-- The 6.6trillion/day forex market begs to differ.
I encourage all sane, socially-well-adjusted, financially-stable men to simply date overseas. Excepting the recent COVID problem impairing travel, your dating pool is essentially all 3.5 billion women on the planet. Especially if you are willing to work remotely, there is almost no incentive to restrict yourself to your domestic regional/national women. Finding a fertile LOYAL childless woman with tolerable political views is not that difficult. You just need to search off the beaten path in developing countries. And then STAY OVERSEAS. Most countries don't have America's costly and misandrist divorce/alimony laws.
> gold

> real estate

> stocks

Sure, these things aren't ponzis. What about art and stamp collecting, though? How are they not ponzis under this definition?
Isn’t forex kind of a joke to everyone?

Hearing your friend got into Forex is about the same as when they get into Amway, Tupperware, DoTerra, or Herbalife …
Gordian Software (YC W19) | Software Engineers | Full Time, Equity, Profit Share | Bellevue, WA | REMOTE w/ periodic travel to HQ | https://www.gordiansoftware.com/

Our mission is removing all unnecessary friction from air travel. Our first product makes it easy for travel websites to offer airline add-ons (rather than make travellers purchase at the airport). We have product market fit, large customers like Priceline, Hopper and Ctrip & have grown 15x so far this year.

Since our post in September months ago, we've hired 4 engineers and are hiring more this month. Check out the JD here if you're interested: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/GordianSoftware/0ea0a67e-3621-4b28-...
Academia encourages people to portray themselves as victims. Applications for most jobs and grants typically have a "Personal statement" component which is universally understood as the place where you are supposed to write your sob story. If you see yourself as a "normal" person and you don't want to write an emotional essay about your personal life and how oppressed you are, you probably won't get the job or grant. This article reads like a personal statement. And it's dripping wet with liberal kool-aid.
Devil's advocate, but starting with a broad based "who to tax" concept allows for more room to horse trade.

If he said front and centre "I want to personally dangle Jeff Bezos and Sergei Brin over the edge of a tall building and shake until their wallets fall out" that gives one clear target to fight over. Starting with an amorphous blob target lets everyone involved say "Oh, we'll exclude X, Y, and Z...." and feel like they won something, while still getting what you really wanted in the end.

It's why they always talk about the budget proposals as "$3.5 trillion" or "$1.8 trillion" without anyone ever saying "my real red-line is the $12k of subsidies to the local dirt farmers."
Silicon Anodes Muscle in on Battery Technology
I’ve discouraged friends from investing in CC as I could never see a material basis for value, present or future. I wonder what if anything exists that is similar that is not a Ponzi scheme.
Ask yourself this: if you woke up in the morning to find BCs value had zeroed out, how surprised would you be
> Of course, immigration-driven growth is great! But for people on the ground, what matters is GDP per capita, not total GDP.

If GDP per capita is what you are interested in, you don't want immigration as it increases the "capita" part.

Also, Australia's growth had nothing to do with immigration. It had everything to do with China and China's economic growth.
They have value as tax evasion schemes
In a nutshell: A ponzi scheme has no external revenue, instead the payoffs come from new investors. This is the case when investing in Bitcoin.
Wrong. You need to get some therapy and stop blaming women.
I think this is simplistic. It’s viewing Bitcoin through a lens of a traditional Ponzi scheme assuming people that trade their fiat currency for Bitcoin are investing, with a view to one day take profits back into dollars.

What if people are seeing discussion of minting a trillion dollar coin, trillions in QE, 25% of all dollars created in the last 12 months…and concluding that fiat currency is in an endgame and they are permanently trading what fiat they have now for one of a finite number of digital assets that will ever be created.

As Michael Saylor once said in an interview: “It’s the superior asset, Laura”
In which a man doesn’t know what a proof of work system is.
> They generally invest in gold as a hedge -- a "store of value" -- that they hope will retain its value in case other assets go sour.

I strongly believe bitcoin will be the new gold one day, if it doesn't pan out as a currency. It sounds insane, but I actually believe the Winklevoss twins when they say Elon and SpaceX will be able to mine gold on asteroids within the next 20 years, which would crash the price of gold. Not to mention as everything inevitably moves digital, we need to have a digital store of value.
There are a lot of people who are "investing" in Bitcoin right now not out of expectation of real gains, but as a way to maintain assets against an inflating dollar... nominal gains, but not real ones.
The Facebook Logout – We're over Facebook
Yes, this is true, but at the same time - there are major institutional players and market makers who do make money off of Forex.
Tell me of a Chromium-based browser that has something like Firefox Multi-Account Containers and is as kind on my Mac's battery as Firefox and I'm out
The article describes "5 features of a Ponzi scheme" which make it sound like some authoritative rules, but so far as I can tell these were simply made up just for this article. I can't find them referenced anywhere else.
Nope. No one is being deceived. A Ponzi scheme pretends to be based on legitimate equities and value and is therefore a fraud. Bitcoin makes no such claim.
Judging by the attitude on HN, cryptocurrency should be worth $0 and written off years ago. Instead it's bigger than ever and the most important people on earth are focusing on it. Somehow it's simultaneously an incredible, useless scam but is so powerful that we must ban it at all costs!

HN doesn't know everything, do your own research, use your own logic.
If they were opt in, would they even make back the investment it took to build the feature to begin with?
I did. It wasn't very cool after all. I know what you mean about the icon, too. And why wasn't it easier to get that kind of cool custom icon for one's favorite, and still current, MS-DOS apps at that time? Frustrating.
I'm ex AWS so I used CloudFormation sort of because I had to (I guess, no one told me not to use terraform, but it felt wrong not to drink our own champaign). I left AWS to co-found a startup and when I had to pick between the two, I just used what I knew already (CloudFormation, but more specifically CDK). I have to say I am highly tempted to give Terraform a look, but if I do, it will be terraform + CDK probably: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-cdk

For me troubleshooting, speed, and that punch in the gut feeling when you see after 30 mins of crunching the dreadful - update failed rollback in progress - are great reasons to give Terraform a try.

AWS should fix this by making the SDK/API be 1:1 with infra as code. The result of a describe call should === the stuff needed to create that thing declaratively.

CDK is an amazing project, their high level constructs are making AWS SAM / Serverless framework / Amplify seem complex. With a line of code I get a best-practice opinionated VPC, an ECS cluster, a Fargate task with an ALB. (off topic - be careful - always ensure tasks return 200 OK on a GET / or it will thrash for hours, as others commented below, it's a known bug, sadly I knew about it only after wasting hours on troubleshooting it)

So I agree perhaps CFN has native issues (speed, troubleshooting) but don't hate CDK just because it uses CFN in the back.

So if you have to choose between CloudFormation or Terraform, I'd choose CDK.
The payoffs in FX trades do not come from "new investment money", so it fails an important Ponzi scheme criteria.

Having said that, speculating on FX is a zero-sum game, which I'm not generally in favor of.
Oh I can do this too:

"...What if we alcohol and spirits tomorrow, will all these problems disappear?"
I've sung or hummed along to canyon.mid a time or two. We're good. The meaning of the word 'song' has expanded in popular usage. I play the horn (french horn) and I smile an nod when someone calls a clarinet a horn.
This honestly sounds like mob tactics.

"It would be a shame if your life were harder if you didn't pay protection money, god forbid"
Concept: High School class called “Internet Skills”
George Soros would like a word.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday
Spotify Has Made All Music into Background Music
I was just now seeing the first video of https://a16z.com/crypto-startup-school/ . Whole video is about how blockchain is awesome because Computer, Internet and Mobile were awesome. Followed by some answers about how we don't know of any use case right now.

Is there any non currency use case of blockchain?
>It’s almost as if you’re being intentionally obtuse. The established term (that I used) is “modern” colonialism - it doesn’t necessarily involve physical colonization, rather systematic external control.

I'll ignore the part where you started off by attacking me and point out: I obviously wasn't saying any of the countries you outlined were LITERALLY colonies, so don't imply I did. Thanks.

>Russia has been tussling with the West for a prolonged period now. Regardless, they are the second largest exporter of oil to the USA. (1)

Right... their entire economy is based on "extractive economies".

>Canada is an American, Western country. Not sure why they would fall under my reasoning, which was specifically about non-Western countries. The USA is the one usually leading this oil-hungry warring - it’s even a meme at this point.

Again, their economy is based on "extractive economies" - Canada is entirely beholden to exporting natural resources to western nations, and they are one of the so-called "western" countries you claim this doesn't happen to.

>Brazil has various issues, most stemming from external influences corrupting the local political powers. Oil is just one of them, they are also coerced to deforest their country for European exports. (2)

So.... a western nation subjected to systematic extraction?
Yeah there was an article I read a while back about a company looking to prevent the use of 'naughty' words in randomly-generated strings used as event IDs. Apparently someone with some pull had seen a message with an offensive word. Some management committee spent a long time trying to figure out how to solve the problem including proposing keeping a list of bad words, and then worrying about what should be in it and who would maintain it. At some point an engineer got a chance to speak and said something like "just use base-31 and omit vowels". The story as I remember it didn't mention the use of v or l33t-speak, but they were randomly generated, not maliciously constructed, values.

Also note that if you're too naive about checking for 'naughty' words, you get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
About two weeks ago a coworker came into my office and told me he bought a cheap motherboard so he could mine bitcoin with his graphics card.

Is it theoretically still possible to make a profit with that kind of hardware nowadays?

Please someone just tell me. I have no interest to do research into this. I just feel sadness for the crypto-bros.
Does the USD have external revenue? Is so, what is it?
I completely disagree. I knew (or remembered) nothing about SCP, but loved the book.
Unpartnered or partner-free?
What about the hodlers.

What if your ponzi becomes a globally accepted currency.
Also it is not true that "governments make their currencies slightly inflationary precisely to discourage hoarding." In fact, this is done so that there can be economic expansion. It is true that some economists have advocated for deliberately trying to increase inflation to spur spending, but it turns out that actually forcing inflation is not easy (see also: Japan for the past two decades).
There was a lot more horrifying stuff on that site besides hello.jpg, but most everyone recoiled in horror before they saw anything else.
Another day another “stay away from bitcoin” post on HN
That's a particularly credulous take, given the circumstances. You can't just gesticulate and say, "regulations, eh?", and get away with theft.

> The neighbors convened, CBC News reports, and discovered that Link Global had not notified anyone, not even the public utility commission or the well’s owner Maga Energy. Taking without telling the owner—stealing, in other words.
> some studies showed vaccination was more effective

Could you point me to them? I'm unable to find any.
This is not true: you don't invest in something with 20% weekly swings to "maintain assets" against 1-3% inflation. You just don't.
I’ll repeat a comment I made earlier on HN re Zuckerberg’s response.

Is there any counterargument to these two statements of his:

> And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world?

> Similar to balancing other social issues, I don't believe private companies should make all of the decisions on their own. That's why we have advocated for updated internet regulations for several years now. I have testified in Congress multiple times and asked them to update these regulations. I've written op-eds outlining the areas of regulation we think are most important related to elections, harmful content, privacy, and competition.

https://www.facebook.com/4/posts/10113961365418581/?d=n
Basecamp, about 60 people

https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/30/basecamp-employees-quit-ce...
> Have 5k users on Android, 3k on iPhone, 8k on web. Add them up to show the product has 16k users.

If it's a traditional desktop program like Word or Excel, I think it's perfectly fine to add up users from different platforms (which often even require a separate purchase). If it's something like Skype or Netflix, I can see how there might be some overlap -- the same person might use it from their iPhone one day and from the web on a different day. Is that what you mean?
If it's not about cashing out then why is the primary hype mechanism talking about the dollar-equivalent value of anything crypto related? Why does it matter if an NFT was sold for $300k worth of ether?
Strong memetic effect.
IIRC, the problem was that rollbacks couldn’t start until it agreed that the service deployment had failed, which wouldn’t happen until I manually drained the task (or waited an unknown period for CF to timeout). You could click the rollback button but nothing would happen. I don’t think the alarm would’ve helped, but maybe I’m misunderstanding.
Unfortunately many datasheets don't include short codes for the devices they describe. And manufacturers often hide them behind search submissions. Hope you can figure out who made the part you're looking at AND that the totally-still-in-business company has a lookup tool!
One word, that starts with V, and isn't Vagina.
How Can You Safely Store Your Vaccine Status on Your Phone?
Yes! It drove me nuts! I had a task that I forgot to give a / 200 ok and it just thrashed like crazy. I think once I have the cluster auto rollback it solved the issue though (other than ensuring a reliable health check). They should fix this!
I thought it was a cute intentional typo
Is it still a Ponzi if you bought it to exit legacy finance with no view to sell back?