skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can send money around the world with it. You can too.

Will it hold up when 10 million people want to do that per day? 100 million? Half 1 billion? I know it can work at niche scales (relative to total global financial transactions) but can it actually be scaled up to be a real player?

Even if the block size was massively larger, say 100 MB, would enough transactions be able to be broadcasted around fast enough to be able to be collected in giant blocks to keep up with demand?

As to hardest/impossible for a government to steal from you: this is the mining pool problem. What if China decided to do something about all of the mining pools they have in their country and try and manipulate bitcoin? What if in addition to the pools that they could get/force to cooperate they added a bunch more miners with government computers?

What if the US government just decided to throw computer power at trying to make the dominant hashrate mining pool?

I'm guessing there are number of governments in the world it would be capable of doing that TODAY. They could certainly do it if they cooperated. Even if they can't take over they could throw enough uncertainty into the process to cause the price to crash.

If they all competed against each other we could end up in a situation where even know if theoretically no one controls bit coin realistically it's controlled by a bunch of giant governments and no one else is capable of competing. Oops, that sort of like the current banking system.

Like I said it's a fascinating idea, but I don't think it works at planet scale or if people can independently buy additional hashing capacity. It seems like it would have to have some sort of agreement to limit everyone to be roughly equal for it to work out almost anywhere.

I'd love to see history prove me wrong. I don't remember seening a solution to the problems that worry me yet. If they exist I'm not smart enough to think of them.

We'll see what happens.
>How does one relate to and incentivize the Chinese people, then?

Guanxi, guanxi, guanxi.
Talking about a book you haven't read shouldn't be too difficult. Just ask a lot of questions and pursue the interesting answers. Convincingly passing yourself off as having read the book when you haven't, is probably more difficult, but would depend on how deep the discussion gets.
It's funny how thick HNers are about Bitcoin. I believe it's evidence of the sort of passive conservatism of the tech community. Bitcoin is some utopian shit, the decentralized technology dream that has a ton of traction, yet many of you just can't seem to get behind it. Is it because YC is an ultra capitalistic investment fund and Bitcoin is just too anarchist for its fanboys?

For all the people out there saying, "I cant find a use case", my question to you is, have you ever used it?!

If you have, did you notice that there wasn't a middleman taking a cut when you sent the money? I mean, do you have any fucking idea how much money businesses pay to the credit card companies?

Get on board guys.
People don't self-select themselves to study and teach mathematics because they like surprises. This is true of academia in general, but very true re math.
To me the true crypto tulip mania is the proliferation of worthless altcoins and tokens that all of a sudden get millions of dollars in marketcap.
Books are like lovers. They change you, even if you don't recall the particulars.
Applied!
I don't see any arguments from the commenters here that convince me in the slightest. It's like magic to them. As long as they believe, it has value.
I am confused because that's what the article seems to say. The other segment on this is:

> “By separating them, it allows the parent company to limit the exposure of the various obligations of the LLCs,” Hobart said. “For example, if one of the LLCs has its own debt, only that LLC will end up being responsible for payment of that debt.”

Is it that the act of making them separate companies under a holding company that grants them this, rather than the change to an LLC specifically?
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Samsung is one of the most advanced semiconductor manufacturers on the planet. You're just thinking of phones.
heh, anarchist? In the course of perhaps 2 or 3 years Bitcoin has turned more anarchists I know into greedy capitalists than anything else over my entire lifetime.

HN is certainly "on board" as ycombinator and affiliates invests in various blockchain retailed companies
they probably couldn't hear you over the price of their coins.
Does the FUD you just wrote invalidate the utility I suggested? If, maybe, someday etc. Bitcoin could be worthless. This is very true but money, of any kind, is only worth what people believe it’s worth.

And in case you didn’t know, cash is also used for illegal activity...
Check this tutorial on PyMC3:
https://github.com/fonnesbeck/intro_stat_modeling_2017/blob/...
Technically, all are true. Sometime the formulation is quite counter intuitive though. The best known exemple is probably the "there is only one room left" message for single room apartments. This has been considered a bug for years. The thing is: any change to the web site, however small, including fixing a bug, must prove conversion-successful in an experiment before going in production. This is both great and dramatic, as you can imagine: great that anyone can change anything as soon as proven successful, but dramatic that often you feel entrenched in local minima.
This experiment driven culture is great for the business though. So far.

Disclaimer: worked there for a bit.
How many money transfers do Visa or Amex handle per day? The Federal Reserve? What about Western Union?

Is bitcoin capable of doing 50% of that? 10%? 1%?

I know people have just decided to expand the block size but what's a realistic limit on how many transactions can be done per hour? Is that enough for real widespread use?

I can certainly see uses but I worry that he can never get big enough to truly matter. Or if it does that a government or large private entity could easily try to take it over through force of computing power.
Apart from the fact that the founders clearly didn't intend to fold the company (removing the malice part of a scam), as a consumer, spending $700 on something that stops functioning nearly immediately is pretty indistinguishable from a scam.
Sequel 5.0.0 Released
So is sticking your head in the sand—everyone is doing it!
Android scale...
Are American companies that different?

There's a little more creative thinking in American companies, but people are still people. Which means you need to tread very carefully or you will quickly acquire an almost invariably fatal reputation as "not a team player".
If the fines are for behavior during the time they were together I don't see any separation now being worth the paper it's written on.
I'm having so much fun reading this: https://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-78107.html
As someone who has tried a couple times to jump the other way I can attest to this. Completely stonewalled for full stack developer positions.

I have found exploits by knowing the quirks of all sorts of libraries and I have to be able to understand how things work on a deep level. But because a lot of the job is tracing other peoples work and finding gaps in their logic, you don't have as much 'dev' time in the traditional sense. Most of your coding turns into ways to prep your exploit. Your life gets wrapped up chasing obscure malloc bugs or strange chrome behavior rather than contributing in normal developer ways and companies don't recognize this as transferable. I'm only a little bit bitter about it, but I love my work. I just hope the pay stays solid and I don't end up in a dead end job later in life.

Also it's really hard to be good in this industry. It is almost entirely driven by the top 1% of people and as someone who is not in that demographic it feels like a constant struggle to keep up.
For Odwalla/Naked juice:
Do you pay 8 dollars per bottle, need to wait for it to arrive in the mail, pay $400 for the juice press to make it, and get locked into a single product for all of your "fruit juice needs"?

The last 3 words make this all the more stupid.
Do you have any timezone restrictions for a remote position?
Many people buy shovels to clear snow. How well will general purpose shovels work after a blizzard?

Product 1 has use A (in this case Apocalypse Insurance), and product 2 doesn't because its meant for another scenario.
I have built projects with a friend in the past.

He so aggressively avoids overengineering that he goes the other way - if you make ANY effort to properly engineer something he gets really annoyed and says time is being wasted.

It's almost like he feels software MUST be engineered to NOT scale in order to be an "MVP".

It's strange because for me, thinking about how something is built means that it can be built right the first time, without extra effort, just by thinking it through.
I don't think we have the same definition of magnificent.
Really?! I'm always out of the loop. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!
https://github.com/stanford-futuredata/noscope
I think, as with many paradigm changing and major ideas, its novelty required a change in the prevailing thinking of the epoch, which always makes people uncomfortable--according to wikipedia most objections were to Cantor's notion of transfinite numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Cantor

There's even a separate article on objections to his theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_Cantor%27s_th...

Seems like the notion of "completed infinity" which sort of gives infinity ontological status (? I'm no mathematician) did not sit well with some--I guess I could understand why--it definitely isn't an intuitive notion:

"Before Cantor, the notion of infinity was often taken as a useful abstraction which helped mathematicians reason about the finite world; for example the use of infinite limit cases in calculus. The infinite was deemed to have at most a potential existence, rather than an actual existence.[18] "Actual infinity does not exist. What we call infinite is only the endless possibility of creating new objects no matter how many exist already".[19] Carl Friedrich Gauss's views on the subject can be paraphrased as: 'Infinity is nothing more than a figure of speech which helps us talk about limits. The notion of a completed infinity doesn't belong in mathematics'.[20] In other words, the only access we have to the infinite is through the notion of limits, and hence, we must not treat infinite sets as if they have an existence exactly comparable to the existence of finite sets."

I guess this shows that the overall pragmatic value of your work may eventually win out against formal refutations.
yeah, i am planning to invest/speculate in it. along with zcash/dash/etc.
Rapid Machine Learning with Tensorflow
Good strategies for low-intensity or casual trolling infestations, bot very efficient or scalable if the number of trolls or volume or content they post exceeds a critical threshold.
But defense create jobs!
Sure, but it seems somewhat disingenous to mention this in the same topic as public health, safety , ecological and science research.

The US spends more for worse outcomes on entitlements like health care, because we refuse to optimize it.
People outside of mainland china (including Hong Kong and Taiwan) still prefer separate apps, and WeChat has been unable to acquire any significant marketshare outside of mainland Chinese users. Heck, even newly opened Myanmar is already dominated by google and Facebook.

The GFW has severely crippled the web, coupled with the lack of card usage, created a situation that made wechat work for mainland china and can't really be replicated anywhere else.
This all seems way more complicated than "buck", "quarter", "dime", etc?

Maybe I'm just not used to it yet - maybe they're just use the first part? "san", "deca", "mil"
Almost: At first the app will be a PWA so that users can use iOS. But yes, the provider side will eventually end up as Android-only app.

These are not really tokens, they are dividend-generating shares that will optionally be recorded via ERC20 tokens. We are using the term ICO only because saying IPO or Blockchain IPO tended to confuse people.

We want to raise secondary rounds to really expand, and screwing Series A investors sounds like the worst way to achieve that goal.
I remember watching that on my local PBS station when I was a kid, which must have been the late 80s or early 90s. I found it fascinating and I made sure to watch every episode. It made a big impression on me and may have been at least partially responsible for kindling my interest in history.

It was until I was older did I realize that it was a big step in the evolution of documentaries or that the panning technique he used was really innovative.

I'm considering watching it again on Netflix.
I've used it and noticed how miners will only include your transaction in a reasonable length of time if you pay a fee, and even that is artificially low due to the subsidy.
The global remittance market transferred more than half a trillion dollars last year, typically at exorbitant, near monopolistic rents.[0]

How big of an industry are electronic payments? Anyone have a guess? I couldn't even find a number I was confident was a reasonable approximation. Unfathomably large.

A unit of exchange as volatile as BTC is not an obvious ideal in the US. But what about in Venezuela, compared to local currency? What's the value of an asset that holds or appreciates, or even bounces around wildly in value in comparison to a currency with triple digit inflation? If all it does is put a stop to the grossest malfeasance by the dozen worst central banks in the world, how would we calculate that as a value?

It's reasonable to believe that BTC isn't the ideal solution for any of these, but with the established markets, even if it is destined to just take over a minority 1% of those sectors, then it's currently far undervalued. If it has a shot at preventing governments from causing mass starvation by printing money and passing it to cronies,[1] then it's a net win for humanity.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/aug/18/g...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1gUR8wM5vA
This (MonthlyBoxer.com) is awesome! You've solved a "pain-point" on a large ecommerce service. I suggest just focussing on this one instead of the poop bags, because, solving "pain points" to real world problems trumps hate-products, plus the latter could expose you to lawsuits that will distract you from your main venture.... wishing you the best to grow and succeed!
IT isn't. There are many proponents of cryptocurrnecy as well as many skeptics, and this community is unusually competent to have opinions on the topic due to the high number of people who are familiar with cryptography.
the china essentialist argument was debunked once CN regulators forced CN exchanges to institute a know-your-customer policy. Result, the bots they used to fluff their order books had to go. You can see this difference from that day onward very clearly in exchange trade volume comparison:
https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/2y?c=e&t=b

actaul trade from china is similar or smaller to that in the EU at the moment
Except anyone can figure out where my money comes from and where it goes. No thanks!
He premieres a series every year at Dartmouth. There is a scene in Baseball: The 10th Inning when he cuts to a closeup of Dave Roberts on base in the 2004 ALC series between the Red Sox and the Yankees. Instantly the whole crowd jumped to its feed and began cheering wildly, something I have never experienced in movie theater, before or after. Ken knows how to get an audience emotionally involved.
Yes, it's been incredible. My ATT fiber has been ROCK solid and not dropped a byte as far as I can tell.

I've been working from home all week, and we had electricity and internet right through the storm.

That's with 3 feet of water in the street outside.
Sure but it's a lot of hype for porting QuickCheck to Python. So glad the rest of you caught on 10 years later.
I dabble in netsec, but not in it. My job requires me to work with our netsec team so I prefer to be familiar about the subject matter. I usually lurk on /r/netsec and they have a good resource on their wiki[1] on getting started in netsec.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/wiki/start
In a true, real post apocalyptic world, you can't eat gold, you can't have sex with it, it will not cure your sickness nor will it feed your vices; therefore, it has little to no value.
It is going to be really interesting to see what happens to cryptocurrencies during the next economic downturn.

If their "market caps" aren't decimated then I will be a true believer.

I say this as someone who has owns some of a few different ones.
Xterm ctlseqs
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> I've got a loose rule: if I've not used it or worn it in the last six months, it should go, no matter how much it originally cost.

My issue isn't cost; it's the emotional investment. Everything has a memory attached.
#viddler and #12seconds failed so Snapchat can live
I'm skeptical that there is a significant part of the industry that considers women less capable than men; I'm also skeptical that women have fewer opportunities than men. I believe there are a few bad apple companies, but mostly I see companies tripping over themselves to hire and retain as many women as they can. I simply haven't seen any compelling evidence, and I know that there is a large group of powerful people spreading misinformation about discrimination against women (e.g., wage gap myth). Lastly, the different-interests hypothesis seems to better explain the various gender/tech gaps and it fits pretty perfectly with my experiences. I'm happy to be persuaded otherwise, however.
if you read the article they're talking about the impact of it on communities nearby
No idea about the situation in the US, where there are constitutional rules about this stuff, but here in my jurisdiction in Australia, they fairly recently passed laws making it illegal to resist arrest even if it turns out the arrest was unlawful.

The idea being that the most appropriate place for determining whether an arrest was lawful is in the courts afterwards, as opposed to risking escalation of force at the scene of the arrest, and thus it'll improve safety, or something. I'm not quite sure I buy it, and I suspect our local bar associations may have disagreed too. Though situations of unlawful arrest are fairly rare all things considered, I guess.
Absolutely agree. This weighting is pointless considering the interdependent nature of the items being weighted.
It still blows my mind that this isn't a bigger issue. Trying to retain any privacy with Bitcoin is an arduous process.
The best case scenario for Bitcoin is reaching a consistent price for the rest of its lifetime. That scenario means there's no reason to "invest" in it because ideally it would never change in value.

Only people trying to cash out need people buying in. If you were really invested in the long term you'd rather people not buy in so you can buy more at a lower price.

Bitcoin also has fees. The only reason the fees are lower than credit cards are because people in China can afford to burn electricity at a loss just to turn their Chinese money into anything else.

You still have to pay taxes on the capital gains. And you can't pay taxes in Bitcoin.
Thanks! I'm glad you found that useful (I'm one of the mods there).

/r/netsec is no longer the smaller, more personal community it was when I started as a mod (7 years ago now?). If you're just starting out, one of the things I recommend most is finding a meetup in whatever city you live. It's hard to underestimate how useful an in-person conversation over a beer or two can be when you're early on.

I guess my advice for you would be: take your netsec team out to lunch once in a while! :-)
They may not want to be considered employees, but by IRS definitions they probably are. Uber has too much control over the schedule and manner in which the work is performed to claim they are truly independent contractors.
It's absolutely a threat to free speech, but I don't think the article goes far enough. Consider the following from Randall Munroe: https://xkcd.com/1357/

On the surface, he's right. You don't have to listen to what you don't want to. On the other hand, I have seen his comic frequently cited as justification for not ignoring, but actively hunting down and quashing dissent. In many oppressive regimes, it's not the government enforcing speech restrictions, but rather the party and its independent zealots.
See the sibling comment. Both stories are common, but I think my story is far more common. We don't have data so it's impossible to know, but of course you'd see a lot of people go from security engineering to VP or CTO -- those are the winners. Survivorship bias is a nasty beast.
They're not trading. They're holding and creating the price support. The only people who are trading right now are John Q. Public and a few whales who manipulate the market with shill bids.
No this is ridiculously far from the truth.

They make an awfull lot of money selling actual room nights (think Google-scale a lot, per employee, although the money culture in both firms are opposite to each other), and actually do cancel bookings and even sometime refund non cancelable ones.
They are definitively harsh on the business side, especially when negotiating commissions with hotels, especially since it's always easy to justify ("that's for our users"). But this is not a scam.

You might have had a bad experience. No amount of money spent on customer care will ever balance out a big firm being 100% money driven as opposed to reputation driven, and fundamentally not caring for an individual user. So yes when you are that one user who felt through the cracks it feels bad indeed.
This also lets junior developers practice planning and self-management, since they basically have 12 hours to come up with something to show.
Could someone explain to me any reason why it would be better to book through any third party instead of directly through the hotel?