skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> because a fundamental problem in Solidity

Problems in Solidity are a systemic risk faced by all contracts and are thus not something that can be hedged within the system.

Correspondingly, fixes to VM bugs are the sort of thing that the hard fork mechanism is good for. Hard forks that fix flaky VM behavior are uncontroversial.

While there are many applications of insurance products, the use case I am referring to above has to do with specifically insuring the expected behavior of a smart contract.

Suppose I write a smart contract that "rounds up" a user's transactions for a day and donates the rest to charity. I describe the contract verbally as "This contract lists all the transactions your account made that day, rounds to the nearest ETH, and donates the difference to account xyz which is associated with the American Red Cross fundraising division.

There are several aspects of this contract to verify. First, does the logic in the code do what the verbal description says it does. Are there any mathematical errors? Can it run more than once in given 24 hour period? Is the id associated with the Red Cross actually linked to that organization?

If a trusted third party vetted the contract and claimed that its claims were true and that 800 people had used it that day to donate, I'd likely consider it worthwhile to trust that contract.

Similarly, if a third party offered an insurance smart contract that would charge me a tiny amount of Ether to guarantee that the contract would behave as expected within a 10 year period, I might feel comfortable buying that contract. If that third party was unknown to me I might rely on recommendations from others, etc.

The point is that trust builds upon trust. One sort of vetting can help buttress other layers of vetting. This is no different than trust in meatspace, only the characteristics of the blockchain make some kinds of trust easier to realize.
I don't think your personal attacks lie within the standards set by this community. There are many ways of disagreeing, even vigorously, without being a jackass. It's discrediting to yourself.
One of my friends was a software developer for the billing software for a cell provider, so I had some "inside scoop" in learning that...
Bitcoin can be mixed. Monero does the mixing on chain from what I understand. Zcash is not something I would say is a good idea because it relies on the initial keys being destroyed to know that more is not being created as well as being hugely premined.
Coinbase UAHF/UASF FAQ
Exactly. You need overwhelming consensus to change the rules safely.

Bitcoin is currently in a state of disarray because groups of developers, miners, industry and users disagree on fundamental aspects of the scaling debate.

There are no fewer than 4 competing Bitcoin fork proposals on the horizon, each one with an unknown number of supporters. The only thing we can measure accurately is "signaling" in blocks, where miners declare their intention to follow one fork when the designated time comes: https://coin.dance/blocks

However, there is such a thing as "false signaling" for strategic reasons, and hashing power can rapidly shift (or just appear, if new mining rigs come online) in favor of a different proposal at any time.

This is indeed a deeply flawed voting system. In contrast, Ethereum still has a capable leadership with sufficient consensus that they can propose and execute hard-forks whenever they feel it's needed, without this level of uncertainty and drama.
The MD will not even give a public advice public about sensitive subjects.
That will depend heavily on the particular domain for what can and can't change. Changing names might be fine in some areas of finance but not others. I know in some medical stuff you can't change names, even when a person gets married and changes their name. When you view an old script for instance, it has to display their name as it was (and as it was printed) at the time the script was created.

Nailing down this stuff is where you really appreciate a good architect.
Graceful degradation working though.
I was thinking the same thing - for purposes of making a record of the evidence and to ensure some forensic integrity (as well as only obtaining local data) a USB connection is the best approach.

FWIW, my laptop and phone were searched going into Canada and there was no special technology used - the officer just made me unlock them and hand them back to him.
Show HN: Dictsh – An extensible dictionary/encyclopedia shell
Having fished Pollock I can confirm that they are typically riddled with nematodes, not sure why, perhaps it's their diet - the article notes they are "ground fish" which might be a euphemism for bottom feeders.

Generally, I think the historical low-value of some fish is a product of fishermen being enmeshed with the markets and communities where the fish they catch is sold. We have lost that for the most part, and therefore lower quality fish becomes salable, particularly if it is heavily processed (hence the fast-food chains being the first to pick it up).

But yeah, you're eating worms buddy.
"I am upset because someone working at a company wrote a blog post to share their design work on a new bottle."

What's the value of sneering at someone else's work like this? Why the mean tone?
Ask the CTO of any Fortune 100 company what they're doing to mitigate such an outage.

What do you think they will answer?

Option A: cross-region replication, regular backups, and secondary service provider failover plan

Option B: decentralize everything on people's laptops
Exactly. Our lack of awareness of political, social, and economic consequences is far more of a problem than any hypothetical paperclip demon.

AI isn't terrifying.

AI built with our current values is an horrific prospect.
I've never understood why some people say a license is needed for something on which patents have expired. What's the legal basis, or is it bluff?

I can understand that copyright exists in the documentation that describes AXI, but that copyright covers only their documentation and not your own implementation (or is some derivation claimed?). I can understand that trademark might exist in the name "AXI", so don't use that name. Trade secrets seem to be moot, if you're not associated with whoever is keeping the secret. If none of the above apply, what basis is there for demanding a license?
Yes.

http://www.tridentseafoods.com/Products/Detail?pid=25546ab0-...

http://www.ljsilvers.com/news-events/item/117-introducing-ha...

If its some kind of white fish and its not named, its frequently something like pollock.
Only time I've encountered something like this was OK GO's All Is Not Lost music video released in 2011, it came with a warning that you could skip but then the performance were so bad you could not enjoy it.

it was available at http://www.allisnotlo.st/ but now features an error message about google dropping python 2.5
Do you have examples of this, or just hearsay?
I think we're veering into pedantic silliness, but "the person I talked to on Monday" is an identity. (Created on the fly when I speak with them on Monday.) This isn't always a useful identity, but perhaps a relevant point in a discussion of identity vs trust.
> If the government wants to have fiber in rural Pennsylvania, it should build it. If voters won't countenance raising taxes enough to pay for that, well that's your answer. What it shouldn't do is try to end-run around the market, e.g. by forcing some customers to subsidize other customers, or imposing industry-specific taxes, or trying to get companies to build infrastructure by fiat. That just robs Peter to pay Paul.

The nuance you miss by way of your hypothetical: representation is not evenly distributed. Paul could be in part of a district that doesn't have good access, but be screwed by Peter and those with access, should they be clustered in an area with good access and vote the tax increase down then.

There literally are situations where internet is great on one block and shit on the other.

I'm well versed in the muni/telco/cable wars. It's not quite as simple as your folksy, yet trite hypothetical. It's basically the same tale as many others in American history: FU GOT MINE.

If you want to get into it from that perspective, Peter AND Paul's relatives were robbed years ago by the government at the request of the elite, often through violence.

A bridge to nowhere is an obvious, pointless, boon doggle. Wifi towers where people live, no matter how remote is something else.

Don't pedal naive nonsense.
> the difference between gender (a social construct) and sex (a physiological issue).

I yet have to see a proof it actually exists
People write this stuff off so fast. Here we have a parity developer, probably one of the most competent in the Ethereum ecosystem, and he screwed up to the tune of losing $30m of other people's money.

If HE can't get it right, what business do you have running around saying that anyone who can make a webpage can make a decentralized application?

We are playing with money. Dealing with attackers is not as simple as rebooting your server. Mistakes mean irreversible loss.

The devs in this industry are way over their heads and nobody is willing to admit it, because doing so destroys the entire core value prop of Ethereum, the poster child of the current bubble.
Next, they're going to announce they invented the 6-pack.
I confessed I skimmed most of the article, but am I fair if I say that it makes the point that electrification is just a nice-to-have feature for rich western hipsters? And nowhere does it raise the issue of the global environmental issues if millions and millions of additional combustion engines? At least there's cake...
>hope the move to WebExtensions lets Mozilla provide less opportunities for extension developers to shoot users in the foot.

If there are firefox users left to shoot.
Interestingly, about 18% of the researchers said "never", but these answers didn't influence the posted CIs. Any reasonable imputation (say, "never = 2350") would both stretch those intervals by a lot and still underestimate the expert consensus.
I'm asking how far we should go to 'not be racist' on principle, when doing so causes measurable material harm.

Is your answer genuinely "I would let myself and those I care about suffer an unlimited amount of harm in order to avoid the possibility of inflicting an unfair prejudice on any individual"? Because according to your stated position, anything less is "defending racism".

And I strongly suspect that, if it were put to the test, you really would not accept arbitrary harm in order to "not defend racism". And if so, then you're publicly declaring that you hold a 'virtuous' position, when in reality you do not. And that is the definition of 'virtue signalling'.
I'll go ahead and give my vote of confidence for all of "Every Frame a Painting" - for a complete newbie like me, it was an amazing introduction to film in general and understanding what to pay attention to, and why certain movies or directors are interesting or exciting to some people. Now I can't help but see more of these details everywhere.

The Akira Kurosawa one, the Ensemble Staging one, the Satoshi Kon one, the Wolf Children one are some of my favourites.

Nerdwriter1 does similar stuff but it's a bit more hit or miss for me. Some of it I love, versus some is a bit too out on a limb.
Running Stack Overflow on Dgraph
Not sure what you mean about Thailand and cars. Cars have been popular in popular areas like Bangkok and Udon Thani for well over a decade and it definitely isn't some new thing.

In 2015 they had the largest car industry in SE Asia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry_in_Thailan...
I miss patio11's posts on these things.
I think they must have recently fixed this, in Win 10 Pro at least. I installed Win 10 Pro yesterday, then Chrome and it did not automatically pin itself. Actually, if I remember correctly it even had a message at one point during the install describing how to pin it.
Ask HN: Question for all you folks who do hiring
I run an interview company called Skilled Inc. (https://www.skilledinc.com); on a daily basis we engage with technical talent currently on the job hunt who leverage our platform for technical evaluation and feedback. Many of our users do a fantastic job on their interviews.
I want to help these folks land jobs and I don't want to charge a penny for it.

Here's the question: If on a weekly basis I published the technical interview feedback of our top users (this would give you a complete breakdown of how the candidate performed in a rigorous 1 hour technical interview with a seasoned pro) + their contact info, would you be willing to reach out to them and potentially interview/hire them?

Really don't want to create a spammy situation here, but a user requested this feature, and I think it's brilliant.

PS: The publication of technical feedback would occur via LinkedIn.
Yes! This does in fact turn hiring on its head. Our vision for Lever is "Connect human potential to meaningful work." What we mean by that is that if we are able to help organize talent a bit better so that human potential is realized and the most meaningful work is done by talent that is the best fit for it, the world will collectively produce more value and people will be have a better experience of work itself.

Already, Lever believes that the talent acquisition is everyone in the company's job. This idea will become even more mainstream. While recruiters are only getting more valuable as hiring becomes more important, everyone in the company will think of the suite of hiring products as part of the tools that they use to do their job, not as the recruiting team's tool. Just like every knowledge worker in a company thinks of email or calendar as a tool to help them do their job, we believe hiring will be so much a part of everyone's job that they think Lever is a tool for them.

As well, we predict that 5 years from now, every company will be developing long standing relationships with potential, current, and future employees at scale. Talent acquisition will be about predicting attrition and strategically modeling future hiring for a company, anticipating pipeline development well in advance. There is a great model for this—sales is a function that has mastered this already. It will be a revolution in the strategic importance of talent acquisition into a key operational function at every company.
These aren't called "Solidity" and more importantly weren't built specifically to write a financial infrastructure of multiple hundreds of million dollars (though some of these languages are definitely used to manage money now)
you don't think 200m ico's counts as marketing traction?

This space doesn't atract incompetence, it atracts everyone. When you have tech thats so transparent and accessible, degrees and diplomas don't get to decide who can or cannot work on it. Plus, the world most experience blockchain developer has at most, 9 years of experience. That's not a lot of time to work out the kinks.
I'll build you a Zeppelin for 1.4m. Do you want plain glass, a prescription or a smart lens for the monocle?
> but pretty clearly trying to use insurance on the platform to insure against risk that are in some sense endemic to the platform seems quite misguided

Absolutely, the risk posed by a malfunctioning VM is a systemic risk that applies to the entire platform. So there is a chance that contracts impacted by a VM bug could be unreliable across the pre and post bugfix VM. The insurance contract could be one of these.

However, all things considered, I think it's interesting to contemplate a binary future "contract" about whether there will be a VM-bug-necessitated ETH hard fork in the next 30 days. What would the ideal exchange be to take a position on that future? I think it would probably be a different, but largely similar, smart contracts platform very similar to ETH, possibly even ETC.

Notably the meatspace financial system does a horrible job at identifying much less hedging against systemic risks. Identification is hard because the interactions between multiple regulatory systems and ambiguous and variable enforcement mechanisms are nearly impossible to model or to understand. It's like having a bunch of inter-related contracts all of which run on their own buggy VM.

The meatspace system seems very stable until you realize that it's highly brittle. It's impossible to meaningfully measure firm solvency risk, because the behavior of the "VM" is so unpredictable.
Those statistics aren't a reflection of who has the better drivers.

If you looked at the page, the road fatalities per 100,000 motor vehicles ranks Thailand somewhere in the middle out of all countries.
That's a valid point. But its hard to be humble when you work on something that was designed to topple national banks.
Almost every month, I think about William Gibson's talk of cardboard car bodies in The Peripheral, and wait to see it eventuate.

If the cars drive themselves and we are then less rushed as we can entertain/work during a drive, will lower speeds be accepted? And if they're safer as a result of the self-driving and lower speed, could a cheaper shell work? And even more so if price is a primary consideration and you don't own the car?

In Australia, a scrape on your car feels like the beginning of the end. In Europe, where people cram into tiny parks out of necessity, bumps and scrapes seem more like a fact of life.
Do you need imagination for Operant Learning and if so can Bacteria imagine
It would be easy enough to have a few "trusted" and "pinned" domains in the browser, or even certs... these pinned sites could then be used to do the cert lookup validation, which then runs against the SOA for the domain...

There's ways to do third party validation of a DNS entry.. only so much that it's the correct entry, since that's really all DV gives you anyway with automation. This is really only needed on first contact too.
yahoo as the default search engine is the same as google as the default search engine. It is a matter of money and selling to the highest bidder, though the move away from google was probably motivated by chrome marketshare.

This is a US only move, in the EU it's still google and mozilla got a truckload of criticism for this.
In the general sense processing of such learned behavior happens in the bacteria, the rodent and in humans. The processing in bacteria is simpler than the rodent. The rodents processing is simpler than the humans. But they all occur using chemical processes.

So if we can extend the courtesy of imagination to rodents why not extend it to bacteria as well?
Please ELI5. I thought contracts were fixed but they're going to deploy a "new" contract reverting back the owners? Contracts can change at any time?
It is fairly easy to disable this functionality. I have seen at least one app do this already.

https://www.google.com/amp/www.winhelponline.com/blog/edge-h...
Sounds like a good idea! Many items I end up stack overflow thinking "wish I could ask one more question to clarify this further with an expert".
Dear god, I've been thinking crypto is a bubble since 2010. At some point, we have to admit this is not just a bubble. It's a new unproven evolving technology
Beyond the one we're already discussing?
And when the company invests his own money in the company we can talk about that.
It's funny, but this is where having a password manager really saves me... if I don't have a login for a site I use often, I'll really scrutinize it... sometimes login urls change, but not very often.
Show HN: Generate cool unique icons for any ethereum address (open source)
the story you are commenting on is a good example

it should not be this easy to lose sixteen million dollars
I flagged your posts because you're either trolling or actively trying to derail a conversation about QR codes to be about how you dislike Tumblr and "what it represents". Get a hold of yourself.
Forget frameworks! Become a versatile hacker
It's mozilla who didn't renew with google in the US, because yahoo needed to appear better for negotiating their price tag and made a better offer.
I realize that was probably satire or sarcasm or both, but since I've seen people actually seriously take that position I'm going to go ahead and respond as if it was serious.

How do these smart contract deal with the real world? I can see how they can work for things that entirely involve activities that take place on the block chain (e.g., a smart contract that automatically pays a crowd funded project if and only if it meets a threshold for pledges by a deadline, and refunds the donors otherwise).

But suppose our contract is something like I will pay you $X in Ethereum when you deliver to me 125 bales of Surat cotton, guaranteed to be middling fair merchant's Dhollorah [1], delivered at the Liverpool docks from Bombay on the next sailing of the Peerless.

How do we put all of that into a smart contract? Can a smart contract trigger payment only when the cotton arrives? Can it check to make sure it arrived on the ship specified in the contract?

And what happens if it turns out that there are two ships named Peerless, unrelated to each other, one of which is sailing from Bombay to Liverpool in October, and one in December? I only know about the December one, and it is on that one that I'm expecting the cotton. You only know about the October one, and so it is on that one you send the cotton. The cotton arrives before I'm ready to deal with.

Unless dealing with all that can be included in the smart contract, and executed by the smart contract without human intervention, lawyers will still be needed...and they will be needed almost as much as they are now.

PS: my cotton hypothetical is based on a real case: Raffles v Wichelhaus, EWHC Exch J19, (1864) 2 Hurl & C 906. There really were two unrelated ships both having and neither deserving the name Peerless, and both working the India / England trade routes, both scheduled for Bombay to Liverpool, one in October and one in December.

[1] Dhollorah is a very dirty cotton of a longish staple, which when cleared is very white, as if bleached. For for more than you probably ever wanted to know on this and other types of cotton, see the book "Cotton Spinning and Weaving: A Practical and Theoretical Treatise" by Herbert Edward Walmsley, page 71. It's from the late 19th century and is public domain now I believe, and you can find it on Google Books.
Are you asking for a formal definition that could be put in code? Sorry, there just isn't one.

The same laws which apply to stealing tangible things and cash also apply to stealing cryptocurrency.

In the very unlikely event that the perpetrators came out and sued the Ethereum developers for violating their contract and taking "their" money back, a judge would look at the facts and then decide how the law applies to this particular case. IANAL, but I'm ready to bet that the thieves will go to jail for a while :-)
You should ask yourself what the Bitcoin developers are doing while Ether takes their market share. The answer is the exact same thing, at https://elementsproject.org

Now why hasn't there been as much publicity about this? Is it because Vitalik Buterin is a wunderkind genius who simply beat them to market? Nope, the Bitcoiners are simply being more responsible and making sure they get the formula right before rushing to market.
Google not Amazon. Make fantastic savings in a server-less world
I did say a "little more detail" and your response indicates your customers are more likely to understand the green bar thing.

I'll be willing to bet that few of them will be able to usefully debate the merits of EV over DV though 8)

However, it is a start and I'm glad it works for you. It would seem that the message is getting through a bit. I own an IT company with 20 odd employees and I estimate that roughly 50% of those staff would be unable to tell me exactly what an EV cert is for as opposed to a DV but to be fair they are all rather good at looking for the signs that a site is dodgy (or bone fide)
Gamers promised better graphics thanks to nano technology breakthrough