The United Kingdom is fairly close to the Boreal Forest Biome [1] which spans across Eurasia and North America in a narrow band. I wonder if it used to include the UK region back in the olden days. Does anybody know?
1. Buy land & build a log cabin. I've been planning this for a year now. Finally have some money saved and now looking for land bordering a National Forest in my area.
2. Deploy my SAAS project on AWS. I've spent last few months learning how to script out stacks in AWS and run an ECS cluster. Just need to wrap this up.
I think that's about what I would expect from HN considering that Bitcoin was largely known for its speculative value rather than its technology. In a way, the success of Bitcoin is its biggest enemy in communities like this one.
I don't think it's a ponzi scheme, but some projects built on it, such as BitConnect, most likely are. I think Bitcoin is the 1st generation of cryptocurrency which should've either died a long time ago and replaced with the 2nd generation like Ethereum or evolved to Bitcoin v2. Instead, perhaps due to lack of competition for a period of time, it became a massive speculative bubble and amassed enough money that it's now too big to fail. So it just keeps on growing, mostly on hype and irrational investments from the influx of new people, and it's doing it so fast that its effectiveness and usability have become largely irrelevant for most general use cases.
> White Americans outperform all of them in the PISA tests. America only performs poorly in the PISA tests when you don't exclude non-whites.
I'm not sure that's a good metric of overall literacy levels in the country. Additionally, I think Soviet-era education, which expired around 2002, always stacked up pretty well to other leading countries.
I personally think that Bitcoin will eventually be taken out by Ethereum, which will then give way to the likes of Cardano or something similar that will figure out issues with scaling, sustainability, governance (ie civil resolution of conflicts and end of hard-forks) and interoperability with legacy financial systems (ie Banks). It's really quite amazing to follow the innovation in this space, once you get through all the shit coins and ICO scams that is.
I was a B student in a Russian school from 1 to 8th grade and started in an American High School in 1999. If you factored in ungodly amount of mandatory summer break reading everyone had to do in Russian schools, you'd probably end up with 3 times the material covered in a span of a year compared to American schools. This basically allowed me to just coast through all 4 years of High School with all kinds of stupid awards and a GPA of 4.0. The same amount of effort would've probably turned me into a dropout back in Russia. Kids here don't learn anything and I think lack of quality material both in and outside of school is to blame. Ironically, I hear they don't learn much in Russian schools either these days.
I agree. Colleges and Universities end up teaching basic math concepts and playing catch-up instead of being places of higher education. It must be costly to be keeping this up.
I've been hearing that .NET is dead/dying for probably 8 years now. I work on an enterprise software platform comprised of mostly .NET microservices and some NodeJs sprinkled here and there on the back end. 80% of our .NET code is running in a container on a Linux distro. The other 20% just hasn't been ported to .NET Core or has some shitty dependency which can only run on a Windows environment. I see some of our devs switching to Macs for development already. All of this has occurred in just 2 years. I would say give it some time. The progress has been amazing in my opinion.
This is the second event involving BCH which is looking very "artificial" for the lack of a better word. About a month ago, BCH started an abrupt up-climb while the prices on BTC started to fall dramatically. BTC recovered soon after by hitting all-time highs while BCH prices fell pretty hard. Now we get these talks of insider trading at Coinbase. I don't have much stake in cryptocurrencies and I actually did not mind the BCH fork, hoping that the 2 cryptos can just co-exist. But from what I'm seeing now this has nothing to do with advancing Bitcoin and is just a money grab by Roger Ver.
Bitcoin price started to tank on December 18th @ 00:00 UTC while BCH started an up-climb at right about the same time. This could be explained by the anticipation of the announcement from Coinbase. But then shortly after Coinbase stopped all trades for BCH, I saw this on Twitter [1]. I don't know, but this last bit is definitely looking very odd.
I'm not a gamer or a game developer, but this is absolutely brilliant. Very clean API and I'm sure a lot to be done with this features-wise. Best of luck!
My grandmother's sister was married to a man who served as Captain of the 1st rank on a nuclear submarine in the Soviet and maybe even Russian Navy (I don't know exactly when he retired). As I found out later in life, he was also one of the liquidators of Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the effects of which ultimately led to his early death in early 2000s. I know for sure he already retired from military by mid 90s when I was about 10 or 11. Right around that time, me and my pops used to visit them in Moscow on just about every summer break and I remember during one of our stays with his family my dad asked him about this particular subject. His response is something I still remember word-for-word which would translate roughly to "We know they exist. There are people (in the government) working on this. I don't know anything more and this is all i can tell you." I'm not trying to make any conclusions here or get ridiculed. Just sharing something that came from a man who must've had a pretty high clearance in Soviet military. Or maybe he was just trolling us lol
Thank you for your insightful comment. I absolutely agree with you. There is a very bright and positive side to social media, which has been especially apparent in recent months. Yet it's hard to not see the worrying trends in public ridicule and constant outrage on social media over petty things. I would like to believe that these are growing pains and we'll eventually figure out how and where to draw the line. We are definitely evolving. Perhaps this is the time when we evolve out of our primitive and humble beginnings and into a sci-fi-ish society.
> “The more I study this object, the more unusual it appears, making me wonder whether it might be an artificially made probe which was sent by an alien civilization,” Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard’s astronomy department and one of Milner’s advisers on Breakthrough Listen, wrote in the email to Milner.
It may sound silly, but I find it fascinating that we're finally in a time when someone in such high position in science can say such a thing without fearing ridicule. I'm also grateful that there are people wealthy enough to sponsor these scientific efforts. What an amazing time!
I always found it amazing how vastly different internet communities are from real-world communities. Skim through just about any YouTube video and the comments are filled with some of the most vile garbage. We'd all be murdering each other had this been the case in real-world communities. But, instead, we think twice about what we tell others we meet face-to-face and we deal with the impact of our actions right then and there. If we get angry, we might say something terrible to someone and quickly see the pain in their eyes before realizing the terrible thing we've done and regret ever doing so. The feedback is immediate and necessary for our personal growth. Social media just amplifies the worst in us without ever seeing the impact of the words that we put online. It pushes people in disagreement further apart who would easily understand each other by simply communicating face-to-face and sharing the emotions surrounding their differences. Instead, everything is lost in endless pile of Twitter or Facebook feeds which regurgitate apologies of "caught" offenders and cries of the offended. All of this, in all likelihood, would've never happened in real, physical world.
There is a saying in Russian that goes "Одно лечишь — другое калечишь" which translates roughly to "You heal one thing, but cripple another". I understand that they see this technology used by people who lost the ability to communicate, but in my opinion, it's far more destructive than it is helpful. Either way, the Obama video is leaps and bounds better than other demos I've seen just a few months ago. Pretty impressive progress.
I think it's subjective. I personally don't have much invested in Bitcoin and if I did I'd probably keep at least half of it in a personal wallet and half in Coinbase in case I wanted to cash out at any given moment and not lose everything. At least in my experience, transferring coins from personal wallet to Coinbase can take days. Just enough to lose everything when it hits the fan. Or maybe i'm just a catastrophist. :)
Was about to say this. Pretty much most of services that tie in with a bank account that I've ever used provide this option as an alternative to waiting 3 days for bank account verification. It is truly bizarre how this has become the standard.
I can only comment on Kansas City, as I used to live there and I agree with you. It's great for the time being, however, it is starting to grow very rapidly. Not quite at, say, Denver's pace but it makes me wonder how long the city will keep its low prices. The rent prices were listed at $954 in MO and $1127 in KS. Both are on the expensive side and i literally don't know anyone who pays this much for rent. You can find a very nice place (20 minute drive from downtown) on both KS and MO sides of Kansas City for $500-$700 per month.
This is interesting. I'm native Russian speaker and outside of catching a few similar words here and there I think Polish sounds absolutely foreign to me. I think just about the only language that I can understand with some effort is Ukrainian.
As a frequent user of meetup.com, I feel like it succeeded at making people one-time acquaintances and failed miserably at making lasting connections. I'm a member of several groups and most of these groups do not see any single individual more than once. I won't even mention terrible attendance for just about any groups I've ever been a part of. I think there could've been a lot of improvements made here but meetup really hasn't done anything with the concept for years, which is a shame. I still think this space is ripe for innovation.
You'd be surprised how many factory electronic components on Amazon are being advertised by "legitimate" vendors who are selling Chinese knockoffs. I just had a first-hand experience with this by purchasing a factory Nikon battery from what appears to be a legitimate Nikon dealer and receiving something that barely holds charge. It's not all so black and white.
> The point is not all of these nomads are forced into it by desperation or financial necessity; some of them just want to spend their retirement traveling and don't mind a little work along the way.
I was about to post the same thing. Not everyone is in desperate need of affordable housing. YouTube is full of channels by RVers of all ages who simply want to travel and experience adventure on the road.
Wanted to share something that I think is relevant to this discussion. I'm an avid listener of Rogan's podcast and I found his recent interview [1] with Sebastian Junger very insightful. Junger is a journalist who spent a lot of time with American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. He talks a lot about how social media makes us asocial and how a lot of people who experienced war and turmoil oddly miss the experience because it brought everyone closer together and gave everyone purpose, much like what used to happen when societies were tribal. It's a long interview but I would highly recommend giving it a listen.
I agree that screaming something like this on Twitter when you're in temporary rage is nothing but childish. But it's also hard to ignore that someone who represents webpack was able to resolve the situation calmly and civilly only to call the person a hater and a troll later on. This, in my eyes, is a breath away from screaming obscenities on Twitter.
Denver and surrounding areas will be unaffordable in the next few years, much like San Francisco today. It's a good time to buy property now and see it double in value.