skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The writer is lagging way behind bleeding edge blockchain research.

>1. Contacting external services
..Often, the first use case proposed is a smart contract that changes its behavior in response to some external event. For example, an agricultural insurance policy which pays out conditionally based on the quantity of rainfall in a given month.

The imagined process goes something like this: The smart contract waits until the predetermined time, retrieves the weather report from an external service and behaves appropriately based on the data received.

This all sounds simple enough, but it’s also impossible. Why? Because a blockchain is a consensus-based system, meaning that it only works if every node reaches an identical state after processing every transaction and block.

(see https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ)

>3. Hiding confidential data
..Because even if one smart contract can’t read another’s data, that data is still stored on every single node in the chain. For each blockchain participant, it’s in the memory or disk of a system which that participant completely controls. And there’s nothing to stop them reading the information from their own system, if and when they choose to do so.

(see https://blog.ethereum.org/2017/01/19/update-integrating-zcas...)
Nico Robin Black Dress – One Piece
https://www.cs.umd.edu/~elaine/docs/permacoin.pdf

>Bitcoin is widely regarded as the first broadly successful ecash
system. An oft-cited concern, though, is that mining
Bitcoins wastes computational resources. Indeed, Bitcoin’s
underlying mining mechanism, which we call a scratch-off
puzzle (SOP), involves continuously attempting to solve computational
puzzles that have no intrinsic utility.
We propose a modification to Bitcoin that repurposes its
mining resources to achieve a more broadly useful goal: distributed
storage of archival data. We call our new scheme
Permacoin. Unlike Bitcoin and its proposed alternatives,
Permacoin requires clients to invest not just computational
resources, but also storage. Our scheme involves an alternative
scratch-off puzzle for Bitcoin based on Proofs-ofRetrievability
(PORs). Successfully minting money with this
SOP requires local, random access to a copy of a file. Given
the competition among mining clients in Bitcoin, this modi-
fied SOP gives rise to highly decentralized file storage, thus
reducing the overall waste of Bitcoin.
Using a model of rational economic agents we show that
our modified SOP preserves the essential properties of the
original Bitcoin puzzle. We also provide parameterizations
and calculations based on realistic hardware constraints to
demonstrate the practicality of Permacoin as a whole.
There are many possible reasons for the the lower power consumption. E.g. the OS could schedule processes other than the foreground window less often in fullscreen mode. Or it even detects that the user watches video and puts the CPU in a very low power (low frequency) mode. Or it's the overhead of the desktop environment and compositor. I have no idea.

I justed wanted to give an explanation why I don't think that the video scaling makes a huge difference.
What is your opinion on companies that interview with requiring rote knowledge on frameworks, or even put it on the job titles (eg. Senior Django developer)?

My city is full of these and there is the disconnect online I get from interview prep guides on algorithms, but none of that benefits me in the local companies I apply for.

A lot of these companies flat out ignore me, despite that I know OOP development well enough for a couple of years.

So much revolves around taking in new tools and frameworks that it's become fashion. That's a big reason why I want to head out of web dev too.

Along with that, it seems like most web dev jobs just are hooking up API endpoints for applications that don't get a lot of traffic, so there are no interesting speed/performance problems to solve.
Definitely, a blockchain is just about the only way to do this without trusting a third-party.

Git on a blockchain sounds like an interesting idea. I wonder if anyone has done that.
Yeah - though at least we've learned a little from the dust bowl lesson.
ORNL Begins Construction of Summit Supercomputer
Most peoples "social circle" is very, very small. Think about the number of eligible women (or men) within your circle - it can probably be counted on 2 hands. Are you sure you want to limit your selection of something as important as a forever partner?
My father said the same thing to me about my mother on two different occasions: "I could never have made it without her." But the thing is it took him years to get to that point.

Enjoy what you have now. Realize that it's only the beginning of a journey which could be long and wonderful. Think of it as... I don't know, the tutorial level of a video game or something. It's quick, exciting, and over soon, but there's a whole game left that you still have yet to play.
AFAIK you don't need to check historical timestamps (beyond sanity checks) during initial block download (IBD).

What you need to consider is whether an attacker can manipulate historical timestamps to get you to follow the wrong blockchain. The answer is, they can't.

The only thing manipulating historical timestamps would accomplish is allow the attacker to change the historical difficulty of their alternative blockchain. But that doesn't enable them to add additional proof of work. The amount of total proof of work they can add to an alternative blockchain is not dictated by difficulty, but merely by how much hashrate they have poured into the chain.

Since total proof of work for a chain is the metric by which the "correct" blockchain is established we can conclude that manipulating historical timestamps doesn't make it any easier for an attacker to get you to follow their chain.

That's for IBD. Obviously you need to verify timestamps after IBD, since timestamps are used to adjust difficulty and that's a consensus critical rule.
It's a variation of the travellers curse, where the more places you visit the less satisfied you will be with settling in any one place.

That happens because you find new, positive qualities in each place, and no place will ever have them all. In fact, over time any place will have proportionally fewer of the positive qualities you've found, and everywhere becomes less appealing the further you travel.
Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that it'll happily emulate an 8080 at useful speeds. I wanted to illustrate the orders of magnitude between "minimal something useful" and "a modern cpu", and an 8080 is a reasonably familiar point on that spectrum.

Anything you can do in 10 or 20 cycles of an 8080, you can now do to secret data in a few hours. And you can probably do much, much faster than that if you design a special purpose circuit. It's still sloooow by the computational standards we're used to. But it might be fast enough that there are useful applications.
That's probably due to shitty ISP DNS hijacking/redirecting requests if it can't resolve a name.
The survival of any birds at all has puzzled me, as modern birds seem to have very active lifestyles and metabolisms that would not tolerate long-term scarcity (as many Cretaceous birds flew, I am guessing the same applied to them.)

This is also true of small mammals, though many can hibernate. I sometimes wonder if it was winter in one hemisphere, and all the surviving mammals were hibernating.

Some modern birds, such as scrub jays, cache food for the lean season - perhaps that is how their ancestors survived?
The languages that almost became CSS
Quote: "One possibility is to treat AC as a powerful drug and take it only when necessary. Theorems should come with consumer labels saying what went into them. So if you see a box on the shelf of 'Banach and Tarski’s Miracle Duplicator! Feed Multitudes!', it will say on the back of the box 'Contains AC'."

Indeed, many mathematicians are sensitive to this and try to point out when they invoke the Axiom of Choice, and there are other mathematicians who deliberately seek non-AC-powered variants of theorems in order to put them on less nebulous and more constructive ground.

Personally, I view AC as another reason to consider more generalized foundations of mathematics. For example, if you know anything about topoi, it turns out that we can view set theory as a topos on a point, and any topos on a complete Boolean algebra comes pre-equipped with an inherent axiom of choice! [0]

[0] https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/axiom+of+choice
This implies traditional car manufacturers are not already working on EV vehicles.

Sure some will be left in the dust because they missed the good wagon, but a large chunk of them will survive and thrive.

Right know Tesla's production is quite small compared to other manufacturers, and even the Model 3 is quite expensive. Most people want a car to go reliably from point A to point B, for a relatively small cost. At 30000 to 35000 dollars, the Model 3 is 50% more expensive than a "good enough" car that fulfills basic needs like daily commutes and a few long trips a year. The Model 3 is still a car for people who likes interesting cars and have the money to buy it.

Also right now, even "quite expensive" electric cars are not yet as convenient as traditional cars. IMHO, EV will become a truly viable alternative when they reach the 3 twos: 20 minutes recharge for 200 kilometers of autonomy, at price of 20000 dollars.

~200 km is the distance traveled between pauses on long trips, ~20 minutes is the duration of the pauses, ~20000 dollars is a bit arbitrarily, but I think it's the average price a middle class family is willing to pay for its main car. Of course it's a general approximation, but I think it's still a quite generous target for EV.

Another possible outcome might not come from the traditional car manufacturers but from China or maybe India. Pollution is a huge issue there given the population density and these countries might need EV to reduce it. "Necessity is the mother of invention", local manufacturers might take a lead because of it.
"If you have trusted services available, you may not need a blockchain."

You mean the way people should trust their governments.

"Paul Kagame re-elected president with 99% of vote in Rwanda election"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/05/paul-kagame-se...
Everyone selects someone who isn't perfect, but good enough. 7 billion people in the world, a better match is out there for everyone, but is it worth the effort if you can't find them? Probably not.

Wait But Why covers this pretty well also: Happiness is reality minus expectations. Its up to you to be content with what you have and what you can realistically achieve.
Serious question. Anyone?
> paper "hacking" scales as O(n)

It's quite common to drop handfuls of paper. And really, the grouping comes down to transportation issues as well; when you move ballots in boxes and trucks, 0(n) becomes less accurate.

There were numerous issues with the security, packing, and handfuls of paper in 2000.
You should also read part 2 of the article.

After some relationships from 18-28 that all ended unhappy, I decided to screen my next partner in a very rational way. Of course I wanted romance and some attractiveness out of my next girlfriend, but I primarily wanted a friend that I could talk to when we were 95 and sitting in wheelchairs next to each other, unable to do much else. Destiny called and the girl I then met and found worthwhile to date further became my wife and mother of two children.

Why I reference the second part of the article: we just talked about it and totally agreed that our marriage was more or less how it should be (as described in part 2) and felt not at all touched by part 1.

While we are for sure people that are different, we usually find new stuff we absolutely want to do together. Last year we did boat- and radio licenses (5 so far...), this year we began pistol shooting in a sports club, we travel to many places, have tons of family meetings (I think being in a supportive family helps a lot, too)... yes we also have the occasional fight, but there has been exactly no occurence where it had not been completely resolved before sleeping.

So being rational about your partner does not mean to stop the fun, stop the romance, but means you know exactly what you get into and care for the happiness for you own life.

Remember: a divorce is often the complete destruction of your life dreams. You can destroy yourself and/or your partner. Your partner REALLY gives the single life he/she has in your hands and hopes, like you do, that everything will go right. Don't be a fool when given such a treasure.
I've always wondered if a little alcohol would help here. But I'm so habituated to avoiding these situations I haven't had the opportunity to experiment.

When I am forced to speak to a room full of people it's usually spur of the moment. If I know exactly what I'm talking about, I tend to talk too fast. When I'm unsure of myself or how to phrase things, my stuttering is almost completely debilitating even when I'm controlling my rate of speech. I figure alcohol could help in both situations by keeping me relaxed and more focused.
I see stories promoting kite energy harvesting every couple years. They never address (one of) the primary obstacles to a functional unit: transmitting the energy to the ground. They usually hand wave the problem by saying there will be a conductive tether, but they don't mention the challenge in designing a tether that is strong enough to hold the kite, while also conductive enough to transfer power, while light enough for the kite to stay airborne. The usual solution for ground based power transmission it to use a high voltage, but that requires significant insulation separating the conductors, usually air. Other materials tend to fail under high voltage. So they will be limited in maximum voltage, and be forced to have a larger diameter conductor. It would be too heavy and won't fly. Tldr; this is probably a scam.
I do, and provided a direct example of their culture of censorship - how they limit the ability of minority opinions to speak on their own site, and manipulate the front page to control perception. YC leadership and rank and file effectively never express opinions that are significantly different from the rest of SF tech, because in many ways they define its culture. Why is it a "bastion of reasonableness?"

The only reason I even talk at all here is because I think it's important to break up the ideological uniformity, because people who talk here have enormous amounts of control over how people are able to communicate with one another in the modern world. I don't want to be here, I fucking hate this community.
That's what it is, and people are greedier still thanks to the notion of perfect partners.
Baow baow baowbaow babaow baow baowbaow babaow baow baowbaow babaow baow baowbaow...
Turns out mayonnaise performs just about as well as Arctic MX-4: http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/tcr9-g1.gi...
Gave me the exact same rate for my current apartment (1600sq ft Capitol Hill Seattle) and my previous condo (1100 sq ft NuLu Louisville, KY). My rent here is 3.5x what my mortgage was in Louisville and from personal experience in both places the demand for short term rentals in Louisville is nothing like it is in Seattle. So yeah... probably not accurate for the addresses I checked.
I would LOVE to know what the other people in the conversation had to say! I'm entertaining myself mightily by imagining it.
Isn't one of these lakes the same as the one that Periodic Videos talked about recently (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uaj722cg9Gk)?
We only published it yesterday, but you may have seen something else, like a blog post or our self-teaching guide teachyourselfcs.com
TensorFlow Serving 1.0
Just saw this and came on to post the same thing. It's such a lovely book, I got it in hardback last year.

I've actually just switched over to HN from playing a Euclid game I've been totally addicted to this last week. Go on, I dare you.... :-) https://www.euclidea.xyz/game
"Pure acid" isn't quite right; it's an aqueous solution with a pH of zero. Zero isn't a special value. You can have negative pH (cf. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ed083p1465).
> Well, I guess my point is that it wouldn't have added or taken anything away from the experience

You already said that you would have felt like something was off. That's detracting from the experience even though you don't consciously know why.

A ton of effort goes into choosing the fonts of the hundred different things you see every day, so you've been trained to unconsciously associate different fonts with different feelings. You don't need to be able to pick a font out of a lineup in order for font choice to affect your experience. If I spend enough time on Mozilla's site, I'm going to start associating Zilla Slab with internet-related things, even though I still can't distinguish slab fonts. Your brain's good at things like that.
"Understand the importance of the Trinity of delivery: Delivery manager, product owner, tech lead"

I'm only familiar with teams too small to have separate roles like this. How does good software planning scale down to smaller teams -- say 5 or 10 people in the whole organization? Ultimately someone has to be responsible for the same concerns, but I wonder how it maps.

In general I'd love to see a comparison of software teams at different sizes. What are the key, identified roles in a company of 5, 50, or 500? What are habits that smaller organizations ought to borrow from larger ones?
>> I have always hated the notion that having a happy marriage is about filtering through many candidates to find the one perfect partner.

Dating is no machine learning where you need a large sample to get it right. It is rather taking the looking glass focussing on what fits for you.
One of the arguments, which the NYT piece mentions, is that decades of fire suppression causes a fuel buildup so that if/when a fire does occur, it is much larger, more dangerous, and harder to manage.

For example, https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2016/0504/Did-fi... points out: "In order to prevent fire like this week’s, Alberta has engaged in a robust fire suppression program, says MacDonald. But because the province has suppressed natural fires that burn off underbrush ever 50 or more years, forests are full of fresh tinder.

“Alberta has engaged in a robust fire suppression program that changed the age structure of the forest,” MacDonald told the Monitor. “Typically, forests in that part of Alberta would burn every 50 to 200 years. But with strong fire suppression, there has been a tremendous buildup of fuel.”"

As a politician, would you rather say "we'll have a forest fire in the area every 10 years" or "we'll make sure there are no fires" .. and conveniently or optimistically omit the "until after I'm long gone, but then we'll have a real doozy of a blaze which will be worse than all of the little fires put together".

In addition, as that Wikipedia article points out, fire fighters came in from other provinces, the national government, and even South Africa. Do you think the local people paid for all of that? Effectively this fire fighting acts as an insurance subsidy.

It's possible to build houses to withstand wildfires, as people have done in Australia and southern California. These designs work best when fires are more frequent, because those fires are less intense, with less fuel to burn. However, these designs are also more expensive.

If people are convinced that the fires will be suppressed, they are not going to spend the money, and the building codes won't change to require better wildfire resistance. Nor is it easy for individuals to switch to safer building designs because when the fires do come they will be much more intense than it should have been without decades of fire suppression.
If you spent 7 years of your life on a project only to haven it stolen out from underneath you by an unscrupulous "mentor", you're saying wouldn't get emotional about it? As far as I can tell, her story reveals exceptional resilience: She did, after all, get her Ph.D., despite having a normal emotional response to the revelation that people she trusted for a substantial proportion of her adult life were conspiring to screw her over.
>: the author presents one view of how to pick your life partner, from one way of life

Yeah that's often a very genuine way of writting, from your own perspective. I don't think there is anything wrong with that. Sure it might not fit your life but it might be interesting to or help a few.
1. Is also because people want to have ego stroked and sex all the time. If you have tons of potential mates but you just only want to email with them for 2-3 months, and not sappy emails, but just emailing to get to know eachother, then you weed out most of that. All the 'fast ones' are completely gone by that time and you are left with something that could be 'real'. You never know, but this advice got a lot of people permanently together when we owned a dating site where we didn't want focus on one night stands. Which ofcourse happened a lot (and worse), but this seems to work effectively if both sides can withstand the usual 'ah, ok, well here's my number, see ya in 10' after a few texts. As that usually ends in not all that much; fine if that was what you were going for.
Contrary to what people like you routinely assume, I don't publicly admit to being homeless in order to garner sympathy from internet strangers. I merely do so in order to make it clear that I have first-hand experience with the problem space, in addition to having taken a college class on the subject.

I don't have any fantasies at all that most strangers on the internet care one whit about my personal welfare.
Tissue Nanotransfection
Anyone have any real information on this?
An attribute will only work if you are given a list of employees or other iterable structure.

My real example is that in my day job different business units of our customers are represented by a hierarchy, and you frequently traverse that hierarchy looking for some feature that's derived from the ancestor.

But really this is any algorithm that looks up a tree.
I'm German. I think this idea "Get a degree in Germany" is not impossible, but it would be quite risky for Americans. There are just too many unknowns or uncontrollable factors.

Many subjects, say Biology, are actually difficult to get in, even for Germans. Not having the language skills would mean you're in for bad grades from the very beginning.

It'll work only for a few majors, and only with a considerable effort, ideally before enrolling, to obtain relevant information (about costs and specifics) concerning the admission procedure and moving to Germany (or some other European country where college tuition is low, say Austria)
This is awesome. Would it be possible for you to extend the spx 10 year return line with a greyed out or dotted line from 2007 onwards that shows the running annualized return so far? So for example for 2012 it would show the spx annualized return from 2012 to 2017.
Absolutely true. But we need to expose the dangers of building and living in these hazardous areas and make the owners share significant portions of the costs of protecting them. Here, in California, you can buy earthquake insurance but at a high premium and high deductabl but everyone is quite aware of the fact that the earth can shift any time. The same should be the case for building in areas subject to wildfires, or avalanches, or tidal surge, or tornadoes, or hurricanes.
Your response is almost a perfect description of the incentives that lead to the tragedy of the commons: "this is better for me, even if it's worse for society".

Here's a little video that explains it, for those that haven't yet heard of the tragedy of the commons:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzJmaJCx7-s
> I think you're hallucinating your own meaning to it.

Welcome to politics. A single event merely kicks off a discussion that people want to have, not actually debating what was said/done.

It's a boring game to play over and over.