skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can look at the state-financed "art programs" in ex-communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe. As artists in these countries were left with nothing to "propagandize" for (their sole qualification, by design) they slowly mutated into non-productive radical leftism and work-for-hire for anybody willing to invest into non-beauty. I hope that Ireland will fare better, although in the last few years their foreign policy seems to have been re-focused onto a domain that also involves LGBT type outbursts.
> Meanwhile we suffer from a hugely incompetent global payment network

Incompetence is a cop-out argument because you could argue any organization or community suffers from it given a sufficient amount of time in existence. Plus, it's not like crypto companies have a perfect record either. Look at mt gox, or more currently, the accusations against Tether. If it comes out that they've been lying about their capitalization, which many have argued that they are, it could cause major problems for the crypto industry.

True decentralization has not been achieved by the crypto industry, it's merely shifting the rent-seeking from one set of parties to another.
They just got bought by Microsoft for almost 70 Billion dollars.
Yes so the people that cannot afford to buy games will not buy them.

I have disposable income now and buy games as its easier than pirate it from random source.

DRM is thinking of old people forced onto new world.
That doesn't say that Kotick will be gone, it says that he'll be reporting up to Microsoft.
Oh dear more consolidation in the gaming space. Not good for the consumer.
According to my analysis of a similar youtube corpus, dashcam owners end up in accidents once every 30 seconds, so this is a vast improvement. Not to mention the meteor strikes.
Maybe they can't get rid of Mr. Kotick yet..
> global payment network that is horrible to deal with

With proper regulation, banks can have maximum terms on holding money mid-transfer, limits (or even abolition!) of transfer and withdrawal fees, etc.

It is possible to designate a product as an essential service or utility. It's just that the US government has chosen to not apply that kind of regulation to a lot of essential products like banking and telecoms, much like it hasn't chosen to enforce anti-trust laws, remove tax avoidance provisions, deal with corporate capture or reform the healthcare, education and electoral systems.

In essence, it's a people problem all the way down. Technology is incapable of solving those, which is why blockchain is a solution looking for a problem.
My figure of 2,000 was estimating the hours you’re paid for, including holidays, not the hours worked, matching Australia’s model for salary, where the figure is normally reckoned annually. It’s still definitely a touch on the high side (standard in Australia is 7.5h/day, which multiplied by 5 days per week and 52 and a bit weeks per year comes to 1,950 hours per year or a little more), but not by much—around 2.5%, rather than 11–12%.
Can somebody please explain to me, why is it allowed for a company like MS to buy all of their (indirect) competitors?
because they aren't locking down like they were this is from instagram 4 days days ago in xian, one of their strictest lockdown locations [1] https://i.imgur.com/49QjHJN.jpg and this [2] https://i.imgur.com/OugsA59.png is from an article talking about the lockdowns in xian.

Neither of these pictures could've been taken during their early lockdowns that everyone talks about because people were literally blockaded into their own apartments and homes completely unable to leave.
Not shaming is not the same as condoning. Imagine actually expecting a company to comment on every story.
When you transition and you leave your old perm role, offer them your time via consulting to keep the lights on in whatever you were involved in (they will likely want this if you were any good...) but ensure you do two things:

1. plan for rate increases that very meaningfully increase as time goes on

2. keep an eye on when they transition from "glad not to have lost you" to "taking you for granted" and when this happens, it is time to move on and fire them as a client

* both of these presume you are successful in finding, pleasing and retaining new clients
I share your dismay. Even if you're someone who doesn't care about the issues that have come to light over the past year, the blatant mismanagement (dare I say running into the ground) of the once golden Blizzard portfolio has been painful as a long-time Starcraft 2 fan.

For a moment, I was truly hopeful that we might see some reinvigoration for blundered projects like the Warcraft III reforged.

Perhaps even some hope that Microsoft might breathe new life into Starcraft II, which still stands as an incredible game.

/sigh
Yet this era was also known as the "Gilded Age". Literally covered in gold.

I'm not detecting nuance in this take. The Fed has created boom bust cycles and is hardly a bastion of price stability. The great depression and the continued interventions which prolonged it come to mind.
> blockchain allows essentially instantaneous completion of transactions between unrelated parties with no clearing house.

Wait, aren't blockchain transactions hilariously slow and depend on an internet connection?

> Clearinghouses make a lot of money just guaranteeing transactions. That is friction in the system.

Aren't popular blockchains using transaction fees to pay for validation?

> Wire transfers, ACH, cashiers checks, etc all have the same issues.

Seems to also apply to bitcoin.
Note that Thread Reader loses the images attached to some of the tweets (at least for me).

Edit: strike that, it was Firefox's social tracker protection blocking them. Just need to click the shield icon left of the address bar and temporarily disable it.
I wonder if this will trigger any antitrust lawsuits. I know Microsoft isn't that of the 90's but it seems like the political situation is ripe for politicians to go after "big tech" and this is a pretty major acquisition that will help Xbox be the dominant player in terms of content.
If they were already in talks to buy, how much of it is a case of "wasn't willing", and how much is it "wasn't allowed"?

For all the flak ActiBlizzard deserves for this situation, I'd be happier if it were illegal for Microsoft to publicly give them shit about while already in talks to buy. There's just way too many ways to abuse that for leverage.
I think there should be more (gaming) companies, and (gaming) companies should not be owned by the platforms, so I see this as a pretty big negative for the industry and customers.

Congrats to Phil on his resume bump I guess.
You probably should have savings as well, if someone isn't good with their finances then it probably isn't an ideal career for them. Customers can smell the desperation for work a mile off.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/activision-blizzard-pushes-out-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29966958
Ransomware would be eliminated if we just banned computers and made the internet illegal.
Has any social ill been eliminated by any other means?
Clicked for me when I realised HN is compromised of the few for whom web2 has served quite nicely, so it's unsurprising that talk of web3 is received about as well as a brick through the Google bus window
UPI and M-Pesa have had far reaching effects to this regard. This narritive that crypto helps the unbanked is not true.

If I'm wrong about crypto helping the unbanked, please provide any context or numbers to back up this claim.

P.S. Let the poor countries solve their own problems, if you want to help donate money directly.
Six years and that wasn't enough time. The initial Polio vaccines were a disaster: they caused polio in the people who took them.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC2928990/

Abstract: The Salk inactivated poliovirus vaccine is one of the most rapid examples of bench‐to‐bedside translation in medicine. In the span of 6 years, the key basic lab discoveries facilitating the development of the vaccine were made, optimization and safety testing was completed in both animals and human volunteers, the largest clinical trial in history of 1.8 million children was conducted, and the results were released to an eagerly awaiting public. Such examples of rapid translation cannot only offer clues to what factors can successfully drive and accelerate the translational process but also what mistakes can occur (and thus should be avoided) during such a swift process. In this commentary, we explore the translational path of the Salk polio vaccine from the key basic science discoveries to the 1954 Field Trials and delve into the scientific and sociopolitical factors that aided in its rapid development. Moreover, we look at the Cutter and Wyeth incidents after the vaccine’s approval and the errors that led to them.

The Cutter incident:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC1383764/

In April 1955 more than 200 000 children in five Western and mid-Western USA states received a polio vaccine in which the process of inactivating the live virus proved to be defective. Within days there were reports of paralysis and within a month the first mass vaccination programme against polio had to be abandoned. Subsequent investigations revealed that the vaccine, manufactured by the California-based family firm of Cutter Laboratories, had caused 40 000 cases of polio, leaving 200 children with varying degrees of paralysis and killing 10.

This isn't restricted to the past. It can still happen today.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/polio-cases-now-caus...

LONDON -- Four African countries have reported new cases of polio linked to the oral vaccine, as global health numbers show there are now more children being paralyzed by viruses originating in vaccines than in the wild.
They've now fallen so low, it's like it's a completely different company.
I understand what you are trying to say but it is also a form of master-slave dialectic, you don't like something and feel above it and try to organise your social life with strict rules to isolate you from it. It's not even always a bad thing to do, like I an a coder who tries to avoid working with people who think like you.
It’s rather pointless to go through the effort of building a house if you don’t expect to live in it for very long. So, the minimum standards should only be relevant to people building homes for sale.

As to insulation, it’s very cheap to add some form of solar heating outside of the arctic but cooling always takes energy.
> This isn’t a fish

Are you familiar with the concept of 'metaphor'?
> Transferring your deed is a very complicated process.

For regulatory reasons, not for technical ones. You're using the word "transaction", but you should distinguish between legal transactions and what is essentially a database transaction.
I don’t want to take sides, but https://nohello.net/ is good too.
I disagree here. Having GC, VM, streams, big stdlib, makes is quite highlevel.

It's not very terse (like Ruby maybe), but modern Java is terse enough.

To keep a language small is a good thing: less to remember, easier to join the team. Go, Elm, Reason/ReScript, LISPs all go that route.

Java misses some things badly. Like being able to have a reference to a method (Jodd has a library fix for this). Or like sum types and pattern matching.

But I'm more bitten by features that Java has than what it has not. Overuse of Exceptions (instead of sum types) and Annotations are my biggest pains.

You see a lot of Java's shortcomings properly being addressed in Kotlin. Like the getter/setter story. And "standards" like Bean and XML config have given Java a bad rep.
No, he's just going to report to Phil Spencer it looks like. He will still lead Activision Blizzard. Might be different once we know more details.
Overwatch 2 PC/Xbox exclusive in 2030??
Effectively it isn't allowed since the whole building has to meet a minimum efficiency standard which would be impossible to meet with U=2 windows throughout.

My double glazed windows have a U value of 1.2 and typical for triple is 0.8 so the improvement isn't that big between good new double glazed and triple.
IMHO they new and it probably drove the acquisition. Kotick gets to cash-in an insane amount of money and retire in 6 months - 2 years, MS gets the biggest independent game company out there and sends Sony a(nother) message they won't forget.
Criteria for a currency I would like to use:

- Accepted by my government to pay taxes in

- Accepted by all the places I would like to buy things

- Stable price

- Easy to use

- My job pays me in this currency

- Easy to transfer

Every single one is already satisfied by current currencies. Cryptocurrencies bring nothing, "except anonymity" which isn't true (the blockchain is literally a public leger of all transactions, yes you can open a wallet anonymously but you can do that for a bank account too if you have to)

If somebody is seriously trying to suggest that people in hyperinflationary economies would prefer bitcoin, hyperdeflationary economies are just as bad, and worse than both is wildly unpredictable economies.
These acquisitions are ridiculous. How long till Disney buys Microsoft? Why even bother having more than one company in the US?
You're not wrong, but there's two situations that can call for it.

1. You are indeed sometimes (more often than not) responsible for things that happen under "your watch" even if they're none of your doing, because you're responsible for calculating things that can go wrong. For a recent news comparison, the JWST is a great example of this mindset: If something goes wrong, NASA was responsible for predicting the chances of it happening and ultimately, having a plan for it.

2. As a consultant, you're sometimes hired so bigger clients can externalize blame. It makes no difference to you, doesn't matter, it's not like they're hampering your career opportunities or something. They love that they have someone to blame for shit instead of blaming the actual people responsible. Yes, it's entirely bullshitty in this case. But it gets you re-hired :)
Probably not for Go in containers since binaries end up compressed anyway as part of the OCI layers. But Go binaries do get quite large so if you're distributing them other ways, it might be useful.
I think most of EU countries your total tax burden is already 50% of what employer pays. Mostly we don't see that part and only talk about what employer has to pay that is less than 50%

But even some countries at certain brackets have the only income tax part over 50%.

So flat 50% of total tax burden would not be unheard of.
They are long overdue for a break-up. I guess the US elite thinks otherwise.
It took me several years in pursuit of a self hosted solution, that I don’t need too much time to maintain. I think the current solution is working very well for me.

I have a raspberry pi with a USB drive attached. The OS is ubuntu, so I can use ZFS.
The drive is backed up to backblaze S3 using restic in a cron job. The backup and ZFS health is monitored with healthchecks.io

The data sync across all the devices including the raspberry pi is done using resilio sync.

I view my photos when I am home using an app written by myself: photograf (https://github.com/ptek/photograf)
It runs on the same raspberry.
This is something Google does themselves. Their listing for Chrome is "Google Chrome: Fast & Secure", Keep is "Google Keep - Notes and Lists"
Corporate speak sometimes requires you to read between the lines.
Sometimes it's a trick to see if you're there so if you don't respond to the following question with similar speed, the sender (incorrectly?) assumes something's up
My dad was going to do this himself but it is a massive job. He ultimately sent them to a company and received them back on DVD.

My family even has reel to reel from the 50s or 60s. The problem though is everyone in them has passed on. I am never going to watch video of my great uncle fishing in 1960. Then he is basically a stranger to the next generation.

All this is quite a bit of work for things that will most likely never get watched.
It depends a lot on your specific situation, but I actually did it for consulting gigs when I was quitting my full time job last year.

I used Twitter DMs instead of Cold Email or LinkedIn.

And I focused on startup founders who were actively hiring.

I sent out custom pitches to each of them, some of them converted. I did end up getting a gig.

So it does work. But you have to be persistent, and hone your pitch, get better at copywriting.
Microsoft owns CoD, Doom, Quake, Minecraft, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, and soon Warcraft, Starcraft, and Overwatch.

They're becoming the Disney of gaming, which is scary, but hey, Microsoft gonna Microsoft.
Sure, some fascinating bricks would be created even without brick houses, but having brick houses means that many more people are thinking about and creating fascinating bricks, and using those bricks for more purposes.

It's like saying we shouldn't be pleased that pharmaceutical research is giving us greater insights into genetics because genetic science would exist even without pharmaceutical research. It's true that genetic science would exist, it's false that therefore pharmaceutical research adds no value to it.
Lucky me, there were libraries available, for mail, JMS, Kafka, logging and so on. Also implementing things in shittier way than Spring is difficult feat to achieve for my modest skillset.

However there were some impossibly complex requirement like thread pool and with great effort I was able to found a solution in standard JDK like :

`ExecutorService exec = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(st.threads);`

Spring could have greatly simplified this code I guess.
Whether or not Bitcoin is going to become the "currency of the future" is certainly highly debatable (debatable in the sense that, is it likely to happen, or is it even a good idea for society), but the argument against it, is not going to boil down to "digital beanie babies"... Retail and retail adoption is not going to shape the future of Bitcoin, not past this point in history.

Do you remember seeing institutional-grade analysts and advisers issuing guidance about beanie babies? Pointing out that corporate treasuries or sovereign nations might consider a small allocation to beanie babies as a hedge against future-whatever? This is hardly the only such report, though it's a recent one looking at 2021 trends in review: https://www.fidelitydigitalassets.com/articles/2021-trends-i...

I am not saying Bitcoin is destined to win or to make anyone rich, but clearly this has moved far beyond the realm of beanie baby speculation. I mean, good or bad, it's at least reached the level of institutional speculation (see exhibits: dot-com crash, 2008 financial crisis, etc.), and at least it should be taken proportionally as seriously as other institutional financial instruments (i.e. do you take bonds seriously? gold as a financial commodity to be traded? well Bitcoin is X% of those by marketcap, so maybe deserves X% of your attention).
Because unless the state starts producing menstrual products and toilet paper himself, including the supply chain to create and distributing that, there will be a price hike.

Me as a toilet paper manufacturer would happily raise my prices and lower the quality when I know the state HAS to buy a certain number of sales units from me.
> Until this transaction closes, Activision Blizzard and Microsoft Gaming will continue to operate independently. Once the deal is complete, the Activision Blizzard business will report to me [Phil Spencer] as CEO, Microsoft Gaming.

I wonder if this will be the push to displace Bobby out of his current CEO role? Has this happened with any other acquisitions by Microsoft game studios? Or any other acquisitions in general?
The Rise of A.I. Fighter Pilots
That may be true culturally in general, but my theory is just that the 80s marked the end of the period where the sound of pop music was heavily constrained by the technology of the instruments. After that, synthesizers got good and didn't have to sound like synthesizers. There was a little gasp of that when Autotune got overused, but otherwise, music can sound however you want it to sound now, so there's no consistency of style.
I really like this idea, and have thought about doing something similar - glad somebody did it!

However, why on earth do I have to sign in?
Indeed! I say hello to our helpdesk all the time to make sure someone is there to answer before it times out :p
The High Cost of an Easy Job
At least you don't lose money though.
I doubt it. There are much bigger monopolies in the webspace / ecommerce space than the gaming space.
My god I hate monopolies, MS has been on a buying spree and someone needs to stop them, but it will likely never happen.
Another good resource is https://www.neighbourhoodconstruction.org
e.g their page on Thermal Envelope > Bio aggregate https://www.neighbourhoodconstruction.org/bio-aggregate/
It's an absolute shame Bobby Kotick will continue to function as CEO.
You act like people are unable to access arguments from both sides and make their own educated decisions.

Take me, for example. I consider it unethical for me to take the vaccine as I've had covid twice (the second time was a very mild cold) and I'm in extremely good health. If I take the vaccine that means someone else in a poor country with bad health will not have access to that vaccine.

So I would suggest vaccinating naturally immune people in no-risk demographics is quite literally going to be the cause for people dying in less advantaged countries.

and before you ask, yes the US has been shipping excess vaccines to other countries for a long time now, so it does matter.
> I think I'm helping and being brutally honest when in reality it comes off condescending or arrogant.

> honesty without kindness is cruelty

That is so very spot on. I strongly identify with this, great quote.
With these kind of acquisitions, other companies are going to find it very hard to compete with Game Pass.

I think we'll look back in 10 years and wonder why antitrust regulators did nothing, but it may be too late by then.
You're strawmanning heavily. The energy argument is a big one, but it's not THE argument against crypto.
For some basic use cases that's probably good enough, but saying that that can replace jQuery is like saying that farts can replace rocket engines.

For example I can do the following with jQuery:

$(document).on ( 'click.ns', '.button', callback );

How should one do the same with vanilla JS? You'd end up rewriting a (probably buggy) reimplementation of jQuery's $.fn.on method in the end.
We have a heat pump from ~2008 about a meter away from the outer wall of the house and I don't recall ever hearing it from the inside. You'll hear it from a few meters on the outside, but it has never been a problem. It's able to heat a ~250m2 house in -10°C weather.

That being said, do yourself a favor and do not get a heat pump connected to 'the cloud'. Our heat pump can't be fully controlled locally (some functionality is web only) otherwise I'd put it offline. They unnecessarily performed repairs on the heat pump to the tune of 500€ because their servers had issues.
Visual mode only allows for a single selection, though
Why wouldn't they be allowed to? Companies acquire smaller companies and competitors all the time, it's called consolidation.

One party want to sell, the other wants to buy. As long as the deal doesn't breach any anti-trust laws, it's good to go.
This is... unexpected. Wow and COD on Gamepass?
That's a new one, to me.

Thanks!
Not sure it's worth the domain name. OP should make a slack bot at least.