nathanasmith

>Switzerland is hardly homogeneous. 29% of residents are foreign born. If anything it is less homogeneous than the US.

85% of those "foreigners" are your fellow Europeans. It would be like me saying Florida is less homogeneous because some people from Utah moved there. Except Utah is further away from Florida than any country in Europe is from any other. Switzerland is quite homogeneous.

>come over to Europe

>Our people are happier and more productive.

The US ranks 14th in happiness ahead of the majority of European countries. Europe as a whole ranks between 42 and 43[0]

The US ranks 6th in productivity, again ahead of the vast majority of European countries and far ahead of the European average[1]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report#2017_Wo...

[1]https://www.expertmarket.co.uk/focus/worlds-most-productive-...

You condescending assholes waste no opportunity to toot your horn. Your statement is as vacuous as it is wrong. First of all, there are quite a few European nations with double digit percentages of the population living under what is considered the poverty line in the US. Secondly, your rich don't give because they are more interested preserving a family name and giving the money to their descendants.

I've been so poor I had to sleep behind a dumpster and cover up with a cardboard box and I never found myself just buying paper plates over and over. The dollar tree will sell you a plate for 1 single George Washington. Or just eat out of the pot. Hell, I do that now just to save having to wash a dish. Something tells me this story doesn't add up.

> Like what? What specific things are you having to do today that you wouldn't have had to do in, say, 1998?

Not going to go into my strategy. I'll just say what I do works for me. Until it doesn't. Like in March when Google made the so-called "Fred" update. Sites that had been running for years just like yours went from the 5th position on page one to somewhere on page 10. Some sites went from page 10 to page 1. On the whole it was a net negative with no rhyme or reason to it, i.e., some lower quality sites ranked higher and vice versa. By the way, none of these sites are spam, are cloaked, aren't https, no PBN crap, etc. They were just there one day and gone the next. Many many people had the same experience. If you didn't then that's great. My point is not woe is me, down with Google. My point is Google being a gatekeeper has an immense amount of power and a subtle change by them can mean the difference between being "on the internet" and off of it. Fortunately I have many sites so I'll survive but a lot of people don't.

So to sum up what you're saying, you're a hypocrite and no matter what anybody says showing you how much of a hypocrite you are, you're just going to dig in. Got it.

To add to this, I made the huge mistake a few years ago of admitting to an amount of social anxiety at a certain workplace. Within a few weeks that admission of vulnerability was used against me as a reason I wasn't a good fit for a project that I know I would have been great at. I left over it. Never again.

I keep hearing about this so-called backlash, the government is going to do this, the EU is going to do that. Yet Google/Facebook/Amazon et al's grip grows ever tighter. The bottom line is people have chosen these companies as the gatekeepers to the internet. I don't like it the least bit. Especially since it makes my life harder as a web site operator. I have to do everything I can to please the mighty Google and if I don't I'm as much as erased from the internet. It didn't used to be that way but that's how it is now. These companies have massive power and what the EU or anybody else plans to actually do about it is beyond me. We'll see.

In that case, then yes, it is a good strategy. Find a currency you like holding and have some of it on as many exchanges as you want. When the price gets out of whack, sell on one exchange and buy on the other. Square up when it's convenient.

That requires holding a balance of LTC on different exchanges which is great if you really like LTC but personally I don't since you can't really trade that much with it other than BTC and USDT/EUR. Ethereum on the other hand has a ton of trading pairs on many exchanges so I would consider your strategy with it. Only issue is, arbitrage opportunities with Ethereum come around a lot less often than with LTC so I'm unlikely to hold ETH just waiting for that. To make a long story short, my base currency for trading is BTC so that's what I like to hodl. When an opportunity for arbitrage comes up, I take my chances buying, transferring to another exchange, selling, then transferring the BTC back. Successful trading is predicated on the probabilities being in your favor and a >5% arbitrage spread, usually (not always) works out. At least it works out enough to make it worth your while.

LTC is often higher on GDAX than most other exchanges and the coin takes about 15-20 minutes to send. Sending Bitcoin back can take a while but that has more to do with GDAX/Coinbase actually posting your transaction to the blockchain than Bitcoin itself (though, yes, Bitcoin transactions themselves can take a while). The longest I've had to wait was 8 hours total. But 5-10% profit in 8 hours is, um, pretty good.

The last time I did this about a week or 2 ago, there was an 8% difference between GDAX and Bittrex. At the end of it, after fees and all that, I made 6%.

You'd think it would send it down assuming people were buying in anticipating the free coins after the fork. Since there aren't any free coins to get now and assuming that was propping up the recent price rise, why not sell? At least in theory.

edit: First three responses to the question all within one minute of each other with all completely different opinions. That's why it's so difficult to predict these things!

I'm not affiliated with them but I like Bittrex. The main thing I like over some other exchanges I've used is the volume. Having good volume for any coin you are trading is important otherwise you end up competing with bots making it very hard to get a fill. Other things I like is very little down time, lots of coins, a decent if not stellar interface, and a good API.

In the cons I wish they would add new coins faster though they seem to be picking up the pace lately. That's about it. All in all, I'm happy with them and would recommend.

Things must have drastically changed in the last seven years then. Between 2008 and 2010 I drove rental cars almost full time with horrible credit and a debit card. The weekly cost for a car was 170 and if I went monthly it was around 600.

There are more axes of comparison than literal interpretation.

A few of my favorites like Accelerando and Neuromancer have been mentioned but I’ll add Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. It’s set in the near future but features general AI, lots of intrigue and conspiring governments and corporations. Really a great story.

> They could have written an Android-on-Windows compatibility layer

MS had Android emulation[0] in the works for Windows Mobile 10 but then decided to cancel it citing it was "unnecessary".

[0]https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-officially-cancels-...

Back in 2011, I bought an HTC HD7 from a friend who switched back to Android. I was very impressed by how fast Windows Phone 7 was especially the ultra-smooth scrolling. But, like you said, the animations were enough to drive you nuts. Way too much, I don't know what to call it, "swoopy" maybe. It was enough to make you dizzy. I ended up trading the phone for a Galaxy S and that was the end of Windows Phone for me.

Just give me the option. When I'm in the car, I like the "wall of sound" since it's a noisy environment, so I have a head unit with a built-in compressor I can control. When I'm at home, I prefer the dynamic range. The problem comes when the engineer takes that option away from me (quite often) clipping and distorting everything to the nth degree. Like the article mentions, this creates ear fatigue and I end up, eventually, just not wanting to listen to the CD at all which colors my perception of the band. So I'm less likely to go to their concerts and give them money. That's just me though.

Does the converse not slip just as easily off the tongue?

> The people who generally push against that "meritocracy" are the ones who benefit from it not being implemented in the first place.

The DRM won't change the availability of O'Reilly books on pirate sites in the least.

>I think this sums up 2012 4chan perfectly. However things have changed drastically. There is an extremely rigid, narrowly defined viewpoint of alt-right Trumpism there now. If you do not fall in line with it, you will be ostracized and targeted for attack. Before it was all about the 'lulz' and attacking people for no good reason. It is now an organized right wing hate machine with a very specific ideology.

/pol/ is almost entirely satire. The fact that so many people are falling for said satire makes it even funnier.

This whole idea of "exclusive carrier" just wears me out. My first smartphone was an HTC Dream with T-Mobile, then a Moto Droid with Verizon, then a CDMA Galaxy Nexus again with Verizon. I finally got sick of it and bought a Motorola X Pure last Christmas. It's so-called "universal" so it works on whatever carrier I want. Right now I'm using it on Cricket pre-paid and if they do something janky I'll just pick up and go somewhere else. No more of that carrier exclusive crap and no more contracts.

Regarding the Essential phone, even for people that don't mind being locked to a major carrier, they chose Sprint? I'm not positive but I'm pretty sure they have the least favorable reputation of the 4 major carriers. Hitching your wagon to that seems like a bad idea. I'm all for more competition though so I hope Rubin knows what he's doing.

>Firstly, there's no requirement to read other unrelated threads before commenting in this thread.

The guy started a new thread on the exact same issue that had already been discussed completely with insightful posts on both sides in another thread containing exactly 32 comments which was more than half the total comments on the article at the time he posted. Starting a new thread when over 50 percent of the comments were on this exact subject was absolutely unnecessary and frankly tiresome. And you claim that is "unrelated". How exactly do you get that?

>Secondly, what's more relevant: Siri, Cortana, and Alexa, or random assistants on the Play store?

The latter are more relevant as this is an assistant written by some guy by himself in Python. Furthermore, in the settings for this one, you can name it whatever you want. Additionally, note how Siri defaults to male or female depending on the market. Specifically, in the UK, it is male out of the box.

>I'm ignoring Google Assistant

Hmm..

>I just thought your comment was needlessly dismissive. Had you provided a link to the other hacker news thread[s] and not been as aggressive, your comment would have had much more value.

Provide a link? Use your eyes. The comments are inches away on this exact page.

The bottom line is, this issue was talked about thoroughly, yet it keeps being brought up, derailing the comments, instead of actually discussing the topic at hand which is the app the guy wrote. This kind of thing makes Hacker News less useful and that is a worse problem than my purported "dismissiveness" over something that shouldn't exist in the first place.

We've already hashed this out in these very comments. If you'd read before posting, you'd see the premise was investigated by looking at the current crop of virtual assistants on the play store and found to be false.

For anyone else on Linux that gets the error:

Default Audio Player for mp3 files is not set up, like vlc or something.

when you try to run it, note that Stephanie depends on the python module os.startfile[0] which apparently is a Windows only thing that works like xdg-open. I'm not a python expert but here's what I did: the offending file is stephanie-va-master/Stephanie/TextManager/speaker.py. If you edit line 15 which is:

os.startfile(self.speak_result)

and change it to:

os.system("xdg-open " + self.speak_result)

everything works. Somebody else more knowledgeable can probably suggest something better.

[0]https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/os.html#os.startfile

Edit: Fixed! They fixed it by wrapping that line in an if statement checking the output of sys.platform. Very responsive dev.

>Personification of the assistant allows a more intimate experience for those not of the computer science inclination.

Fair enough. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I don't want anything I do with my phone to be described as an "intimate experience". Takes all kinds.

> It's extremely off-putting that the only software we give human names to is the software we boss around, and when we do give it a name, the name is always female.

That's not true though. Just a cursory glance at the Play Store with the search term "voice assistant"[0] reveals mostly gender neutral with some male and female. I "equalled" the female names and plussed the male names:

Dragon Mobile Assistant;

=Cortana – Digital assistant;

Indigo Virtual Assistant;

Smart Voice Assistant;

OK Google;

=Robin - AI Voice Assistant;

DataBot Assistant;

=EVA Free - Voice Assistant;

utter! Voice Commands BETA!;

voice Assistant;

+Jarvis - My Personal Assistant;

Google Allo;

Extreme: Personal Assistant;

=AIVC (Alice);

HOUND Voice Search & Assistant;

Google Now Launcher;

Genie;

=Amazon Alexa;

My Assistant;

Heaveen;

+SpeakBro;

+ANDY Voice Assistant (FREE);

Cyman Mark 2 Free;

+Noah Voice Assistant Beta;

My Android Assistant;

AVX Free - Voice Assistant;

Moto Voice;

+EVAN Free - Voice Assistant;

Voice Assistant;

Get Assistant - Root

Tally: 5 female and 5 male with 20 gender neutral including some arguable, e.g., "Cyman" (Simon?) and Robin. This isn't the most scientific thing but it certainly exposes the assertion "the name is always female" for what it is. The really unfortunate thing is this erroneous belief is so ingrained that half the comments here are bike shedding about this exact point instead of discussing how cool this piece of software is. Not that I'm helping that problem.

[0]https://play.google.com/store/apps/collection/search_results...

The whole thing is written in Python so it shouldn't be that hard. Maybe use something like QPython[0] It might Just Work.

[0]http://qpython.com/

Let me rephrase my suggestion for what to do here. Seems in the config.ini file, there is a setting for what you want the assistant's name to be:

[SYSTEM]

assistant_name = Stephanie

welcome_message = How may I help you?

wake_up_engine = False

wake_up_command = Stephanie wake up

I would presume you just replace Stephanie with whatever you want.