skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a nice pipe dream. Unfortunately, it's not how Bitcoin has played out in the real world. The Bitcoin network has unfortunately not been owned by the people, but instead dominated by Chinese miners with ASICs. The current low-ball estimate based on public numbers is that Chinese miners account for ~70% of the hashrate -- see https://blockchain.info/pools

As the database gets larger and larger, less and less people can afford the disk space, bandwidth, and electricity, and they will be pushed out by people who can. The current scalability of Bitcoin, with its absolutely miniscule userbase, and incredibly high miner count, can barely scrape past 3 transactions per second. Attempts at trying to fix this have absolutely fractured the community. See BIP101 / BitcoinXT and the resulting blowout, especially on the /r/bitcoin subreddit.

The security of Bitcoin is abysmal. There are major mining pools that don't even bother to validate the incoming transactions, since validating was slower than not validating, and more blocks means more money -- https://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2015-07-04-spv-mining

Oh, how are these BTC miners getting money? BitPay's statistics say that $76 million, a disproportionate majority of their payouts, go to miners: http://d.ibtimes.co.uk/en/full/1433561/bitcoin-merchants-mai...

So Bitcoin seems to be a vehicle for Chinese BTC miners to trade cheap electricity for VC money. Up until everything bursts, at least.

It's also worth mentioning that if anybody was able to get these miners to collude, they could completely crash it if they wanted to. Bitcoin's security is largely based on no one entity having a majority of the network's power.

Etherum has all of the same problems and none of the solutions. The official FAQ even says that we're going to see a tilted hashrate arms race ("AMD GPUs will be 'faster' than similarly priced NVIDIA GPUs") -- https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/197/how-to-help-secure...
Hitler wasn't interested in the welfare of the whole world. If Nazi Germany had won the war, large-scale extermination of Slavs was the next item on the list [1]. You could say the Third Reich was just getting warmed up with the Holocaust.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost
I think it's amazing because, well, what technology do we have that could "come back to life" in 30,000 years frozen?

Nature showing how diverse and robust some of its work is.
Like most disruptive technologies, it's not quite clear why Bitcoin / blockchain are better than incumbents, namely credit cards / centralized databases.

At Purse, we use blockchain escrows to unlock value from Amazon gift card balances. This was previously impossible (gift card exchanges can't transact Amazon), and the liquidity premium powers the discount. Escrows and other complex transactions are difficult using traditional payment systems, and we believe that they can be applied more broadly to many other markets.
I disagree with arguing (provably wrong) theory in the face of hard data (which disproves said theory) - drugs and care are significantly cheaper in every single payer market, and provide better outcomes as measured by life expectancy and many other measures.

> So it's pretty hard to look at what people are spending in two different places for two different things, with a probably large subsidy involved, and conclude that a theory about supply and demand for identical goods in a free market is wrong.

It's actually quite easy, just like you do with e.g. a McDonald's meal or a bottle of coke (e.g. the US subsidies these indirectly through corn subsidies, no other country does). It's not the same everywhere, not by a long shot, but it's functionally quite close.

Same drugs and similar are cost much more in the US.

The market is not free - it is illegal for you to have your medicine shipped from Canada or India or anywhere else.
purse.io's UI emphasizes the discounts you can get, by having a slider from 0% - 50% when you put in your wishlist. They claim they're just matchmaking with a buyer really interested in Bitcoin, but really, there's no way that 50% discounts on Amazon would ever happen, unless it's money laundering or CC fraud. And even then, 20% is really skeptical.

FoldApp seems to just be subsidizing purchases with VC money for adoption. It doesn't seem to be going well.

See also: Flooz, of which 20% of their transactions were fraudulent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flooz.com
There are least three competing standard libraries: Jane Street's Core (high-quality but fairly big, also generates large binaries due to OCaml's lack of good dead code elimination support), Batteries (older, developed by the community), and Containers (Simon Cruanes' project, mostly - smaller but very well-designed).

They all have their advantages, the issue is that there is no one true alternative standard library, which makes the life of library writers difficult (especially when you want to use a type in your interface that is only present in one of these libraries).
> The guy is acting like Hitler invented anti-Semitism.

No he's not, he's saying Hitler used anti-Semitism as the basis for a crackpot philosophical theory about the nature of humanity. I'm not sure whether I agree with that, but it's certainly an interesting idea.
Has anyone attended a VLDB conference recently? How is it different from Strata, for example?

P.S. Their choice of venues is nice.
This is the Rosenhan study (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment), called one of the most influential psycholocial studies of all time.
Do you remember which versions and wordlength you use of each software, in case I get a chance to do comparisons?
The point about internalizing what you are doing is sadly overshadowed here. I know folks love Bret Victor's talks about externalizing this visualization to teach people and make things easier to show to others. What that misses, is there is a great benefit to internalizing this such that you don't have to find a way to visualize it.

The killer section for me is Thompson's quote regarding how hard it is to follow programs that are built with layer upon layer. Just a single paragraph really sums this up.
Show HN: Best ECards Maker App – Design and Send E-Cards for All Greetings
Can geometry calculations display information about past and future events?
Ask HN: Any Ubuntu phone OS users here? How do you like it?
Alternately - are there any still around?
The problem is that we don’t have the range of treatment types to target all the the different mutation types. Most of the drugs we have target the same basic pathways like DNA damage repair - we have dozens of these drugs, but very few targeting specific mutations. We need a lot more diversity of action in our drugs if we have a chance to cure cancer.

Having said this the most hopeful area is the immunotherapies. Scaled out to their full potential we could have a very powerful set of drugs to go after the cancer diversity problem.
He bought an iphone 6s as a testing device that would spend most of its life in a desk drawer! I hope this was a company expense or something? One of those would be like a weeks wages for me. I can't understand why people pay so much for smart phones anyway. And if your idiotic phone runs out of memory at the top of some mountain, "the moment isn't missed forever", the moment gets missed because you're mucking about with a stupid phone instead of enjoying the moment with your family.
You saw Steve Jobs do it couple of times. Different goals, same tricks. Not hard at all.
This being fivethirtyeight, I wish they could display a bit more statistical sophistication.

Okay, so we've got six out of sixteen. That's not a large number, but it's not small enough to be meaningless either. Let's talk probabilities. You could have a graph. You could teach the reader some actual statistics. But no.

As far as I can figure out, the writer isn't a statistician at all, so I'm not sure why she's writing for fivethirtyeight.
German police searched a house and seized stuff for months in one case[1], Amazon reversed gift credit in another[2].

Obviously this is no proof that fraud is rampant, but I still lean toward thinking fraud is too likely for me to want to be involved with using purse.io, especially if I wanted a good deal (big discount = more likely it's a carder cashing out a stolen card.) If nothing else these stories show there's a small chance you might get burned pretty badly. Has anything significantly changed to remove or lessen the risk?

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2po40d/since_my_ho...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2eqcnv/do_not_purc...
On HN we try to avoid generic dismissals of new work. I'm afraid this comment counts as one.

Yes, the burden of proof is on Snyder (not "this guy") to make an argument. But he just wrote a book about it and you haven't engaged with anything specific in the argument he did make. Nor have you offered a counter-argument; that anti-Semitism was common doesn't imply that Hitler's was garden-variety. To say it was unusual "only" in how it ended is weak—that is more than unusual enough. And to criticize Synder for starting with an intuition is unfair. Much scholarly work starts that way.
That's the nature of mathematical knowledge though. If you can't understand basic calculus then there's a helluva lot that's downstream from there that you won't understand either.
Iranian Authorities Arrest Prominent Internet Entrepreneur
The first thought I had while reading this is that Hitler, as described here, would have hated Calvinball from Calvin & Hobbes.

The whole premise of Calvinball is that you make up the rules as you go along. You don't win by being stronger or faster but by constantly redefining the rules until you win by default. In Hitler's worldview though, there's no value to these rules. They're just artificial constructs that pervert the true nature of Hobbes, a tiger red of tooth and claw. Since Calvinball is inextricably tied to Calvin, Calvin must die, so that the Hobbes can revert back to the state of nature imagined by (Thomas) Hobbes, rather than the one imagined by Calvin.
Inverse Ackermann without pain (2009)
So the UI allows users to set a discount rate, similar to the way you set a limit order on etrade or Name Your Price on Priceline. I can place an order to buy AAPL for $100 or bid to stay in a 5 star hotel for $10. Doesn't mean they will get filled.
Genocide is pretty high energy expenditure affair. You need records, you need logistics, you need system to minimize the false positives, you need a lot of stuff that must be state provided.

Indiscriminate killing is easier. You just carpet bomb and wipe the ashes.
I know people live in this city and having a lower wage...
I wasn't able to grok pointers in C, until I worked to write an application in Assembly. After that pointer referencing, dereferencing, arithmetic everything looked very natural.
There'a real problem with abstraction. Look at any Java code. If you haven't seen it before you are going to deperately browse around the code to find out a single line that actually does something. But all you see is scaffolding. When you finally find a line that does actual work, it's not clear how it connect to other such lines. There's another such line 1000 lines below it but all the abstraction makes it almost impossible to find out how are the two executed. Which one goes first? Is one of them optional? Et c.

In general, abstractions are used to capture programmer's understanding of the structure of the program (it's more or less like boxes and arrow sketches in your notebook). But then, programmer's understanding of the structure of the program is often inadequate and lacking. As your understanding of the problem improves, so does your abstraction. But by then, it's hard-coded and cannot be easily changed. Many times I've seen how new functionality cannot be implemented because it doesn't fit the abstraction and re-writing the abstraction would mean re-writing the whole project.
Hailey Clauson by Jason Kim
I believe gp was talking about a failure mode in which station-keeping goes on automatically when communication fails, as we learn that we massively overdone it because climate science is hard.
They Pretend to Be Us While Pretending We Don't Exist
But they will be filled. By people who are very eager to cash out of some stolen credit cards or need some dirty money in someone else's hands. And, bonus points, in a way that makes the transaction irreversible.
wow, that, plus the VS2015 support for JSX syntax amount to great tooling.

Being able to use JSX in Typescript is a big deal, if only for the compile-time checking you get for free.
Of course it's futile. The only thing that protects confidentiality is end-to-end zero-knowledge encryption performed in open source code audited by professional cryptographers, with a trusted system for distributing public keys. Using indie or European providers is just window dressing. Your emails will be in plaintext SMTP when they reach NSA fiber taps just like everyone else's.

Running your own server just shifts your trust from Google to DigitalOcean/Linode/AWS or your residential ISP (even less deserving).

I wish we would stop this navel-gazing about which providers to trust and FUCKING ADOPT GPG ALREADY. It's been, what, 15 years?
I think it's more that when faced with a code smell, I get into a mental loop where I evaluate each possible solution I can think of over and over without being able to commit to one. Sort of like a simulated annealing algorithm that never cools down.
Jazz (which I am more familiar with) is a reasonable analogy. And I agree. You should be able to capture a good studio performance just the way Ornette Coleman and Coltrane could.

One thing to note is that jazz has more structure. There is improvisation around that structure. Indian classical music is structured around rhythms and scales (and Carnatic music is microtonal) so it gets pretty out there.
Moving online webserver using public transport [video]
I was replying to what he said, not who he is.
He also had his mother bringing food by every day or so.
Well, since you want to get pedantic, fine....

Regular Expressions define/describe a language. They do not, can not, evaluate to a value, and it wouldn't even make sense if they did.

Regular Expressions also don't by themselves accept input. A RE library/software accepts input (which is always a finite string, an expression (also a finite string), and always returns one of two values: The input string is a member of that language, or the input string is not a member of that language. The result is binary, and it isn't returned from the regular expression.

Saying that you can't feed PCRE expressions into PIRE is completely false, since my original comment and the example in the linked github is literally a valid PCRE. That's like saying ASM.js isn't compatible with JavaScript, which is obvious nonsense, because it's by definition a strict subset of javascript.

The set of all regular expressions that will test valid in this library is strictly a subset of those which are valid in PCRE.

Type theory has nothing to do with anything here, and even if it did, PCRE and PIRE have identical functional types. They both accept string expressions (language descriptions), finite string input, and they both return boolean values (wether the input string is a member of that language).

And enough with the snark already. You aren't the only one on the planet who knows what a DFA/NFA is, and your statements make it seem debatable that you understand them.

But again, my first question was: "is this name really a joke?", which could have been answered by a single damned comment saying "yes".
I just used W32DASM for most things. I learned to work backwards from an "invalid key" dialog, find the comparisons/jumps to NOP out, and use HEXVIEW to write them before I could even write my own programs. Hard to believe that was 15 years ago now...
Thank you, that's 100% the type of answer I was hoping for
If the behavior was never fully specified (as claimed), then it might be worth having this just to see what it breaks and what bugs it uncovers.
FCC slaps Lyft with citation for calling and texting customers
Restrictions on buyers (unverified users are limited, 6 levels), social verification, behavior analytics (sift science), among others. User was made whole, police dropped the case, and we introduced $10,0000 guarantee. Not an excuse, but we were a team of 2 when that transaction happened, and it was 3 months after we started while we were in an accelerator.
It's funny you should ask this, because you're right that some types really are quite hard to read and there was a great discussion a few days ago where someone mentioned that the types tell you a lot about what the function is doing, and then someone retorted that most examples of types guiding you are usually very simple, and posted a really complex type for people to decipher, and the more proficient Haskellers actually worked it out--based partly on their previous knowledge of similar types! See http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3ijtej/any_tips_for...

Now, I'm not at that level of proficiency, but I can tell that your example above takes a binary function and 'lifts' it into a higher (monadic) context, so that it can work on monadic values. And the reason I can work this out is because I know about the Functor typeclass which has the function fmap :: (a -> b) -> f a -> f b, which does a similar job of lifting an input function into a higher context (in this case a functor context).
You think USA 2015 is anything like Germany 1930?
I suspect the elite universities are actually pretty good at hoovering up good kids from unfortunate backgrounds. They tend to be able to fund the money from somewhere, and they don't have a problem with brand recognition, so there's a decent chance of getting an application.

I have a good friend who has an unlikely story of escaping a civil war, avoiding helicopter gunships, having so little paper he'd write his equations in teeny tiny letters. Somehow Oxford managed to find the money for him to fly across the world to do his degree. There was another kid who'd lived through the Balkans war, though I'm not as familiar with his story.

The dons probably have a bit of an egalitarian streak as well, preferring the hard-up kids (not just war of course) over the privately educated ones if there's a choice.
Right, I was talking about a sci-fi failure mode where the onboard program goes haywire and it ends up actively station keeping and maintaining the block for hundreds of years. Is 1.7% not something to worry about? IIRC, Solar variance of 0.1% has correlated with a 0.32F temperature variance. If that relation were linear, that would amount to almost a 5.5F variance.

I'm not proposing this as a 'hard scifi' model for a story, but you could tweak the scenario to get suitably scary failures (multiple shades)
For the meantime, there is a very nice Go plugin for IntelliJ products:

https://github.com/go-lang-plugin-org/go-lang-idea-plugin
> and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause

In the case written about here, the Justice Department has a search warrant issued upon probable cause.
+fravia produced so much worthwhile content without so much as a single ad. He is sorely missed.

It's why I always laugh when people say the Internet needs ads to survive. It was doing just fine before ads became so pervasive.
That comment was probably supposed to have been posted in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10207681
Hitler was wrong in his opinion that Jews exploited the economic system for nefarious means, or that Jews were entirely in control of the international politics. On the other hand, he was correct that Jews (both as individuals, and through Jewish political organizations) supported communism, and sought to subvert the majority culture in the nations in which they lived. Many moderates say the same thing. The difference is that they say this is a good thing. Anyone can say "Jews have, because of their history of oppression, sought to deconstruct and subvert the dominant culture of [Western nation]" and be thought a political moderate, as long as they assert that this is a good thing. However, to make the same claim and assert that this is a bad thing, makes one, well, a Nazi.
The Verizon Math was gold.
Get Rid of Vaastu Defects
I think this part of the article directly addresses your complaint:

"I asked Andrew Vickers, a statistician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, to take a look at the analysis. He said it wasn’t surprising that there was an association between e-cigarettes and smoking. The real question is how big it is. While this study suggests that the effect is large, Vickers found reason for caution in what statisticians call the “confidence interval,” a plausible range of values for the study results. The confidence intervals here are “ridiculously wide,” he said, which means that the estimate that e-cigarette users are about eight times as likely to take up smoking as non-users is just a rough approximation — the true increase in risk could be anywhere from 30 percent to 5,700 percent."
I think the word "modern" is misplaced here. All of the listed microcontrollers are more than a decade old.
Analyse Asia Podcast #59: China's Five Year Plan and Huawei with Kitty Fok
Synopsis: With Kitty Fok (Country Manager, China) from IDC, we discuss the Chinese government’s five year plan specifically on their ambitions on technology, innovation and digital infrastructure for the next 5 years. In the same conversation, we analyse Huawei, one of China’s top technology companies where they are now growing in three important segments: (a) carriers in the telecommunications industry, (b) enterprise and (c) consumer where they have beaten Xiaomi in market share and sought to dominate in other markets. With an in-depth discussion on Huawei (which is a private corporation), we discussed how they are innovating and growing as one of the top Chinese companies leading globally along with the Baidu-Alibaba-Tencent (BAT) Axis.
"Bitcoin seems to be a vehicle for Chinese BTC miners to trade cheap electricity for VC money."

I suspect that some of the Chinese BTC mining is simply a way to convert yuan to dollars. That's hard to do from inside China, because the People's Bank of China imposes currency controls.

Back in 2013, it was possible to buy Bitcoin with yuan transferred through the banking system within China and sell it outside China for dollars. That's what cause the big run-up in Bitcoin to over $1000. Then the PBOC clamped down, which caused the big drop in Bitcoin to around $250.

Bitcoin mining, though, is viewed as manufacturing and export under Chinese law. Those activities are encouraged, and subsidies may be available for construction and power. The Bitcoins can be sold outside China for dollars or euros. So, even if the mining just breaks even, it has utility for the owners of the mining operations.
No private didn't win. But public, that is, you and I, clearly lost.
Just because something has a de facto rather than de jure specification does not make it unspecified.
I don't think that is true at all. There have been many genocides throughout history, but how many have been characterized as industrial, documented, in need of logistics, or particularly concerned with false identification?

Well the last one is questionable at all, but generally speaking the Holocaust is spoken of as fairly unique in those other regards.

The general rule of thumb is that the only thing you need for a genocide is a bunch of men willing to do it. You don't need trains or camps. You don't need gas chambers or tabulating machines. You just need willing men.
A novel method for the removal of earwax (2005)
int v =
((r << 24) & 0xff000000) |
((g << 16) & 0xff0000) |
((b << 8) & 0xff00) |
( a & 0xff) ;

Is there a reason you're doing the shift before the mask? I find this much less intuitive than the equivalent

int v =
((r & 0xff) << 24) |
((g & 0xff) << 16) |
((b & 0xff) << 8) |
( a & 0xff) ;
The point here is that Somaliland is not a "country" (as in, officially recognized), in spite of having, apparently, more solid institutions than Somalia.