skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How long does it normally take to travel between Houston and Denver? If you're flying, I'm guessing it takes more than four hours between the center of each city because of, e.g., airport security theater, check-in, etc.

At TGV speed, I believe that train connection would be about four hours.
Couldn’t that have been done equally well with a centralized ledger? Lots of games have “high stakes pvp”, such as eve online. They don’t have a blockchain, and yet you can still steal stuff permanently from other players if that’s how you want to play the game.
There was a good article from six degrees of wikipedia (https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/blog/search-results-an...) which would show the ideal path and be cheating, but fun to compare optimal vs what was found.
globalization, cheap easy access to air travel, and the internet are breaking down the systems that were working fine for countless years.

It's not limited to employment, either. Create a SaaS or other internet-based business and try to serve customers outside your nation. Or even outside the border of your state/territory/province. Entire services such as Paddle exist just to deal with this. But I suspect most people are trying to fly under the radar here using regular Stripe, etc. and not dealing with any of it, just like digital nomads do.
The miners don't need to be running at all times. If the cost of power exceeds mining returns then they definitely should not be running -- they'd be losing money AND wearing out their equipment. There is a middle ground where mining returns exceed power costs but don't fully cover capital expenditures, but the miner doesn't have to operate during that time if they think they are better off making no revenue but avoiding the wear on their machines. The question is whether you think you will have a period of cheap power in the near future, and in this case miners can benefit from the cyclical and predictable nature of power demand in answering that for themselves.

One can easily imagine a scenario where miners run overnight when power is cheap, turn their machines off during the day when power is in high demand and expensive (and you'd either lose money by having them on, or you would make less than you would by conserving your hardware and optimizing its usage), and earn a profit overall (while leaving the power producer better off too by letting them sell power that would otherwise be wasted).
I remember when CryptoKitties clogged the ETH blockchain and it has become unfeasible to do most of the transactions.

Anyway, the game is very simple and it actually makes much more sense than the recent NFT fud. Essentially you combine characters to create new characters that have some of the traits of the parent characters. It's a breeding game.

I kind of see how it can be valuable to own an NFT character with certain traits that can be used to create other NFT characters. Unlike the recent NFT stuff, it makes sense within its universe. The NFT market on the other hand is just a hot patato game where you speculate that there exist a greater fool in a rigged marketplace.
It's better for the environment if we build expensive cables to send that power to areas still emitting CO2, instead of selling it cheaply to miners. At least up to some pretty large distance.

There's a case to be made for using the spikes of solar power to run miners, on a grid dominated by renewables, but that requires the economics to work out just right with very cheap silicon that can sit idle a big majority of the time.
After checking out Sketch, I don't believe they offer a one-time payment option any longer. They seem to have switched to a subscription service now?

I don't use software like Figma or Sketch often enough to justify an ongoing subscription, so I suppose Penpot might be the next best alternative for users like myself?
Has piracy really ever been a crippling problem for any business?
Technology behind spanner is incredible but unfortunately marketed horribly and positioned terribly. It was a solution built for large scale enterprise and no one else. It's not worth trying to sell this to developers. They're better off layering something else on top with a different brand and pricing model.
He's ignoring the "what type of business" questions. I'm getting downvoted. I don't care. He's ignoring it for a reason still.
Aren't luxury taxes and exemptions on necessities an attempt at this as well?
Hi, the "lack of focus" feeling is due to the fact that Qworum is still a work in progress, although the specification itself is stable.

In terms of elevator pitch:

Qworum's mission statement could be something like "Premium web browser features for business and consumer applications". So this would involve adding Qworum's modularization technology to browsers, along with some other features. The result would be improved developer productivity and better integration between web applications.

In a more general sense, what I think is lacking on the web right now is a commercial entity that can augment the baseline capabilities that are provided by Chrome, Safari etc. If the browser is the web's operating system, then what we have right now is Linux on the desktop, not Windows and not macOS. So that's the opportunity I am seeing.
I'd say that's true. The reasons being that the housing economy is an enormously complex system and so while addressing certain problems fixed those problems, there still remained others which still continued to induce high prices.

(using Vancouver as an example, after the foreign buyer tax the city still has an incredibly low near 0% rental vacancy, which makes secondary home investment enormously profitable and continues to keep prices lofty)

This doesn't mean that it wasn't a good idea to address the foreign buyer problem, but it was clear that the system instantly shifted to compensate for the lack of foreign buyers, and new buyers appeared. There was plenty of local buyers, many of which had existing properties with inflated land values they could borrow against and the ultra low interest rates from the pandemic that aided them in bidding up properties to buy. Good for local buyers to have less foreign competition, no real change for local renters.

The most real direct outcome of the foreign buyer tax was the nature of the housing product that was made changed. Previously there were companies that were building "luxury" condos explicitly marketed as pied a terres to a foreign audience (largely from major cities in asia). Overnight this sort of thing went away and the same companies that were previously pushing these products instantly pivoted into building purpose built rental buildings for locals.

Ultimately I think the foreign buyer tax is good for local renters, but further work needs to be done.
As much as folks may be unhappy Adobe is taking over Figma, I'm sure the team over at Figma are elated. It's a successful exit for a much loved company and I'm sure the hard working team that built such a fantastic product are being well rewarded by such a large acquisition.
Amazing, I love it! Thanks for the link!
Facebook spied on private messages of Americans who questioned 2020 election
I suspect this could be a really efficient way of working this. In much the same way that public transport - trains, busses etc. are more efficient. But I suspect a big part of the answer is incentives. You have the Silicon Valley model, where Billionaires plow billion after billion into self-driving vaporware in the hope that one day they can force the entire middle class into serfdom. On the other hand you have city planners who literally could solve the problems of public transit if previously mentioned billionaires paid a bit of tax - but that's totally off the table don't be ridiculous.

Efficient transportation in cities is communal, and built using tax dollars. That's not Silicon Valley sexiness.
"Car as a service" is really popular, usually in the form of leasing. You can own the car at the end, but many people replace it with a new car after the period ends as there are incentives to do so.

"Food as a service" is called restaurants. But even for groceries, this is by nature a recurring business. They don't need you to sign a contract, they know you will come back if you want to stay alive, they have loyalty cards though.

I never heard of "fridge as a service", or any home appliance for that matter. But it was popular for a times with phones: subsidized phones are essentially that. You pay your phone with your subscription, and after some time (often 2 years), you get a new phone, you got to keep the old one though.

The new thing is recorded entertainment. Streaming services have took over music and video. Video games are a mixed bag, but we are starting to see "all games" subscriptions. Books are stubbornly sold on a "per item, keep forever" basis for some reason though, even on Kindle, which is ironic since "books as a service" have been a thing since the early days of civilization, in the form of libraries.

Thinking of it "buy once, keep forever" is not that common. I just took a look at my bank account and most of my payments are services and/or recurring: utilities, gas, groceries (most of it made up of repeat purchases), subscriptions, taxes,... And usually, when I can buy something forever, I take that option, and I pay cash.
Any time and place other than a funeral or memorial service would be a good start. I can't believe there are adults here arguing that it's somehow ok to crash someone's funeral or memorial service to hurl insults at their relatives.
That excerpt is clearly describing operations on the digits that compose the string and not arithmetic on the CC number as a single integer.
> You really need to define "significant"

How about Any number that is greater than the pre-pandemic average for persons that age before the vaccines

Also, if your standard is going to be “temporary” and “easily treatable” as core components of “insignificant risk” for the vaccines…that would also apply to COVID itself in most people under the age of 50.

But…I think your equation could have some value if the vaccines were effective at preventing covid infection. However, since they don’t, and they don’t appear to diminish hospitalization risk of covid for younger people (like older people), but the vaccines do have a statistical increase on more pericarditis and myocarditis, logic would dictate that there is a possible slight negative risk by younger folk getting the vaccine. Especially for males.
Elvis Presley returns to the stage thanks to deepfake technology
Better business model (definitely for business owner, arguably for customers)
The things killing people in the developed world are diseases of excess. People literally have too much stuff.
You're mixing up reactive programming and responsive design.
You, sir, are 100% correct. And yet, I am happy, that if this kinda BS is to continue, that I am a mexican. I gotta family to feed.
FPTP in non-US contexts very regularly has >2 candidates, despite the risk of a spoiler. England has a 2.5 party system where the Lib Dems compete in every seat and win some. Scotland and Wales have nationalist parties in addition to this (and the Scottish National Party is currently overwhelmingly dominant in seats won, as a result of one of FPTP's other failure modes). Northern Ireland has a different party system with sectional voting and ~5 effective parties. Canada has the NDP and (in Quebec) the Bloc.

One of the classic results in political science is Duverger's Law, sometimes formulated as 'under first past the post the number of effective parties tends towards two', but 'tends towards' is doing an awful lot of work. One could unkindly suggest that, like a lot of political science results, it works better in the US than in the rest of the world. And I say that as a political scientist...
We did that for decades. Many products still do. The model is plenty well proven, and the markets well demonstrated, so this kind of rhetorical “well what do you expect?” stuff is unconstructive.

There are reasons a business may prefer to provide their product as an SaaS, but it’s hardly some necessity.
I would rate this as a very low likelihood, because even if someone did come up with a way to pirate single player games (such as Horizon Zero Dawn/Forbidden West), the number of games now that are persistently online-only means that most people will be unwilling to give up that functionality.

Any theoretical PS5 piracy would almost certainly require it to be completely disconnected from the Internet so that the firmware and operating system could not be updated (or verified by Sony).
I did not mean it this way. The user will always ask the question: „Can i use another software for less money/more value“. Those who can will turn their back on adobe as the company is greedy and lazy. Problem is: if your company/client is a large cooperation you dont have any choice. Never underestimate professional users.
This statistic can be true while at the same time, women prefer tall men.

To confirm the latter, it is not enough to look at who is the taller in most pairings.
I said "in its own right discovers/invents and proves significant new theorems, advancing some area of research mathematics".

Neither of the things you mention are of this nature, or working towards it. "Finding a symbolic expression that matches data from an unknown function" (Feynman) and "solv[ing] differential equations, calculus problems, etc" are not descriptions of what a research mathematician does.
On the Origins and Variations of Blockchain Technologies
No telling stories about how great the Lucky Penny was.
Wait until you learn about "game theory"!
You need to explain what happened, and what sector you operate in. Doing this support stuff on HN as a last resort & getting on the front page is crap in the first place, not feeding back is even worse.
>I think he is so far I offered to bet him a $100,000 he was wrong; enough of my colleagues agreed with me that within hours they quintupled my bet, to $500,000. Musk didn’t have the guts to accept, which tells you a lot.

What a bloviating egomaniac. Does Musk really have the time to deal with pissant researchers like him? Whats 500k to a man worth a hundred billion?
Nb PayPal has owned BrainTree since 2013.

You probably already knew that, but for the benefit of anyone reading this who didn't.
I'm always surprised that projects like cryptokitties are referred to as games. I guess saying "game" makes it sound more legitimate, but there's almost nothing to do with your characters besides sell them.
The Koh-i-Noor diamond, and why the British won’t give it back (2017)
Those laws certainly feel like guilty until proven innocent or in many cases, guilty no chance to prove innocence.
US Military has a vaccine mandate in effect. Last I looked, most branches of the service were filled with younger folks.
Let's say I want to build a game where you can destroy your EVE Online spaceships to get bonuses in my game. How would that work? That's what happened with CryptoKitties and HyperDragons.

Just to clarify: someone who owns a CryptoKitty decides to send it to the HyperDragons smart contract that handles the absorption. It's not about stealing anything. You use your assets in CryptoKitties to boost your dragon in HyperDragons.
TaxProper (YC S19) Is Hiring Engineers and Operations
Operations:
https://www.notion.so/taxproper/TaxProper-is-Hiring-Property...

Software Engineers: https://www.notion.so/taxproper/TaxProper-is-Hiring-Software...
> 56 cars energy = 1 trains energy.

These trains accommodate around 500 passengers though, while a car is generally max 5 passengers.

So the trains are about ten times more efficient, and two to three times as far.
Show HN: Grapevine – discover events and the groups attending
> Re internet/electricity outages, this is so rare enough to not be a concern

This is definitely not true in my part of the US. Internet outages are not common, but they're also not rare. I see it happen 3 or 4 times per month.
What security problems? If you’re talking about https://matrix.org/blog/2022/08/31/security-releases-matrix-..., it’s not that exciting - it’s just a BAU security release; no reason for particular panic.

Meanwhile is https://element.io/matrix-services the people behind Matrix caring about getting this in commercial usage.
Is it viable? Probably. Much of the world manages to get jobs without prepping on their free time. With 8 years of experience, it's likely that you'll be able to find at least some kind of job, even if it isn't an ideal fit.

Does it slow your career advancement? Yes. Does it decrease your likelihood of finding higher level jobs? Also yes.

Ultimately it's up to you how you value your free time. There's clear value in skill development and interview prep in that it helps you improve your chances of getting a better job.
On the other hand, you can regard one-time fees as subscriptions in disguise, because hardly any useful software can be used forever. File formats change, collaboration changes, operating systems change.

Yeah you could run your bought-once MS-DOS accounting software in a VM forever, but most useful software has a clear expiration date, especially if you try to collaborate on data.
I posted this before going to teach a class without any specific expectations about the response to the post. I am pleasantly surprised by so many high quality comments!
I like it. This is comparable to the oracle plan stability feature.

I don't like the interface, however. As you have to wrap the query with custom markers $pgpg$, you can't use it on anything that programatically generates the query, like an ORM.

I'd prefer an interface where you have a table that maps the query (hash?) to a plan. Then create a stored procedure e.g. nail_plan('SELECT blah blah blah') that inserts a record in that table. You can then backup and restore plans, easily query what plans are guaranteed, maybe even migrate plans between dev and prod. Table could also mark which plans are now invalid.
DRG should run fine on a gaming PC from five years ago I think (a mid-range GPU from then would be like a GTX 1060).

Actually, I think basically all of these games should run fine on that sort of hardware, as long as the quality isn't turned up high. Did they just build a really cheap machine or something?
I grew up in the central valley in California and it is already very noticeable how much less tule fog [1] there is from just a few decades ago. It just doesn't get as cool at night and humidity is lower on average and that significantly reduces the fog formation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tule_fog
It also puts the burden on the user to remember to cancel things. If I stop using my bike, it just sits in my garage. If I stop using the gym, I keep paying for it until I jump through their hoops and cancel my membership.
In a vacuum I'd have assumed that attempting to make transaction fees undercut things like credit card processing fees would have been a key design goal of post-bitcoin block chains, so it's surprising to me (as someone not terribly invested in keeping up with crypto) to realize that transactions fees can be so high (though in some ways I suppose it's kind of like combining title registration with supermarket checkout more than it is just a transaction).

But besides side chains are there other approaches to allowing newer crypto currencies to be highly liquid and handle large volumes of transactions at low cost? This issue seems like it's a recurring problem for crypto.
So it can compute while you don't compute
Agreed. I don't remember how it is in Gare de Lyon, but platforms are usually announced at the last minute for TGV (not TER).
It may have something to do with Vigipirate, the counter-terrorism operation?

Gare Part-Dieu in Lyon is one of the worst offenders, sometimes having to change platforms.

We do not talk about the app. (TBH, I don't use proprietary apps, but they also somewhat neutered their website, though I think they still indicate platforms in real time?).

The only thing I'm curious about... there are plenty of LCDs?

Also, I still prefer the experience to taking a car or plane, and can run errands while waiting for the train.
Yes, absolutely. Some banks offer "sweep accounts" that do this automatically. If they have to come to you to claw back some money, they're more likely to tell you why.
Being direct, accessible and reactive at scale when you’re processing billions of dollars of transactions simply is not possible.

Stripe and other companies are doing their best, but they are in an arms race with more and more elaborate fraudsters. At planet scale.
> What Went Wrong?

It's in the title of the article. It's a "Blockchain Game". That's what went wrong. It was a flawed concept from its inception. Blockchains are pretty cool from a math/cryptography standpoint, but they really do not provide added value in most areas people try to apply them to.

CryptoKitties is a digital trading card game. You get cards, you can "breed" cards together to make new cards, you trade/buy/sell cards. That's it. Nowhere at any point in this "game" is a blockchain necessary. Nowhere at any point does a blockchain add any value whatsoever. In fact, due to transaction fees, I'd argue the blockchain actively detracts from the game.

The idea of an artist signing their work in a cryptographically unique way is not new or revolutionary, and it certainly doesn't need a blockchain. There's a reason the general sentiment the art community has towards NFTs is overwhelmingly negative: it's because they literally actively harm us.
Phew, I was worried for a second, because of [NEW OVERLORD]'s persistent track record of killing babies. So glad to hear that [STARTUP] CEO thinks it's going to be fine, in a public statement nonetheless! More than anyone, he must have done his due diligence.
Partially this is confusing "Scott Alexander won a bet" with "compositionality is solved." And also, I'm not sure Scott won the bet? Changing people to robots is a cheap trick. I think Imagen should have been disqualified because it won't do people.

Vitor took the other side of the bet and he is also not convinced [1]:

> I'm not conceding just yet, even though it feels like I'm just dragging out the inevitable for a few months. Maybe we should agree on a new set of prompts to get around the robot issue.

> In retrospect, I think that your side of the bet is too lenient in only requiring one of the images to fulfill the prompt. I'm happy to leave that part standing as-is, of course, though I've learned the lesson to be more careful about operationalization. Overall, these images shift my priors a fair amount, but aren't enough to change my fundamental view.

Scott putting "I Won" in the headline when it's not resolved yet seems somewhat dishonest, or more charitably wishful thinking.

[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/i-won-my-three-year-ai...
Humans delayed onset of Sahara desert by 500 years, research suggests (2018)
For whatever reason, Gary doesn't even mention this, but from reading Scott's post, I don't think I agree that it even got 1/5, let alone 3/5. The bell is not on the llama's tail in any of the examples, though it is very close to the tail in one. The robot is either looking over the cat or in an unrelated direction, never at the cat. None of those basketball pictures shows a robot farmer. The fact that one may be wearing a hat doesn't make it a farmer. He says he's being generous because he believes it would have gotten a farmer more easily than robot farmer, which may be true, but a human artist would easily be able to depict a robot farmer.

At least one other key to making a bet like this fair is that it needs to be arbitrated by a third party. He shouldn't get to decide himself if he won or not.
The reason the PS2 succeeded so massively is that it was an affordable DVD player alone, IIRC at the time you could buy a DVD player for like $199 or a PS2 for $299. It was a no brainer for any family looking to either replace their console or seek to upgrade to DVD - something which was a way bigger deal than the transition from DVD to Blu-Ray.
Certain banking regulations make those transactions "high risk".