skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The west (and the United States in particular) has had ample time and resources to do something about the problem, and failed to act meaningfully. China and India would have had to make much larger sacrifices in terms of individual quality of life to have the same impact.
I played it like 4 times now and still haven't won it :( Maybe it's meant to be like that!
Does anyone have experience with EB-5? I did a startup in Canada, so am fortunate enough to have the 500K/$1M.

It looks like it is fair from a panacea - I haven't yet consulted a lawyer, but based on internet research, it seems like it can be hard to find a legitimate (e.g.: non-scammy) EB-5 Visa project, and the wait times for EB-5 can fairly long. But at least you aren't tied to an employer, and can do whatever you want as long as your investment works out and creates the 10 jobs.
What does the bookmark or link point to, if not a domain name? If it points to an IP address instead, then changing servers would break all links and bookmarks.
Wow good for you for matt, hope it goes well!
Since Verisign is public, we have a lot of visibility into their profitability.

http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/VRSN/2260644339x0x888...

From page 28, no more than 38% of revenues could possibly be used to support their registry systems and obligations (this number includes costs of revenues, administrative expenses, and interest expense). The remainder, 62%, is used for expansion and profit: 9% sales and marketing ($90m), 6% R&D ($63m), the remainder to income tax and shareholders. And obviously sales and R&D take up some of administrative expenses and usage of debt raised as well.

That's a pretty sizeable margin for a non-differentiated product. If they didn't have the contract for .com and .net, there are many other players who could jump in: per page 6, "there are over 840 other operational gTLD registries" that do not use Verisign's services.

Don't bet on them losing the contract, though, unless you want to bet against Berkshire Hathaway - which recently upped its investment in Verisign despite uncertainty about ICANN's future. For better or for worse, a lot of smart people think Verisign's current business model is here to stay.

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/why-buffett-broke-his-rule-and...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/14/icann-int...
Also, stress affects autoimmunity [1], so it's possible that the placebo effect modulated the autoimmune disease itself.

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1568997207...
Pros and cons of software robots
I'm looking at how software robots can be used in a big corporate, I wondered if people had a good overview of the pros and cons of practical deployments, in particular the longer term and more subtle effects - for example maintenance and the impact on architecture. Any comments or views would be very helpful!
> Perhaps the West will pass from 'apathy' directly to 'resignation' and skip 'panic' altogether.

Anything to avoid actually doing anything.
A small number of law schools have debt-forgiveness programs for graduates who take low-paying public-service jobs.
Geez, Now Internet Insurance?
A good marketer puts the message where those who it can benefit will find it.
It happened a while ago. You don't think it was reported on at the time?
No, we don't have a UBI. We have a ragbag of cash and in-kind transfers that add up to approx $20k. Go read the CBO study I linked to, it explains in detail.

Why do you keep ignoring the research I've posted, and continue spreading myths? What do you gain from it?
On Java
IANAL but I expect that anyone admitting to this will find themselves in jail very quickly, at least in the US. The legal system isn't fond of $50 million cons based on one paragraph of legalese.
A security note regarding JWTs - https://auth0.com/blog/2015/03/31/critical-vulnerabilities-i...
As unlikely as it may be (I believe real lawyers will quickly come along and tell us how unlikely), we may actually be seeing $ATTACKER legally assert his claim to the money, and the whole thing "come through", so to speak.

Edit: The author seems like a very, very disturbing individual. Does anyone on HN have a bit of a back story on this person?
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11927891
Might consider it if artists like Taylor Swift are onboard
This is about par for the course for a Nick Bilton piece
IMO, more interesting property than the messaging complexity is, bitcoin (in theory) allows <50% malicious actors in the consensus group. Lamport BFT only allows <33% malicious actors.

Of course, this comparison is not really fair because Lamport BFT achieves deterministic consensus, where as, bitcoin only gives probabilistic consensus.

I hope there is room for Deterministic BFT with <50% malicious actors.

> or in some new highly-academic algorithms O(N polylog(N))

Could you point me to this algorithm? I am not aware of any BFT solution other Lamport BFT.
How many of the TheDAO Curator members are lawyers?

Contracts are agreements that are meant to be legally enforceable. The enforcer has always been the King, a local governmental authority and a third party. The very concept of a contract assumes the neutral third party. That third party is to interpret the contract, identify potential scoundrels, nullify illegal contracts and generally make sure everyone isn't playing games. Smart contracts seek to sidestep that ancient structure by replacing the neutral third party with an inflexible machine. Good luck with that.

Contract language is also meant as a manifestation of intent. Smart contracts seek a perfect manifestation, dismissing all notions of imperfect knowledge or misunderstanding. Typos rarely matter in real contracts. Intent can trump language where appropriate. But in smart contracts typos are everything. Good luck with that too.
The US is surrounded by two friendly nations and two big fuckoff oceans.

I question the need for 'defense'.
Untrue. Drug dealers often fund rehabilitation groups; good way to find customers, double profits, identify rats, etc. True rehab centers would never take funds from a dealer, and would be happy to go out of business because there were no more addicts in the world.

Refugees in the EU would not need Doctors Without Borders; in Turkey, refugees will need Doctors Without Borders.

If the EU wants to help Doctors Without Borders' mission, then it needs to take refugees and help them, not make more refugees Doctors Without Borders to help.
Because if you used bare IP addresses

1) a site or email service couldn't change hosting providers (and hence IP) without breaking all links and bookmarks

2) you couldn't have more than one site or email namespace hosted on the same machine, since the server wouldn't be able to distinguish them

Having a layer of indirection gives you much more flexibility.

And if you don't really care about the name, you can a domain for less than $2/y on one of the new TLDs.
Recognizing Bad Advice
What happens when a judge interprets the spirit of the T&C and not the letter? Is that something that a judge has the right to do?

I understand that this would most likely kill "smart contracts" (since they can just be overridden by existing legal systems...), but wouldn't it be a possible path to reclaiming the assets?
I don't know, but I figure they must know because otherwise they'd think you're shoplifting too.
As a software engineer everything here rings true to me.

Use as simple of tools as possible when programming and offer many ways for mere humans to change code and review correctness and review, approve and roll back critical transactions.

But this sounds effectively like the status quo with credit cards and Kickstarter.

So I'm not sure what a blockchain adds other than a different platform and maintainers than the existing financial and group purchasing corporations.
Also, worth mentioning this article as an opinion:

http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2016/06/13/stop-using-jwt-fo...

Edit: Title is Stop using JWT for sessions
If the writer is confident in their legal team why do they remain unnamed?
Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but I suspect the differences of opinion between you and the person you replied to may be due to age differences.

I was a nerd in high school and was picked on when I wasn't being out-right ignored. My college experience was noticeably better, but the stereotypical extroverted "jock" still had me and my friends beat in the dating pool and other social circles. By graduation I too would have agreed that "Your local handsome extroverted bartender who can't even operate a computer takes a higher precedence than you".

However, ten years later into a highly technical career, I am constantly amazed at how beautiful my coworkers' partners are and how much respect they command from their social circles. It turns out that by the mid-thirties intelligence, and the success that comes with it, are incredibly attractive qualities. Most of these coworkers were introverted outcasts like me in school, but it's hard to ostracize someone in the prime of their life with a beautiful spouse, intelligent children, and a six figure salary.
Amusingly, Gun Sirer and others anticipated this just yesterday:

http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/17/thoughts-on-the-dao...

"What's a Hack When You Don't Have a Spec?

First of all, I'm not even sure that this qualifies as a hack. To label something as a hack or a bug or unwanted behavior, we need to have a specification of the wanted behavior.

We had no such specification for The DAO. There is no independent specification for what The DAO is supposed to implement. Heck, there are hardly any comments in The DAO code that document what the developers may have been thinking at the time they wrote the code.

The "code was its own documentation," as people say. It was its own fine print. The hacker read the fine print better than most, better than the developers themselves.

Had the attacker lost money by mistake, I am sure the devs would have had no difficulty appropriating his funds and saying "this is what happens in the brave new world of programmatic money flows." When he instead emptied out coins from The DAO, the only consistent response is to call it a job well done."
That's completely unfair. China is a huge importer of CO2 emissions. Where do you think the dollars behind all those plastic toys and electric components come from?

Statistics like these don't account for a countries carbon footprint relative to population; there's no way that Poland, with a GDP of $13k per capita, produces fewer CO2 emissions than South Africa with a GDP of $6k per capita. But it is likely that South Africa has more manufacturing and mining operations to support exports.
Simple contracts then are only as scalable, reliable, and secure as the code that runs off the blockchain.

Arguably, that defeats the whole purpose because it is then who controls the code (since it is no longer decentralized), controls the contract.

If I'm reading this right (I'm not 100% sure of that), this is the equivalent almost of not running a blockchain at all (if the idea is taken to its finality).

Storing the who and the what of contracts has never really been the issue, its been the execution and the honoring of the contract that man has not yet solved.

But centralizing the code that runs the contracts, and taking it off the blockchain doesn't sound like the way to do it.
If smart contracts are dead are there any assets to reclaim?
> Regarding languages, that is why commercial tools get all the nice goodies

I mostly don't need the "nice goodies" - which why I don't but them (and I am prepared to buy when I do, or to show support to the developer. I love JetBrains).

> no one can make a living of selling improved tooling to FOSS developers

Good thing FOSS developers can improve their own tooling; they are developers after all. Freeware and Demoware are hardly comparable to Free & Open Source Software except on price. As a developer, I am empowered when I can fix bugs in my tools and submit a pull request upstream (happened to me 3 times this year alone). What do you do if you run into a bug in Borland Turbo Pascal or QBasic? If you have the energy, submit a bug report and hope it get fixed 4 versions down the line.
Somebody put in a proposal to run the .org registry at cost for $2/domain/year a while back, but it was rejected because their infrastructure was only something like triple-redundant Postgres instead of quintuple-redundant Oracle. This is known as a "beauty contest"; ICANN picks whoever has the most over-engineered solution and when you cross that with "cost plus" thinking leftover from the military-industrial complex you end up paying $9.
I don't understand how this is even comparable to "banking". It seems like more a replacement for wire transfers. I don't see how it changes the face of investment or the flow of capital.
Flexconvergence,+el+futuro+de+las+ciudades+de+conocimiento
A great tip.

Yet I'm keeping in mind that it isn't doesn't guaranteed to work for me. Everyone is wired different. I'm fallible and perfectly capable of misidentifying something as procrastination. I'm uncomfortable with "procrastination"s connotation of moral failing. One person's procrastination is another's Just in Time execution.
They verify your phone number.
As I understand it: The goal of the fork is to freeze the DAO account starting just before the 'split' drain (at the blockchain level). And then figure out a long term solution (possibly using another fork to return all ETH to the original contributing accounts dissolving the DAO?).

The ability of a core of developers and miner to exercise their will over the system like this is alarming though.

https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/17/critical-update-re-dao-...
There's another story of a dinner with Thiel in George Packer's The Unwinding (https://www.amazon.com/Unwinding-Inner-History-New-America/d...). The vignettes about Thiel are a small but interesting part of a great book.
Fair point. I think the legal situation is much more complex than the "The Attacker" is trying to portray it though.
Unless the attacker is an author of DAO or Ethereum I fail to see where the con would be.
By your logic, we should in fact blame China for bringing upon themselves this burden by offering low manufacturing prices? Without low prices, "western" consumers would not create such demand.

Climate change is absolutely the fault of China, India, Russia and others. Perhaps they should issue basic income or increase their minimum wage.
I think that interesting topic is "will we create programs as text for a long time?". Projection IDE seems to stall.
Some time ago I was thinking about visual query language for databases (domain-specific) and composed this list of text advantages:

1. Version control systems (VSC) out of the box. Software developers have been using safe source code tracking for many decades. Since queries are the main tools for data analysts, they should be treated the same way, but the development of all VCS features in a custom query editor is not economically viable.

2. Portability. Text queries can be written even on a whiteboard and a notepad. One of the great advantages of text queries is that they are unambiguous: there are no hidden parts in a text query.

3. Detachable. Text queries can be run in different warehouses. They should not depend on identifiers, conditions, and environmental variables.

4. Fragmentation. An analyst can extract some feature from a query and partly pass it to his colleagues.

5. Embedding. Software developers easily can embed queries into autotests, side subsystems can embed query parts into their code or resources.

6. Specification. DSQL can be a part of a system’s applied programming interface (API) for third party systems if DSQL specification is precise enough.
Correct me if I'm wrong but the benefits sound very similar to a good old fashion cookie except that you're not limited by 4kb.
I see parallels here with UI code that is very imperative in nature, but FRP and similar approaches are showing great promise in creating abstractions for reasoning.
If there's no bank you have an account at within a reasonable distance, you might not have a choice. Obviously I use free ATMs when I can, but how much control do you have when a cabbie is demanding money?
This is a great idea -- text is much faster to read, but watching a speaker is much more information-dense due to body language and intonation.

This would be a fun hack. Looks like the YouTube caption data is available via API: https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/captions/downl...
> Cut off trade with China

Why not? Prices would rise marginally if at all. There'd be some supply issues for a while.

It was ok to sanction Iran, Iraq and South Africa and so on but not now in this globalised world? We put up with any old abuse from Israel and China because they're approved in some way?

I'm no diplomat, but there should be some consequences of significance.
Hopefully you'll share some photos!
What do those examples have to do with the parent not understanding the Chinese Government's cowardice and fear?

I don't regard it as insulated thinking at all. It makes perfect sense to be bewildered by such a disgusting display of cowardice and irrational fear by China.

Someone on a public forum says: X nation is doing a bad thing; one of the responses inevitably is: yeah but the US did a bad thing. There should be a 'law' named for that attempted topic distraction in public forums.
If you've studied O-1 recipients in non-business's categories, I think founders have it hard. I certainly know of some recipients in other industries and honestly the burden of proof was just not as difficult.
I think it is relevant because I would be willing to take a quality of life hit to be in the "top 1% of 1%" that I wouldn't take to make $200k. I make more than $200k, but I suspect that I'm nowhere close to the top 1 bps.
This is not an argument that will win in court, the actions are not equitable. And, it is probably still criminal even if you win your civil suit. It's all just posturing in my opinion, someone made their money shorting ether and is just messing around right now.
It's not like honoring contracts is unsolved.

Bookies have been doing it forever with questionable effectiveness.

PayPal offers arbitration on stranger to stranger sales. Again with questionable fairness in tough cases.

Kickstarter et al are doing a pretty good job as arbitrators and collecting money and issuing refunds more or less fairly.
I know that feeling all too well :-|.
To me it sounds like the attacker just hates the idea of ethereum for some reason.
That's essentially right. Law schools have generally not focused on providing any sort of training for the actual practice of law. The model of education established by the elite law schools and imitated to a large extent by most of the non-elite ones is focused on teaching how to "think like a lawyer", which is probably better seen as how to think like an appellate judge. The elite law schools for the most part offer little in the way of practical training. Some schools have electives, taught generally by adjuncts or lower-status "clinical" professors, that are aimed more at practical skills, though these tend to focus on aspects of litigation or administrative practice rather than various sorts of other areas of legal practice.

I don't think things are too different as you get to the less elite law schools, though some of them may attempt to prepare students to pass the local state bar exam. One reason for this is that even at the lower tier faculty tend to be drawn from the top graduates of the top schools, who excelled in the traditional program of elite legal education and thus are disinclined to see anything questionable about it (I suspect).
>> There was no point at which brains stopped evolving.

Evolution operates on a different timescale. For all intents and purposes, our physical structure hasn't evolved since reading became widespread in the population perhaps a couple hundred years ago.
That's one of the reasons why I like the pomodoro technique. You can always narrow even the most complex issues into smaller pieces that can be accomplished in a short sprint.
Somehow, I had never even heard of auction theory. Thanks!

This has to be the only comments section on the internet where I actually get smarter by participating. :)
It is clearly theft and whatever legal mumbo jumbo he provides doesn't change that. I'd personally say the claims that this is somehow legal is the con, but I agree it's not entirely clear.
How much of that is just western stuff being manufactured there?
VR right now has a lot of first generation problems. It's expensive as a peripheral, and until PSVR comes out it is only available to people with gaming PCs. The resolution is too low, the headsets are kinda awkward, and most of the content available now barely rises above the level of tech demo. That and we still don't have a better solution to movement than teleportation.

Still, I think for first person-gaming experiences, VR is the future, and that for the next generation of gamers who will likely grow up experiencing first-person gaming in VR first, the idea of anything else will seem pretty silly.
> contracts the courts won't enforce, even though they are otherwise legal and valid, because it is unfair.

is there some kind of common law that would indicate what sort of contract would be deemed unfair? Because a lot of contracts seems to be drafted in favour of one party, and the expense of the other, simply because of power imbalance. Employment non-compete contracts tend to have this property. What about assymptotic licensing like those of software/service EULA (e.g., where they have a clause that says they can terminate your service for whatever reason they desire).