skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, the purpose of mining gives Bitcoin value.

The value of gold and silver is that it is a store of value. In order to acquire those gold or silver, it required doing expeditions to search for where they are, it required heavy machinery to mine it out of the earth, it required human labor paid to mine them, it required factories to process them to purity, it required transporting them, etc...

All of that WORK is stored in the value of the gold or the silver to make it rare. This is why they are real money. Bitcoin digitally replicates this using computing power. This is important because essentially it ensures that a BTC has stored value. It is still currency but it ensure banks and the Federal Reserve cannot just print them digitally whenever they see fit.

"Bitcoin developed an ingenious method of making coin creation take computational power, thus imposing a cost on creating new coins, and allowing them to limit the total circulation of coins. These measures give Bitcoin an intrinsic value (the cost of creating a new coin) and make inflation impossible by setting a hard limit on total currency issue."
Never treating anything as a black box and learning the implementation details of every single bit of the framework I'm using sounds like a good educational exercise, I guess, but not a great way to deliver a useful application in a reasonable amount of time.
This (at least this specific comment thread) isn't a discussion on if belief in a religion is justified, but rather the acknowledgment that if you believe you have found the answer to life, the universe, whatever, you would almost certainly feel obligated to pass it on.
Ask HN: Does anyone else feel like Rails screwed them up professionally?
7 years experience. 5 with Rails. I've recently booked a gig using C#, and I feel like a college freshman, pretty lost on how to structure the project, what to name things, and general architecture.

I feel like Rails really screwed me long-turn and it's like now I'm actually writing code again.

Anyone else feel this way or this just me?
I wish I'd noticed how bad the formatting was on that. I don't see a way I can edit it to fix it now.
not all databases require rigid schemas. a filesystem, for instance.
I just wanted to say that I love these type of postmortem stories. Thanks for sharing!
A new vinyl album is typically $20 a disk. That's more expensive than a digital album, but a lot of times new vinyls come with download codes for MP3s these days as well.
Both Machine Learning (ML) and Probabilistic Programming (PP) work towards building a mathematical object (model), which takes observation as input and produces prediction as output. Both ML and PP are about finding the parameters of the model, which requires bits of information.

Main differences:

1. The type of bits of information used to find parameters of the model is one main difference.

In ML, information used to "train" the model is called "training set" and usually consists of the observation-prediction pairs (or just observations, for unsupervised learning), which are of the same kind as desired observation-prediction pair. In other words, with ML you "fit" your model using the same type of data, which you will use the model for. At least, this is the most common scenario of ML.

In the problems, which PP specializes in, this is not as prevalent. For example, with PP we may often see a model which predicts where the planet is, while the model is itself trained using apples falling from the tree.

2. The type of output is the second difference.

ML focuses on producing a single value of the most likely prediction (Maximum a posteriori estimate), while PP produces a probability distribution of the predicted quantity.

Arguably, the probability distribution of the prediction is more useful for any problem where we need to _use_ the prediction for some decision-making process because then we can calculate the expectation of (mis)decision-cost over possible values of prediction.

Practically, many decision-making situations can be transformed into _estimating_ some quantity (instead of taking some arbitrary action) and ML model can be built to directly produce prediction, which is at the same time a decision.

3. The speed of prediction is the third difference.

ML model, after the "slow" training phase, produces a mathematical object, which is a straight function and can be very quickly calculated for any observation to produce prediction (think: forward-pass in a deep-learning network).

With PP, with most common models, you need to go through a "slow" inference (MCMC-like) process for every new observation to produce a prediction. It is possible, in some cases, to design a probabilistic model such that it only needs to be fitted once and can then be transformed into an analytical expression (function) producing predictions from observations.

As the result of these differences, people applying PP and ML are of different characters :) Still, I expect ML and PP to converge over time. Specifically, I notice that:

- ML-models are used to represent probabilistic distributions in probabilistic models; and

- trained ML-models are being interpreted in terms of their information content (in probabilistic terms, as if ML-model is probabilistic model).
The question is a matter of trust in the correctness of any such ledger.

Bitcoin only exists as entries in a trustless ledger. The trustless ledger of gold is physical possession of that gold -- that's the only way that you can verify possession (or spend freely) without a mutually trusted third party.
+1 for Siraj Raval's YouTube channel. Videos are quick, entertaining and give a good overview of a lot of ai/ml concepts. Some of the content is a little over the top (i.e. memes & breaking out into song), but overall really well put together.
I was very surprised when I discovered it :)

Looks like they used to develop all kinds of tech for sound record and playback.
Oh hey! Following you on youtube. Fan of the wiki. Didn't know you were on HN too.
ACC doesn't build upon the hypothesis that CO2 reduces the energy emission. The underpinning is the greenhouse effect whereby gasses, particularly CO2 prevent heat absorbed by the Earth's surface from radiating back out into space. Only about 26% of the Sun's energy is reflected by clouds or the atmosphere. CO2 concentration increases heat retention but not cloud albedo(reflectiveness) nor atmospheric reflectiveness.

Cloud formation is not related to CO2. CO2 is the primary factor driving the greenhouse effect. In fact research is beginning to show that a warmer planet may have lower cloud cover [1][2]. There is no cloud controversy, you are literally making that up.

[1] https://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1912448,...
[2]https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/clouds/question.jsp
Here’s the tune for June
Accelerating Growth Through Facebook's Rotational Engineering Program
We are making a user curated visual search engine to learn anything most optimally. Here is a mind map for Deep Learning for example :

https://learn-anything.xyz/machine-learning/deep-learning
Oh sorry, thanks for the correction, I really did confidently believe it was the final scene in the pilot for some reason. Wish I could delete my comment.
House panel votes to split Air Force, create new U.S. Space Corps
I love bugs like these. Make it crash is often the hardest part of solving any bug and without this you'd have never known. There is one nasty bit to this story though: the NSOC was running outdated firmware on their Cisco's and wouldn't have known about it if an outside party had not alerted them to this fact. That's pretty sloppy on their end.
I'd love something like this for personal finance, especially catering to these two things:

- Paying off debt (especially student loans)

- Saving for retirement
To be fair, that's my impression of a number of people who introduce themselves as 'entrepreneurs'.

The people who run a business, or are building something or are otherwise working, will say that. People who say they're in 'business' or are an 'entrepreneur' are the ones who haven't figured out exactly what they're up to.
Docker Monitoring: 5 Methods for Monitoring Java Applications in Docker
I still can't believe they looked at their framework reaching escape velocity and gradually becoming the thing to learn and decided to turn around and announce a backwards-incompatible framework with no migration path that took away two-way binding, the marquee feature that sold everyone on it. Of course they backpedaled on some of that but the damage was done.
What are truly anonymous cryptocurrencies? Dash, monero zcash Bitcoin ethereum?
Which crypto is truly anonymous? Which of the following crypto currencies provide true anonymity?

Dash
Monero
Anoncoin
ShadowCash
ZeroCash
Other (please specify by replying)

What makes a crypto not anonymous as they are all just merely public keys/numbers?
> everyday human belief like "vaccines cause autism"..

A bit funny that you have to tell this, considering where this originated from..
> When the music is good, I'm still moved by a 64 kb/s encoding using 8 bit uLaw, played through laptop speakers.

I'm not an audiophile, but I disagree with your assertion. I did love going to concerts in the 90's and early 00's. In February of 1993, I saw Stone Temple Pilots opening for Megadeth at the Fargo Civic Memorial Auditorium (not the Fargo Dome, think bigger high school gym). I liked their album, but was pretty much there to see Megadeth.

When I heard STP in concert (an frankly its not the best venue particularly in ND in Feb) including the megaphone in Crackerman, it blew me away. You can feel the range, and I loved their music ever since. I will say that the CD and mp4 are loved because of a memory more than how they sound.
No, I don't think I missed the point.

My point was that he was unnecessarily tying the listener's activeness/seriousness/whatever with/about the music to the medium it was on.

I totally get the point about there being different levels of interaction with music. I just don't think that listening to music on vinyl equates to you being a more active listener. For some it might help, I suppose, but I think it is far from universal. Also, the implication was (as I read it), that if you listen on vinyl you are tons more likely to be an active listener than someone who is using a more modern medium, and I just don't think that's true.
Let me see if I understand correctly.

When there's a claim, you send all members a bill for their share of the claim plus your fee. If there are no claims, you don't get paid. You're incentivized to pay out so you get your fees. But not too often or premiums will sky-rocket and you'll lose customers. Is that right?

What happens if there is a spike in claims and everyone leaves at once?
No, actually, a lot of term policies basically bet that you die after the policy expires.

Whole life policies make the bet you are describing. They are a lot more expensive than term policies and you can borrow against them because you are basically putting money into a fund in some sense.

The vast majority of life insurance is absolutely a bet. Many, many life insurance policies are only good if you die on this flight to New Zealand or if you die in a car wreck or if you die in the next five years while still quite young. People buy these things because they are cheap as all fuck because they are long shot bets. Most people won't die on their plane flight or in the next five years while in their 20s or 30s.

And the last line in the comment to which you are replying makes it crystal clear that I have, in fact, heard of life insurance.
Show HN: ABCWeb – A Go Web Framework
I don't know if you've looked at what gets sent out, but the e-mails sent for the Giveaways are extremely spammy.

I get that you probably added it somewhere in the giveaway text, but from a post somewhere, it was indicated the giveaways were more to garner attention, not as a profit-making venture. It turned me off completely when I started getting those. It gave me a negative impression on both Scott's Cheap Flights and on any companies that started sending me cold emails.

Maybe you can be more selective in your partners, or perhaps work with the partners in what gets sent out. I'm very judicious in what I let get my attention, and seeing these kinds of random sales pitches with no actual value proposition was annoying.

I went back to the giveaway and found the e-mail consent in the tiny text under the consent checkmark for signing up, so I can give you that for having the warning there now. It was not noticed when I signed up, however.
I wound not be surprised if he is the product of a Math Circle:a nice place to stretch one's mathematical abilities while retaining the bragging rights of never having formally studied math in college.
> You'd have to install the TestPilot extension first, and then the Containers addon.

No you wouldn't …? Firefox has had support for profiles as long as I've been using it, which goes back to the Phoenix days. It tries to pretend that you can't run it with multiple profiles simultaneously, but you can (`firefox-bin -profilemanager`).
Catching Up on AWS Announcements from Early 2017
Designing Genderless Emoji? It Takes More Than Just Losing the Lipstick
Exchange bitcoin with real money and ask yourself the same questions.

> And, we don't need a digital currency. We already have a bunch of them [...]

That's a bit enraging to me. I feel it's in the same class of arguments with things like earth is flat -- we don't want a round one, blacks are not humans -- they should be happy we grant them slavery. The status quo is our normality.

> backed by a sovereign entity

Which one? I had savings to buy several apartments but in a few years those savings were worth a lunch. That was a long time ago. But as of now my income depends on US, EU, Syria, Turkey etc crisis and hell knows what other stuff I don't even hear about on the news.

As a guy lacking both bitcoins and real money they both weight as a surprisingly similar amount of crap.
I'd suggest to the mods that all threads about health insurance be removed and perhaps moved to a new post. Though an interesting discussion, Aaron's article explicitly does not address healthcare. The dynamics of healthcare are so different than P&C, it is a wildly off-topic discussion.
Help me
I need help figuring out files that my bf has made into another file type then encrypted i believe they are originally pics and vids. Im sry to post this on your site here but i dont know who else to ask. Sorry. I believe hes been cheating and need to know. I can send them to you if you can help me. I need to see these files when they are back to the original form pls. Thx so much pls help.
With maybe the exception of a lock, I wonder if that fear is justified without knowing the catastrophic failure rate of the "smart" functionality. There are plenty of ways that these devices can save you from the failure of "dumb" devices by keeping you aware of the status of your home.

For example which scenario is more common:

-A smart thermostat mistakenly turns off your heat in the dead of winter while you are on vacation causing your pipes to burst.

-A smart thermostat lets you know that the heat is not working in the dead of winter while you are on vacation because the furnace died which allows you to fix the problem before your pipes burst.

I don't know the answer to that, but I am not sure why we should assume the first scenario is more common without any real evidence.
I'd also add that ever since I figured this out I've wanted to invent an ebook reader that actually gave you a third dimension, multiple (say ~20) eink pages with perhaps an additional tactile slider on the binding as you progress through the book.

Maybe it'll become feasible as the price for flexible eink displays drops.
With a single wiretap order, US authorities listened in on 3.3M phone calls
I am fairly comfortable with doing basic matrix work in MATLAB and I am fairly comfortable using Python, but I have found matplotlib to be quite hard to get the hang of. Esp when you add it to pandas which is also slightly idiosyncratic in its own way, and then all of these are different from numpy, which is a mess of its own.
I mentioned this on the previous HN topic, the way the heating temperature is being controlled doesn't look correct to me. In all the boilers I've used the dial the servo is turning adjusts the temperature of the water being sent through the heating loop (to a blower or radiators) - this is not the heating thermostat. Generally you set this once and don't need to adjust it again, the thermostat does the work of turning the boiler on and off depending on when heat is required.

Similarly the dial above adjusts the domestic hot water temperature, while the system is running. Again, you rarely need to change it once its set to a temperature you are happy with.

Maybe I'm not understanding how this boiler works?
Now let's see if we can solve one of /r/whatisthisthing's most longstanding mysteries: What does the J stand for on this blanket?

https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/58o43m/hel...
What is the secret to networking? Make it about them
The stage for your tanlent, make and win
It doesn't work like that. The null hypothesis is that natural processes fully account for observed temperature data. In order to generate enough thrust to escape the gravity of the null hypothesis, you must do the following, according to Karl Popper (cribbed from here [1]):

1) Describe a difficulty or gap in scientific knowledge, a "general problem", clearly defined, and show that the problem needs to be addressed.

2) Formulate a hypothesis, a "tentative theory", addressing the general problem, stated as clearly as possible in the language of science, which is mathematics.

3) Try to invalidate the tentative theory, and apply a certain scientific ethic described by Richard Feynman in his famous essay "Cargo Cult Science"[2]

I'm not sure the "general problem" has even been established. From 1880 to 2015 the Earth's temperature has gone from 288 K to 288.8 K, a 0.3% increase. So first of all you need to prove that the Earth system is not able to keep the climate stable.

Then you need to prove that recent increases in temperature are fundamentally different from past increases in the same system, i.e. the current interglacial period of the last 10,000 years. Again, this is not conclusive at all.

Then you need to prove that CO2 plays a huge part in the recent temperature changes. Correlation does not imply causation. Two independent variables can both increase and you have not proven that they are causally linked (beyond the first-order effects of course). All we have so far are computer models which, so far, are no more than best-fit lines on observed data.

In order for a computer model to be a good enough piece of evidence to favor dropping the null hypothesis and accepting the basis of the model, you would have to leave the model alone and see how well it predicts climate going forward. So far the models have not done well predicting actual climate [3].

QED.

[1] https://www.scribd.com/document/23499288/Lord-Monckton-Caugh...

[2] http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

[3] https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/06/28/173948/
Here is the direct link to the lab:

http://advanced-hindsight.com/startup-lab/

It seems we are running up against the deadline, probably should have posted this sooner.

Advanced hindsight is 20/20
Love the simplistic design of the website to give the information right away! Can you where are you sourcing the data from? I've playing with Flask and Scrapy yesterday and love to build something like it. What I have in mind, [Complete disclosure - I'm a total novice right now] Scrapy to get the data and Flask to integrate it on the web with a Boostrap front end.
What an incredible response, have you not read it yourself?

"Our subscribers are too important to us to ever sell their information to someone else. We never have and never will sell users information like that. Our only source of income is subscriptions and occasional advertisements in the free emails. Ruining our reputation to make a few extra bucks would be an extremely stupid decision on our end."

Is at complete odds with:

"With that said, we do run promotions with partners where we give away awesome vacation packages (Mexico and Tokyo recently). If anyone signs up for one of these promotions they are agreeing to the terms and conditions, which clearly state that by signing up for the giveaway the email address will be distributed to all of the partners involved in the giveaway (typically 4-5 other companies)."

You literally sell their information to advertisers (oh no, sorry, your "partners") to make a buck. Acknowledge it, don't preface it with PR bull.
What do you see as the difference between the first and the second paragraph? The fact that you only do it with people entering your promotions? Because that's still your users information.

Yes it's in your TOS, you are still selling personal information to third parties and their unknown partners.
I replied to one of his emails and we had a nice back and forth even laughing at a pic response I sent him. He seems like a good person and I signed up for his premium service. I was already very interested in his premium svc but that interaction really sealed the deal for me.
> It is slower. My livereloading browsersync ng1 apps were faster and more fun to work on.

Wasn't performance meant to be the whole raison d'etre of the rewrite?
I really hope USDS can help introduce interdepartmental digital transfers within the federal government.

To give an example of how frustrating it can be... I went through the visa -> green card -> citizenship process. No two departments talk to one another, and when they do they seemingly transmit information on paper which is then transcribed by hand introducing errors/typos.

For example USCIS does not talk to the SSA digitally at all. I filled in a single form which was used for both my Visa/Green Card and to apply for a Social Security Card on my behalf, my name was spelt correctly on the visa, but got typo-ed during entry into the SSA's system (then the emphasis placed on me to prove their error, even though other US government departments don't have the typo, including any official ID I hold or naturalisation certificate).

Additionally when you earn citizenship the USCIS won't tell anyone. You have to get your piece of paper and physically go tell each department one by one about the change, otherwise nothing will happen.

Why doesn't the federal government just have a big database? Or failing that, why does one department not electronically transfer records to another department? Why are people still hand re-entering information already held digitally?
It should be, but people often forget whether we're currently in standard or DST.

I usually just hedge my bets and write Eastern. :)
How Yoot Saito Designed Seaman for Sega Dreamcast
I think s·he's talking about cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, ethereum, etc...
Seems like a catch-22 of adoption. Not worth the effort to develop on unless it is ubiquitous enough? I'm sure there will be growing (security) pains as well. Also not sure exactly how AMD allows development for the PSP (specific vendor keys?).
> They want exactly the opposite of what makes HK HK

China is what made HK HK... It was china's economic boom that enriched and modernized china.
I wonder how they're going to wedge DRM into them. /s

(Perhaps you have to be of a certain age to get this...)
RPi 3-like Le Potato SBC Showcases Fast Amlogic S905X SoC