skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It takes a cryptographically provable amount of energy to reverse a Bitcoin transaction, and that amount is equal to the money spent on electricity mining blocks that confirm a transaction.

Proof of Stake systems have no equivalent. They operate by trusting the staking parties are not colluding to create an alternate history. But if they do decide to collude, there is little thermodynamic cost to rewriting history.

It's a fundamentally weaker system, and one that depends on trust. The whole value of proof of work is that it allows you to escape trust.
What do you think it means?
Made an account just to upvote your comment. This is an incredibly powerful point that appears to be completely missed by the majority of threads I'm seeing. Maybe PoS will turn out to be effective and reduce energy costs for cryptocurrencies, but there is absolutely nothing like them. The anonymity of money is valuable for any free and open society, and Bitcoin is currently providing that to anyone willing to create a wallet.
Being a hypocrite dosent make you wrong, or your actions meaningless. After all everyone is responsible in at least a tiny way for most of societies systematic ills, but that dosent mean that speaking out, and acting out against them is stupid, pointless or self defeating.
> it leaves no goat unblown

That's a first. Is that a common saying somewhere? Does it refer to literal oral sex with a goat?
I have very hard time believing anything harmful can get from Chernobyl to Bavaria and still be dangerous by now. I think it's just overreacting. There are millions of people living between Chernobyl and Bavaria, including cities such as Kyiv (3 mln people, less than 100km from Chernobyl), and there seems to be no sign of mass morbidity and mortality from any of radiation related causes. Makes it kinda hard to believe there is still danger in 1400km away.
Sure, you can always choose useless systems of coordinates.
Wetware computer
Least discussed in places where it matters?
Unless you are outside the US or UK or don't want to create a new iTunes account tied to those places (if you happen to have a valid card or an iTunes gift card for these countries)
Scala has incremental compilation now through SBT, I believe. How long ago was this?
Sadly I cannot claim it as my own: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=blows%20goats.
Hi, please use the contact form on the website for support.
For the most part, you shouldn't map SPI peripheral clocks directly to FPGA clocks. They are two very different things. Instead, treat the SPI clock as just another I/O signal.
Cash and coins are not a store of value and are also a fiat currency associated with a central authority. Gold is a better analogy.
Yeah, the P-38 was a decent design, but it's very much a 1930's era plane with its oval pattern wings and control surfaces. The P-51, despite technically only be a couple years newer than the P-38, incorporated a LOT of improvements, most notably those in the 1940 NACA study data. The laminar flow wing alone pushed the P-51 well beyond anything else produced previously. The P-51 was arguably the first line fighter to be designed with aerodynamics based on hard science, rather than seat of the pants "this seemed to work before" design practices.
I can't speak for iOS but many Android apps I've used always ask for crazy permissions and then refuse to work unless I say yes.

My biggest fear, as silly as this may sound, is an app that wants my phone book will contact the people in that phone book for some reason. For example, to tell them that I'm a possible person to add to their Derpchat friends list. My phone book is a useless listing of past professional, personal, and educational contacts whom I don't have a relationship with anymore. I have no idea how it gets auto filled with 99% people I don't want in there but I just don't trust it. I'm afraid I'll accidentally ping someone from my past.
What's that foreign language and how do you study it? (If I might ask)
It's a bad stat. The electricity that goes into a block doesn't just confirm the transactions in the block, it also confirms all the transactions in all blocks prior to that block, and those transactions have a cumulative value of about $70 billion.

The bleak picture painted on the article is an incomplete one by far.
I wish HN had "reddit gold". Thanks for jotting this down for us, super clear and interesting.
Does Airbnb and Instacart have a lot of patents? Or was it their timing?
"which can, by definition, only be for one conviction per pardon"

Not really. You don't even need to be convicted of anything to be pardoned. E.g. Richard Nixon.
https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf

Most bitcoin heavyweights who have researched proof of stake have concluded that it's not viable, and not worth further research in the context to trustless and decentralized systems.
Looking at Netdisco I have 12 VLANs. ISP1, ISP2 (from Dad's house across the valley), OSPF backbone, DMZ, LAN, Guest, Cameras, Servers, Japan, Kids, Management and Test. Everything passes thru PF and only exposes services as required. The Guest VLAN, for example, has no way to get to the rest of the VLANs. Camera VLAN can only talk to the DVR software, etc.

The important thing with securing my public IPs (as with securing anything) is to understand the surface area and minimize risks. With the number of services I'm exposing, I have to be careful. First thing is to keep all OSs up to date. OpenBSD every 6 months and Debian on an ongoing basis.

Next, whenever possible use single-purpose proxies that have been well audited. In my case OpenSMTPD, Unbound and NSD protect the always popular mail and dns servers from attack.

Keeping complicated things off the internet is important. Big CMS packages are constantly under attack. I only run either static pages on my webserver, or very carefully audited custom PHP pages (written with an attacker's eye to exploit injection)

When I expose something more complicated like Guacamole or Citadel that might end up with a known hole in the login screen, I put it behind both SSL and an HTTP simple auth login prompt. It's ancient, and so well tested that it is unlikely to end up with an exploit against it. Or at least less likely than the app its protecting. I've actually been toying around with doing 2 factor auth on these services with a dynamically generated simple auth sent via SMS bridge or IFTTT...

On my internal network, I have my family running linux wherever possible, and keep Java and Flash off the windows PCs. Everyone runs with a nonprivledged account and the OS/software packages/PDF readers are all kept up to date. I think the wife and kid's PCs are probably the most likely things to be compromised on the network, so I keep a close eye on them.

I also take the reactive approach of log alerting, change monitoring and general diligence to the state of my network. If you know what has changed in the last 24 hours it tends to be a small enough dataset to eyeball, and will tend to tip you off when things are wonky. I also have enough logging and data sources (syslog, configs diffs, apache logs, nfsen data, mrtg data) that it would be exceptionally difficult for an attacker to wipe out all trace of their presence.

I do not know of a successful attack against my network, tho I'm not naive enough to think that it hasn't happened. I just haven't realized it if it has.

Its a great hobby if you like this stuff!
If you're WoW you are printing money. You can just throw people at the problem.
Meh. Anything that tries to fool beginners into thinking they're writing software rather than defining hardware is a bad idea.

Understanding why something is non-synthesizable or inefficient in hardware is 90% of your education as a chip designer. Exposure to HLS tools can, and should, wait.
Ask HN: Code review vs. Unit test
Hi,

Within our company there is an internal debat going on about what process should we focus on first to improve code quality. Unit testing frameworks or code review tools ?

IMO code reviews has become just a formality where developers just check for syntactical issues instead of overall design. This is mainly due to tight deadline where everyone is trying to finish their work.

Has anyone tried putting this process in large team ? What are the before and after effcts ?
Bitcoin wants to be money, but it really isn't. It fails the traditional account (originally from Jevons); see Kubát 2015 [1]; Mandjee 2015 [2]. More obviously, it is far too volatile to function like money in a normal sense, see Golumbia 2017 [3]

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212567115...
[2] https://litigation-essentials.lexisnexis.com/webcd/app?actio...
[3] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xwwv83/cryptocurr...
"blows goats" goes back decades, but tbh I never really thought about what it meant until this comment came forth with the hyperbole of fellating literally every goat in existence.
Hah, I don't really enjoying revisiting my decision making but I'll try to answer. I've been away for just over a year and I miss the people and the freedom but I don't miss the politics and the rat race.

Grad school was successful. However, my postdoc was a different story, I got a relatively prestigious fellowship at a DOE lab but my supervisor quit before I started and I tried to do my own stuff but really didn't get much support and it wasn't much fun or productive. I quit after 2 years, about 1 year ago and joined a small biotech company in the bay area. I'm pretty sure I already have too large a gap in my publications to go back, I thought about going back to academia for a bit but that would have entailed doing a 2nd postdoc but I really wasn't interested in moving some random place for 3+ years, then dealing with the whole faculty application process again and 5+ more years before eventually getting tenure.

If you don't hate writing grants maybe academia can be for you.

Good luck.
The Benjamin Graham (who taught Warren Buffett) distinction between investment and speculation is: "An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis promises safety of principal and an adequate return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative."

See http://buffettpedia.com/2015/07/investment-versus-speculatio...

Personally, I think it's helpful to think of it as a spectrum rather than as a necessarily binary distinction. Graham's definition is nice and succinct, but the problem comes with the word "promises". The safety of principal for anything cannot be guaranteed beyond all doubt.
It's not the same. With a Smalltalk system, there isn't really an operating system. All activity we would normally ascribe to an OS is simply implement in the Smalltalk environment, using Smalltalk objects, running in a live image. I recommend checking out the Smalltalk-80 "Blue Book", which is beautifully written. You can also play with Pharo too, just be sure to understand that it's adapted for modern personal computers and therefore has to run as a virtual machine. A system that could run Smalltalk natively would be much better.
Also see hyperHTML [1] which is same idea, but predates lit by some months. Comparison here [2].

[1] https://github.com/WebReflection/hyperHTML
[2] https://gist.github.com/WebReflection/fadcc419f5ccaae92bc167...
Speaking personally, I don't want to work with an image based language. That's an argument against both Lisp and Smalltalk.

The problem with image based languages is that you've thrown away your file-based tool system. You're so used to your favorite text editor, source control system, etc? So sorry, we're building better tools! And when your code is ready, you just deploy the image!

It sounds great in theory, once those tools are delivered, but in practice you've lost more than you gained. No matter how good your environment, you do not beat the collective effort and productivity of file-system based tools.

What I say about image based tools also applies to code deployed in a database. Good luck keeping source control in sync with stored procedures...
They updated their testing shortly after announcing VW's emission violations.
"Testing vehicles in new and unpredictable ways is the new normal"

http://www.autonews.com/article/20160307/OEM11/303079956/aft...
I've been at so many companies where someone is pushing to adopt semantic versioning without actually following step 1 in the spec...

> 1. Software using Semantic Versioning MUST declare a public API. This API could be declared in the code itself or exist strictly in documentation. However it is done, it should be precise and comprehensive.

SemVer doesn't even make sense if you don't have a public API. SemVer doesn't make sense for end user products that don't have an API. I really wish people would stop trying to abuse it.
In my opinion, in retrospect, I should have joined well known groups that had a strong history of placing students and postdocs in faculty positions at top schools.
It's more like giving you a bag of random house numbers and instructing you to place the numbers on the correct houses in an area you've never been to before. An instructor teaches you where some of the numbers go, and you can memorize those examples, but when the instructor leaves you to finish the job on your own you have no way of knowing how to assign the remaining numbers.

Memorization is pretty easy. Generalizing from past examples requires that there be a relationship not just between one person and their phone number but between all people and their phone numbers.
I really like your argument about protein folding. It's another interest area of reversible computing. That is, we will never be able to create a more powerful computational structure that is itself an implementation of the state of matter itself. It will always be less efficient and require more space or energy to represent than nature can do. That is unless we can find methods or create artificial substances or circumstances that would otherwise be impossible or improbable for nature to create. Man made substances come to mind, that have structures and mechanical properties that far exceed anything found naturally.
There's also the "core" curriculum that needs to be covered, however I see no reason why this can't be paired with the student's actual passion. It's important to give relevance to the work so that it actually matters to the student. In higher education (high school / college / beyond) it would be nice if the work were actually productive to society instead of just busy work.
Totally. I generally use svg icons for anything where I don't need them to match color/size of text, automatically. I just noticed a few people asking for them as a font, and thought I'd help out.
Any ideas if there's some regulation stopping more accurate methods of figuring out where they are on the track than through such a strange system? It would not be my go-to method of navigating a track.
"backing" a currency usually refers to exchanging fiat money for a good with intrinsic value. That does not describe the relationship between bitcoin and electricity at all.

Energy ensures bitcoin's ownership, not its value (although it does impact its value indirectly).
I thought that too, I studied the pollution maps of London, and it appears that NOx removes Ozone pollution, I was flummoxed for ages.

Perhaps an Atmospheric Chemist can support this?
PoS as well as PoW depend on the assumption that a majority (either in terms of value invested in hashing power or invested in tokens) of the network is following the rules. If you try to double spend in a PoW system you are betting your current electricity usage on a new block becoming the longest chain and in a PoS system you are betting the tokens themselves - from an economic point of view those two systems are indifferent (if your attempt doesn't succeed you have wasted either electricity or tokens). Collusion can happen in both cases. PoS systems introduce new (probably yet unsolved) problems but they aren't inferior from an economical point of view imho.
https://darksky.net/
Can you explain what makes moon so much smaller and faster than vue ? What are the key differences ? Does it lack features ? Could vue use some tricks from moon ?
Ask HN: What Bitcoin Cash (BCC) exchange and wallet do you use?
Dark Sky actually addressed this topic recently with some additional information. Good read.

https://blog.darksky.net/location-privacy/
What you gain by following more constrained constructs is knowing you can't accidentally use it for something else then what you needed it for.

Take or. You don't need it to be a language construct, the more general conditionals can do it: if y doX else if z doX. While that's more general and thus more powerful, its less expressive. When you mean or use or, less chance of doing it wrong and the intent is clearer and unambiguous to other readers.

Can you define your notation here, I don't follow it. Why do you want a type T * A | T * B ? This I doubt is the real use case, that's already your solution to a use case. Give me a concrete example.
(1) We have to keep something dangerous deep underground in some remote places, and if something goes wrong, it may leak out and contaminate dozens of kilometers around the spot. Dozens of kilometers.

(2) Every coastal towns, cities, estuaries, and natural preserves will be wiped out within a thousand years. Across the globe. Including entire nations. (Well, to be fair, they will cease to be nations long before that.)

There's really no comparison.

For arguments regarding (2), see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_effects_of_global_wa...

> A study in 2015 found that assuming cumulative fossil fuel emissions of 10 000 gigatonnes of carbon, the Antarctic Ice Sheet could melt completely over the following millennia, contributing 58 m to global sea-level rise, and 30 m within the first 1000 years.
Since it is so serious, I promise I will change the imaginary managery from the thought experiment.
I think explicitly or implicitly, vegetarians try to not eat sentient beings, but the story is more complicated because there is a scale for that, with plants being at the bottom of the scale, and mice further up the scale, and then cows, and finally humans.

So in this perspective, does the article you linked to really make sense?
Plasma's default setup starts with the favorites tab, which for me was prepopulated with web browser, e-mail, and file manager (no text editor nor terminal, which is sane for non-programmers). Pressing left goes to the "leave" tab which hass all of the options you suggest, plus suspend and hibernate. Pressing right goes to the "all applications' tab which is ordered as a hierarchy.
They didn't two decades ago when I was in one of the earlier 'pilot programs'; at that time it was apparently VERY costly to get 'PDF' copies of the books on CD-ROM.

If we had an open educational stack we might have actual free content and then it might be possible to use the laptop like an e-reader. However, still, in that use case the student would be better off with a fixed main workstation and more of a consumption and quick-scribble-notes device for portable use.

Plus, books are a different kind of reading experience and a more tactile feedback. It might improve learning retention to read a book relative to reading a tablet or laptop. Having said that, /using/ that content in a trans formative way was always MUCH stronger for me.
It has nothing to do with being kind. It has a lot do do with contributing to the discussion with something useful. Just asserting things without any evidence is not useful and thus downvoted to make more room for more useful comments nearer where people would see them, that's all.
I like your point about making the car predictable for other drivers. I hadn't considered that but intuitively it makes total sense to me.

Maybe the reality is that all of our cars are overpowered for 99% of usage. But if there was an attribute that could be put to use on the road, acceleration makes sense because you legally can't go above 90mph in most places.
Pie menus are great for selecting from a small number of options quickly; I'm not sure that they are any better when chained than rectangular menus though.
The article is [only] a write up of the Hot Chips presentation (I was there). Without a an external validation of the claims it's merely pretty pictures. Iff their claims holds true, then there's some interesting elements here.

This is far from the only data-flow architecture out there (my favorite is the TRIPS instance of EDGE), but so far none have succeeded in the market.

The self-timed part is using NULL Convention Logic (NCL). Wave have dubbed their implementation of this WTL (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11469749). There are some very interesting questions about exactly how they use this, but it sounds like the synchronization between compute nodes is using NCL, but the compute nodes are conventional synchronous logic, clocked by the completion signal from NCL. That would certainly be an interesting hybrid, but the 6.7 GHz results begs a lot of questions.
The vast majority of all extinctions on the planet occurred before humans had anything to do with it.
Yea, you still want regression tests no doubt, but those are very different from TDD. You only need write them after you're code complete on a feature.
What would be better? GPS is inaccurate and probably has issues with the speed they are going, they'd have to some estimate of actual position based on average velocity. I think they want to know the instant they are out of turn.

Sensor in the vehicle is way more responsive and reliable than anything remote (EM emission based).
It is a cynical opinion often repeated, but is not true. Many apps use analytics but limit it to data such as crash information and device hardware / OS version.

There are absolutely other apps which perform tracking similar to AccuWeather, but not many (on iOS anyway).
Alice searches for Bob but does not add him.

Facebook shows Bob a suggestion to add Alice.

It doesn't explain all cases, but it does explain quite a few.
Oryx eat it. We know this because some jackass decided to import a herd to New Mexico.
For the uninformed, Formula 1 has been running on supercharged 1600 cc V6 engines since 2014, with 100 kg of gasoline for the whole GP (300 km), 105 kg this year if I remember correctly (because of larger and heavier tires.) That wouldn't give enough power so there are energy recovery systems from the exhaust and brakes. They get close to 1000 HP when all those power system deploy all the power they can generate.

The driver has still only the accelerator and the brakes pedals to control power so it's critical that the car knows when to recover energy (either when braking or when coasting) and when to go full throttle or deploy partial power, and which percentage. That's where Honda has failed.
What do you mean "Apple won't let it"? Who's stopping you? Just from Google I found https://wukix.com/mocl for example.
Fair enough, but not all Lisps are image based. Clojure is file based. That's the one I use.
That was just to redact sensitive information.