skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had a few more thoughts after thinking about this one for a bit. It's easy to laugh at the boneheaded mistakes, but can we say anything deeper about this?

The author's actions seem to be motivated by an almost childish level of over-enthusiasm. That the word childish occurs to me makes me wonder - are we making it too difficult for kids to try things? Not actually opening a restaurant, of course, but something moderately ambitions for their age. Big enough for them to fail badly at when they're insanely, blindly hopeful about it. It would be good in a way to experience that sort of failure at an age and life situation where you don't destroy your finances when you're 3/4 to retirement and with kids of your own to send to college. Maybe if he had experienced that, then he could chase after his next dream with a little more realism and self-control and a little less blind optimism.
I don't really see your point. Practically speaking, I only food sold in my local grocery store. Sure the grocery chain probably really does take deliveries directly from other states every day, but I'm not directly involved in the interstate portion of the supply chain.
Reminds me of the dystopian conclusion of AI that to protect humans you have to enslave them in some manner to protect them from themselves. Facebook's endless psychology games and A/B testing will ultimately create the most profitable product - which will be the most manipulative product possible.
What is the most energy efficient way to get rid of Bitcoins? Does it matter if I sell them all at once or if I spread it out over more transactions?
I'd argue that Ford is already a technology company - just not one out of the Silicon Valley model.
Why bother with a second layer when new blockchain designs improve upon the designs of Bitcoin? The ledger is "secured" by about 6 mining pools which might even be controlled by the same people.

Second layer goes completely against Satoshi's primary design in the first sentence of the white paper - which is removing the need for third parties. The lightening network design is a siphoning power grab by Blockstream.

After all, if you look at Bitcoin from a technical perspective the services Bitcoin offers are available in Litecoin, Monoero, etc.
Flash Mob: Revolution, Lightning, and the People’s Will
What's a Tensor? – “the facts of the universe” [video]
This doesn't even make sense.

If it isn't profitable to mine, then people won't mine. Difficulty will fall, which will mean that fewer cycles (and thus, less energy) is needed to find the next block.

The author literally took the "total cost of all energy in the network" and divided it by "total number of transactions". That's not how it works. There is effectively zero incremental cost in terms of energy usage for a transaction.
The question becomes does the outsourcing firms they engage have the talent to build what they want (is top talent really applying to IBM/Accenture/etc?), and is the overhead of outsourcing (both monetary and time wise) going to allow them to be competitive with tech companies.

I'm going to argue for any large scale project, the answer will be no.
I own a .io registrar and I had to make changes to migrate to the new system
So what is the NY Times' working definition of a 'tech company' here?
Afilias tech support is 24/7
The problem with this argument is that it's throwing out some big numbers and bad outcomes, without making any attempt to quantify the likelihood of those outcomes.

Without quantification, this position is basically unfalsifiable. Plus, there's a trivial contrapositive that is just as valid: "what if allowing mosquitoes to live causes an outbreak of a new disease that is transmitted by mosquitoes and kills billions?". Sure, that could also happen. As with total food-chain collapse from reduction of population of a non-keystone species, it seems very unlikely. Contrast that against the almost-certain probability that 0.5m will die next year (0.1 Holocausts per year, or one Holocaust per decade) from malaria.

If we don't attach a probability to these outcomes there's no way of having any sort of meaningful conversation about them.
> [ABCDE] has a horrible sensitivity (50%-90% depending on the type). But if this technique also only has a 50% sensitivity...

If the sensitivity of the two techniques are not correlated, a 50% improvement on top of ABCDE would be fantastic.
Because increasing the number of transactions does not significantly change energy cost.

Bitcoin's daily energy cost will asymptotically approach (price per coin)*(daily miner reward amount).

As block reward decreases, we may see less energy investment in the future.

There is a loose link between number of transactions and price (network effect of more people using Bitcoin increases perceived value), but its probably a fairly small correlation.
> cheap, fast, effective, reliable, and safe

You can only maybe guaranty fast.

And the unknown is huge on this one. Just like the potential horrible consequences.

The way you talk scares me a lot. I feel like I'm in front of the stereotypical american gun owner in tv shows.
Please stop your continuous stream of personal attacks and your rants against the 'left', which besides lowering the general level of discourse is factually incorrect in many ways.
Reject a claim because you don’t like the source. Assert that the initial claim is a rejection of science. But instead of refuting the numbers with your own, you launch into an emotional attack about “the left” bombing brown people and people from developing nations having no access to money.

This is not how to defend bitcoin.
Suspected Nuclear Accident in Russia or Kazakhstan in September
I've found through my experience that the choice of urgent care vs a non-urgent care doctor is more important than I have always thought: An urgent care center wants to focus on the shortest path to getting you relief (your story aside). They'll err towards slightly over-prescribing. The non-urgent care doc will take a more comprehensive treatment path.

A slight distinction that might not matter sometimes, but i often wonder how many antibiotics/pain killers I've taken prescribed from urgent cares that were possibly overkill.
11 000 years ago, the falls were almost 11 river-kilometers downstream from where they are now, as the falls began where the gorge now ends: at the Niagara Escarpment.

However, in the last 200 years as the falls became both a societal tourist attraction and a site of hydroelectric power generation, humans have elected to try to make the falls frozen in time as much as it's feasible for them to do so. Due to the diversion of water and various anti-erosion projects, the rate of erosion is now less than a third of what it was before 1905.
Thanks for entering to win
Very interesting post. Is there any benchmark data showing how their system compares to the competition?
Regulators begin to tackle the craze for initial coin offerings
> I say that if WL's real goal is to promote human rights, the US is not the highest target on the list.

well, I say that constant hopes for transparency and the strides we take towards those goals will keep the United States high on the list of nations with decents human rights.

WL is one of those strides, and I think it's invaluable.

It's 'interesting' that given the muck that WL has raked up about the U.S. that anyone could be upset about their ( the US ) having been a target..
UI backwards compatibility
"High-strung", "closed-minded"? I'm sort of offended. There's some good stuff going on in Detroit and Ann Arbor. Not to mention Grand Rapids and others.
"Even as bitcoin flirts with $8,000, the price required for mining to be marginally profitable stands at a jaw-dropping $300,000 to $1.5 million by 2022 based on current growth trends and electricity use, according to Christopher Chapman, an analyst at Citigroup Inc. At that pace, the implied consumption would match that for the whole of Japan over the long haul."

This Citi analyst either doesn't understand Bitcoin or doesn't understand economics: because the protocol has difficulty adjustment and because marginal revenue will always approximate marginal cost, the cost to mine 1 BTC will always approximate its value.

Therefore, projecting the cost of mining is equivalent to predicting the price of Bitcoin. If the cost to mine 1 BTC was $1MM USD (and so $1MM/BTC), that would imply the network value of the Bitcoin ecosystem would be well over the USD M1 supply (tens of trillions, in fact). Bitcoin would have effectively replaced fiat in that world and perhaps all the cost it eliminated would be worth the mining.

In any event, from what he said, I doubt this (equity) analyst understands that he can't project $1MM BTC mining cost without at least $1MM per BTC price.
Whatever.

Servers break. Providers go down.

It happens to all of them. Whenever I read comments like yours I wonder where you moved your servers to, and if you'll move them again when that goes down too.
"Web 1.0" is now synonymous with earnestness. Earnestness is the one thing that people are craving right now, and it's nearly impossible to find anymore, from friendships to politics to writing to business.
I don't see how GPUs are relevant. The question wasn't about real time video, but video without flickering. I don't have the domain knowledge to answer confidently, but the algorithm was designed to be noise-tolerant. From my own amateur-level reading of the paper I see no reason why it shouldn't work well with video.
That looks pretty decent indeed, and makes me a lot more hopeful about the promises of GraphQL, but it sounds like its an Android specific implementation, rather then something I could actually use for JVM service-to-service communication.
Without such control over nature the country where I live would not even exist.
Nice Wxwidgets!
I would just read it yourself, its quite an enjoyable read for adults.
Counterpoint, as technical people, we can agree that there is probably a better solution to an impending accident rather than sit still like a deer in the headlights.

In fact, this article could start a discussion on if the risks of active accident avoidance measures (e.g. running a stop light at a clear intersection if you're about to be rear-ended) might cause more problems than they solve.
I agree, it should be considered a part with a manufacturing defect, not the owner's fault.
Sniffing Kickbase's Traffic
Yeah it would be really bad and luckily never happened in Linux.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/12/richa...
I think some wires are being crossed here, as there has been recent evidence of modifications to earlier leaks from Guccifer 2.0 of DNC documents. These were not published by WL but they are often grouped with WL due to Guccifer 2.0 claiming to be a WL source
There is a good documentary about it, "Stealing a Nation". Free on vimeo: https://vimeo.com/17401157
Hopefully it's largely the family I left behind then;)
Spain revokes certificate of all ID cards issued since April 2015 – ROCA
https://www.dnielectronico.es/PortalDNIe/

[translation with Google Translate]

"To strengthen the security of electronic certificates of the e-ID cards ... the functionality of the digital certificates will be deactivated ..."

"...Until the necessary technical solutions are implemented (which will be done in the near future) .."

More information about the vulnerability is at: https://roca.crocs.fi.muni.cz.

On-line certificate test is at https://keychest.net/roca - including links to off-line tester and an email responder (roca@keychest.net)
They teach this method in my kids UK school, I'm pretty sure it's part of the standard curriculum.
It's pharma who let this happen, on purpose.
I'm 100% sure the daughter would have preferred the abusive alcoholic over being tricked like this. If you don't understand that, then you have a lot to learn about Homo sapiens.
Would greatly benefit from explaining why they couldn't do dns-01 challenges successfully.

This an issue all the way from individuals with crappy or misconfigured DNS locally to whole TLDs (fortunately no really major ones) with non-working DNS. But it's often a teachable moment, something others can learn from.
Do you know what Evernote uses? Although I don't really use it anymore, when I did, I was astonished at how will it found and indexed text.
Quantum Computer Startup
I'm trying to assemble a team to build a quantum computer based on trapped Calcium ions. Contact me (stein@daad-alumni.de) for details. I am specifically looking for a MBA-type to become CEO, a ultra-high-vacuum technician/engineer, a mixed-signal electronics engineer, a quantum optics scientist, a programmer (FPGA to quantum circuits), and someone to deal with purchases. As I am based in Germany, it would help if you are from central Europe (or willing to move). There is no funding yet; this is to find enthusiastic people willing to push for that (and who also fit into the business). I'm a quantum optics PhD with background in ion traps as well as electronics and programming skills; I see myself in the role of CTO or advisor.
Fair point. I guess something only like PoS can avoid that problem, if it is infallible, which might not be the case.

>The costs of securing conventional centralized mechanisms (or bank vaults) ramp up much slower than Bitcoin per dollar or per unit of wealth secured.

Actually I think the costs are much less, because after a certain point, you're not working to secure the network but racing to make more bitcoin. The network can be secure with much less resources than what is currently being spent.

It is a misconception to think that effort to mine is to fight external attacks. It is more like fight between banks to transact faster.
Looking forward to seeing this Dropbox.

If someone there is reading this, please release this code in any way you like, even if you think it's too rushed or ugly, i'm sure the community can clean it up.
>> you'll be forgotten by all but your strong friends (who don't need Facebook's friend-menu to remember you).

> How is that a bad thing?

I already covered that in my original comment: it might not be a bad thing to you, but you are not everyone. There exists a significant number of people for whom quitting Facebook would have some real negative costs.

> It's not normal or healthy to try to maintain hundreds or thousands of "friendships" with people you barely know. You don't need to keep in life-long contact with some guy you spent 4 minutes talking to at a bar while on vacation 5 years ago.

That's not what I was talking about at all. I was thinking more about the kind of friendly acquaintances that you see regularly. For instance, you might have 3-10 close friends, 20-30 more distant friends, and 500-2000 Facebook non-friends. I'm talking about the second group of 20-30 friends.
I understand the point being made here, but I always feel like it contains an underlying assumption that techies should be regarded as better than other types of workers. But I don't see why that should be the case; if you work in HR great, if you're an engineer great.

Because of how I look people tend to assume I'm a designer. That's of course different from discrimination based on race or gender, but I think it would be very strange to be offended by this assumption. Designers are important too, not just engineers.
Was confused at first. I was reading this expecting a history of the beer.
they could possibly want all your development toolchain and apps tied to their ecosystem, intertwined with linux and azure, so that the everything depends on their services.
For the first part the jury is out, and for the second they seem to think so.
Modify the Timbre of Amazon Polly Voices with the New Vocal Tract SSML Feature
Do you think it costs less energy to produce and maintain a fiat currency + supporting systems?
You could use less spite and disdain for your comment i think. You probably already know that convincing yourself that your outgroup is dumb and unqualified is a tribal ego-boosting technique, but a reminder never hurt.
Great paper by the way.

If you look at the graph on page 8, you can see obvious clustering of poor countries vs other countries. This study does not compare the overall wealth of the countries against crime.

The reason that is important, is that in a rich country, even poor people have many options. In a poor country like Venezuela, they don't. As a result, even if they had the same Gini coefficient, the crime would look much different.

So when you take that into account (which is what I tried to do in my statement, but probably could have worded better), then being in a "rich but unequal" society is much better than a poor country of either high or low inequality. I think the high clustering of OECD countries demonstrates this.
This assumes rational actors and a unified market. If bitcoin mining let's people get around currency controls the prices my end up significantly different.
Another automotive company is way ahead of Ford.

http://www.autonews.com/article/20171002/OEM06/171009988/ran...
No, your wife unaware that you'd hired a fake mother will hire a fake you when you die least it break your geriatric mother's heart. Now you'll have two actors unknowingly interacting in perpetuity.
Payment channels and LN don't introduce trusted 3rd parties or counterparty risk.

Payment channels weren't discussed in the whitepaper, but Satoshi discussed and attempted some payment channel designs[1]. He left before coming up with a secure payment channel design. Recent improvements to Bitcoin, including the transaction malleability fix included in the recent segwit upgrade a few months ago, finally make secure payment channels feasible.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Payment_channels#Nakamoto_high-fr...
bitcoin is currently inflationary -- what do you think is paying the miners, but new bitcoins created out of nothing?
The point is to measure the system's efficiency and energy usage.

Bitcoin's Proof of Work algorithm using SHA-256 and power hungry ASICs with a bottle neck on 4-7 transactions per second (average, as latency is in 10 minute intervals) or even in the case of the controversial Bitcoin-Cash with 56 transactions per second; what Bitcoin as a service does with the type of infrastructure required for the software to run can be analyzed and defined in terms of cost of operations versus alternative services which offer similar or identical functionality.
Logitch: Sorry, all Link owners a free Hub
I use two apps on my iPad that do a scarily good job of recognizing my handwriting. They are Nebo and GoodNotes. Neither app was expensive.

I mostly use GoodNotes. I don't convert my handwriting to text, but it is nice that I can search my notes.
I don't think you need to replicate silicon valley culture and pay to be successful - arguable replicating it is harmful.

There is no good reason to pay 200k a year to a guy who can make 200k a year in Sunnyvale - in Michigan, he'll have as much disposable income at, 120-140k a year as he did at 200k a year in California.

Before you say people wont work for less - I know plenty of people who would, including myself.
I too grew up in the Metro Detroit area (and then moved to Seattle).

The suburban schools are quite good. Oakland County schools are some of the best in the nation. International Academy was rated as the top public school in America for many years (it's now amongst the top 10 or so).

In my opinion, Michigan is experiencing a statewide cultural divide. The more metropolitan areas are not nearly as culturally close minded as the less metropolitan areas. Ultimately, Michigan companies don't seem to value talent enough to pay them well. There's no reason somebody should be able to make 2-3x more outside of Michigan than in the state.
I wasn't trying to come across as an anti vaccination person. I realize just about everything is related to ecosystem, but what I meant by "changing ecosystems" was specifically related to introducing species and modifying species, not taking medicine.

Rabbits in australia are a pretty famous example, but I can't walk out my door without seeing numerous fails related to introducing plant species.
I think bitcoin will be used as a store of value rather than for daily transactions.
I mean, I get migraines too, and they're completely debilitating, but I would personally just classifiy them as something very different than a headache. Undersells just how horrible they can be.
Why is their claim nonsensical? Just do the math, politics and countries are not relevant. Take the hash rate, transactions per second, and power consumption of any mining rig. The current hash rate is about 11 ExaH/s (; 11 Million TH/s) supporting approximately 3.81 transactions per second. Meaning power to support about 3 ExaH is used, for every transaction. Taking a decent mining GPU youre at about 3MH/J.

To perform this amount of hashing with this example it would take 3TJ. Or for comparison, the energy in about 170 barrels of oil, for one Bitcoin transaction.

The numbers may be a bit off, but they're not off by a factor 100, and my house for sure doesn't even need 1/100th of this to run a day.
Fair enough, but counterpoint: I live in a vintage building on a busy street, and the USPS carriers never leave packages on our doorstep. Each apartment has put up a little sign on their front door indicating how they'd prefer packages left (on the stairs, out back, whatever), which the postal workers all adhere to.

I see them walking past my window, from the front of the building to the back, all the time.

So they must have some flexibility...
Don't assume everyone on HN is American. Some are actually from openly hostile countries, so what? Can't we discuss these things freely on the internet as long as we don't hurt anyone?
To me it seems that you make the mistake of buying into the old dichotomy of 'left' vs. 'right'.

This leads you to believe that every lefty is a communist, rejects 'sound money' and supports a strong centralized government. But that's not the whole picture. I consider myself to be an anarcho syndicalist - which is pretty lefty - and I don't have a problem with Bitcoin. Quite the contrary; I support the replacement of centralized hierarchical structures by distributed democratic structures. Be it financial, political or societal.

'The left' is much more diverse than you might think. Don't let yourself be fooled into thinking that there's only 'left' vs. 'right'.

So, may I suggest that the dislike of decentralized systems correlates more with a preference for authoritarian systems?

Anyway; about the rest of your post:

> [...] like bombing brown people [...]

I think this is uncalled for. It's a strawman deflection and not a very good one at that. Warmongering has been a favorite past time of all sorts of governments, not only leftist ones.

> It's a rejection of science to do so.

How so?

> But this kind of false claim, that is repeated over and over and over again is just not acceptable.

> [...] most bitcoin is mined by renewable excess energy [...]

Do you have any pointers to refute the claim? Can you give me a link to some numbers?

Looking forward to hear from you!
Jony Ive on Apple Park and the iPhone X
> That assumes a lot about what one considers "real life." My social circle has never included "people who only remember me because I'm in a list curated by Facebook". Whether or not these people invite me to parties makes no difference to me.

I already covered that in my original comment: it might not be a bad thing for you, but you are not everyone. There exists a significant number of people for whom quitting Facebook would have some real negative costs.

> I think as one gets older one finds that "Partying" with distant acquaintances becomes less and less an important part of one's social life.

Also getting invited to a party was just an example, and not all parties are booze-fueled keggers where you "party."

It's also not "distant acquaintances" I'm taking about. The group I'm talking about are the people 1) who you like enough to want to hang out with, 2) who like you enough to invite you, but 3) don't like you enough to always remember your special communication preferences unprompted.