skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll start by echoing another comment below -- Bitcoin is immune to direct central bank intervention.

> ... what is bitcoin useful for right now? ... all my money is tomorrow BTC ... what the bitcoin crowd _is_ using ...

I would contend that this isn't the right question -- value right now is not based on utility right now; it's based on an estimate of discounted future utility. Unfortunately, that future utility includes a component of "price momentum", which may or may not actually exist, or may just be in part a self-fulfilling limited-timeframe prophecy (or a bubble, as some call it). There's even, in some quarters, worries that onroads to cryptocurrencies may become more difficult in the future as AML laws start to focus on it, so better to have some on hand so that when the "one true cryptocurrency" emerges, you'll be able to get in on it despite your government's reluctance to allow it.

> What makes BTC today better than my cash?

Today, I would say the immunity to politically-directed manipulation of value. As compared to "cash" as in folding paper money that you hold on your person, I would say it gains the advantage of being electronically transferable, and arguably, easier to secure. As compared to "cash" as in money on deposit in a demand deposit account, it offers the liquidity of cash (no bank to tell you "you can't take out that much right now), and immunity from other failures: bank runs do happen (rarely), banks do fail (less rarely), "identities" are stolen (not rarely at all), and accounts are closed because of violations of terms of service or because of suspicious activity (which may just involve transactions over a certain dollar amount). If you're sufficiently paranoid, concerns about a cause you support being labelled as "terrorist" and having money laundering protections slapped on it, or a country that you have relatives in being labelled a "rogue state", or even (true story!) a neighboring country being artificially branded a terrorist state to blackmail them into building a wall.

> isn't it a misnomer at this point to keep calling it a currency?

Maybe. But if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck... I mean, this ends up just being a semantic game where we're fighting over the definition of the word "currency". If it makes you feel better, call it a crypt o'currency, which is its own thing distinct from currency; it just shares some attributes of currencies.
I'm worried there's a taboo developing where only professionals or mentally ill people themselves are allowed to express any kind of opinion about mental illness or the mentally ill.
I'm persuaded that wealth taxes and maximum income are the appropriate solution: after X million per year, you don't get more money, and after you and your family heap up Y million of _fluidly defined_ assets, you get taxed on what you hold/control/manage-via-tax-shelter.

Obliterate the tax shelters, obliterate the tax havens, bring the money back home under threat of criminal law.

I'm not saying you can't be a fat cat. But at a certain point (fluid and blurry, but distinctly present), it's just morbid obesity that is squishing other citizens.
"People are going to have conflicts, and some of them are going to become holy wars. Best of luck in the wars to come."

What does this mean? I'm genuinely interested in your perspective, not trying to play gotcha or argue semantics.
Probably the intuition that a pyramid model investment can't continue indefinitely without some sort of inherent value of the trinket being sold?

Then again, maybe that doesn't even matter.
Yes. That would seem to be a better UBI (Universal Basic Income).

The problem with UBI is not just logistical, it's also psychological and cultural. It might work in other countries, but it won't work well in US. For many reason, some good some bad, many people here would not accept receiving what they see is a "hand-out". First they won't accept others receiving it but many would not even justify getting it themselves.

So it would have to be a UBI disguised as something else. A share in the GDP is brilliant I think and solves this issue. It is a bit like they have the oil payment in Alaska, people seem to accept that as valid and well earned income. The GDP dividend would be the same in a way.

I think the shares should be equally divided. Everyone gets a share if they are a citizen of the country or lived here for X number of years for example. Sam Altman gets the same number of shares as Steve the Carpenter, Jane the Software Developer, and Irene the Newborn Baby.
> The whole network has only 21x redundancy in it, and there is no proof of work. Ethereum currently has Nx redundancy, where N is the number of nodes, and nodes are supposed to be as small as laptops.

Interesting. I have (one of the) standards by which I judge cryptocurrencies and that is, if tomorrow USD (or any major currency of a western country) is marred by hyperinflation, which currency is capable of allowing people to continue business as usual (of their consumer spending).

So far, no cryptocurrency is capable of doing that, and the most promising in this aspect were Ethereum's raiden network and IOTA (EOS wasn't even on my radar btw).
>That is incorrect.

Not even technically (although I did mean 1492). The fact that US history begins in 1776 doesn't make the fact that US doesn't have a history before 1492 untrue. If anything, it makes it even stronger: it not only didn't have a history, it didn't even exist for another 3 centuries or so.

In any case, I was referring to the whole history of the now-US settlements, no just the history of the US as a state.

>That is also incorrect. Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833 due to the efforts of Wilberforce, et al. The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified in 1865. That's a little over 30 years, hardly a "long time" even for a country less than a century old.

I spoke of "other European countries". You only mentioned one, the British Empire, and even itself abolished slavery 30 years before the US. Others did it much earlier. So much for being some shining beacon of freedom. Besides, even 1833 is the date for the British Empire at large. In the UK slavery was abolished much earlier still.
I am glad I have sparked your interest... I am even a bit jealous (or just maybe nostalgic), because it is a great journey with a lot of stuff to learn and experiment in the coming years... Hopefully it will change your life forever... there is nothing better in this world to know you have the FU money - this is the freedom everyone should aim for...
No, the previous poster said the earliest adopters take the most risk. In actuality, whoever pays the most for their btc takes the most risk.

Early adopters invested almost nothing compared to the amount of money moving around now (at risk on a speculative investment). Their risk was negligible and certainly far less than folks getting into the game now, coin for coin.

You’re right that if one buys 0.05 btc today for $400, it’s the same risk as someone investing $400 years ago to mine hundreds or even thousands of coins, but real investors aren’t buying 0.05 btc.
I don't get why regulation is needed. The whole thing is by definition very high risk investment, and I think it'd be silly for any "scam-victim" to claim he didn't know he's entering a high risk, and also high chance of scam, deal.

In the end of the day, why is it the government's job to protect idiot people's money? And that's coming from the country where gambling is legal? The whole thing is based upon get-out-of-our-way-government exactly because of these ridiculous regulations.

If someone got money to waste, and decided to bet on some ICO horse, I wish him luck. If he doesn't have money to waste, it doesn't stop him from gambling on a real horse (which is still legal, and yet has 0 meaning whatsoever), so why are we so bothered about him gambling on this new virtual horse?

Sure, arrest those ICOs that are actually 100% clear scam because they left misleading expectations which they never had an intent of fulfilling.
“inline” is more about linkage than about actual inlining. The compiler will in-line regardless of that attribute.
Evolving KDE – The goals are set
>And Europe is extremely uptight about Holocaust-related things in ways that America isn't.

Germany perhaps. Most of Europe, not.

>That the U.S. was, as you point out, a latecomer to the abolition and desegregation, would seem to justify the U.S. being more "uptight" (some would say, "vigilant") about racial discrimination issues. Why should that be seen as being "crazy about race"?

Because the US still has a thing for race, in a degree and a way that western european countries don't.

Not just being "uptight" but active redlining, active huge overrepresentation of blacks in jail, active police open season on blacks, active open racism and much more.
Video.us
> Bitcoin is different in that its only real use so far is as an alternative bank account.

Only? Thats not true though.

> With companies like TSLA it can be sustainable, as investors believe that future earnings will justify the valuation.

Why do you keep using stock and equity analogies when talking about a completely different asset class that behaves more like a commodity?

So so strange.

What does a "pop" and "doom" mean to you? Bitcoin has swung 90% downwards multiple times and all tearful holders at any point in history have a profit right now. The people that are using bitcoin for more than an alternative bank account will still have uses for bitcoin.

limited supply cryptographic hashes have utility for a variety of reasons at any price to various market participants, just like oil and gold has utility for a variety of reasons at any price.

but yes I can see why that might be confusing when your only valuation model requires revenues and earnings.
That's a matter of liver health, right? So you could theoretically go higher (by combining antidiabetic drugs with beta-adrenergic agonists, and then sitting in a hospital in a cold water bath hooked up to a liver dialysis machine.)

Not a viable alternative to dieting and exercise, of course, but maybe an alternative to liposuction or gastric-bypass surgery.
A fool and his money are easily parted
It’s fundamentally Capitalist because its intent is to prevent workers from abandoning the authoritarian hierarchy of modern day corporate structures (which have served many quite poorly) and moving towards worker ownership through unions or other means. It’s paying off the poor and disenfranchised to prevent revolt against Capitalist ordering principles.
Every ARM SoC is already a black-box containing black-boxes. That's one of the reasons why almost all SoCs are on some ancient version of Linux kernel. They will never be mainlined.
>Instead there should be programs to pay people minimum wage + tuition to attend community college for in-demand-career related degrees.

Amazon has a program like that. Unfortunately, it's only for AAS, and they only pay partial tuition.

What Amazon doesn't seem to have is a program to help people grow within Amazon, beyond FC work. There are tons of in-house resources, video tutorials, etc for training that employees simply can never access because they don't have the time.
in the comments below i wrote

the big difference is that i don't have a family.
But i'm not super frugal.
I pay $700/month with utils + internet for my own 1Bedroom apartment. I could've gone much cheaper if I didn't live Downtown (120,000 city population) and could've gotten a roommate in a 2Bedroom aprt. Plus I also eat out at Chipotle/Jimmy Johns almost every other day, then I go drinking maybe once or twice a month. So I could easily save another $500 if I wanted to
The responses here are a mix of whataboutism and hand-waving dismissals. But let's say they're all 100% valid and well-argued. The conclusion of this still wouldn't validate not supporting net neutrality. I will assume based on the site's name the overarching reason is libertarianism. In which case why bother with the dismissals? Isn't then the argument self-evident?
> everyone uplifted by that machine

Darn monoliths, how do they work ...
Your assertions are completely unfounded.
Funny, I think using FROM ubuntu takes away the main benefits of Docker, namely the ability to have perfectly groomed execution environment, that is also fully reproducible and with minimal external dependencies. Basically having immutable infrastructure and infrastructure as code as the core pillars, enabling them to be so smooth that live mutation etc would be unnecessary.
Well, they consider RL problems extensively, and as the joke goes, in RL it's OK to overfit to your validation set - if you can.

As for regular supervised learning: it's no worse than, say, early stopping based on validation scores. It should be wrong but in practice NNs generalize anyway, and since this paper implies that Google Brain & DM are doing this hyperparameter optimization routinely now for everything, I figure that they would have noticed any overfitting problems by now (either when the methods fail to outperform on one of Google's private internal huge databases, or when they rolled outth the translator).
We're still in the information era
I don't think it's about not using the GPLv3 --- a lot of software is stuck in GPLv2 because the maintainers can't get everyone who contributed (or their estate) to sign off on a license upgrade to the better but incompatible GPLv3. Even the linux kernel is stuck!

But this isn't an "escape hatch" for breaking the GPL; there's a reason the FSF made the "cure clause" explicit in the GPLv3. The explicit language should make life easier and save on court costs not only for corporate lawyers, but even more so for the excellent folks at the Free Software Conservancy, the biggest defenders against GPL violations.
I used to believe that as well. I have business and family in other countries and the traditional approaches were way too expensive ($50 for a bank wire, $X fee plus horrible exchange rates via Moneygram, etc). I used Bitcoin a few times to move money from my US accounts to my overseas accounts where I could then transfer it in local currency through the local banking systems.

But then it started taking longer and longer for bitcoin transactions to clear. And the price was often moving during this window between when I bought in one currency and I could sell in another currency.

Now I just use TransferWise. Less hassle. Costs are much more reasonable (a few bucks for small amounts) and I don't have to have do multiple transactions to get money from Point A to Point B.
> In the United Kingdom, it costs about £650 per patient to provide psychotherapy, which is effective for about 50% of patients. That figure indicates how much governments would need to spend, but does not take into account what they might get back.

they don't appear to provide a source for this. The English NHS collects, and publishes, a lot of data for the IAPT (Improved access to psychological therapies programme). IAPT provides access to short forms of therapy such as cognitive behaviour therapy (which would normally be about 7 weeks).

http://www.digital.nhs.uk/catalogue/PUB30153

> In August 2017 there were:

> 113,541 new referrals

> 83,330 referrals entered treatment

> 47,100 referrals finished a course of treatment, of which:

> 88.5 per cent waited less than 6 weeks and 98.9 per cent waited less than 18 weeks to enter treatment

> 43,922 started treatment at caseness, with 50.8 per cent moving to recovery

there's a large unweidly spreedsheet with results for each provider.

the latest figures are here: http://content.digital.nhs.uk/iaptmonthly
1st point: Private companies can already ban hate speech so net neutrality won't change anything.

2nd point: An ISP failed to invest in the infrastructure it needed to provide the service it promised but something something net neutrality.

3rd point: Companies should be regulated, but not by the government. They should be sued, by the people.

Honestly.. this kind of drivel is so tiring. Can libertarians please go away, or at least stop using resources and infrastructure that only exists because of public funding and government intervention.
Supreme Court Weighs Streamlined Patent Challenges
Active Storage looks nice, and perfect timing for me, I'm looking to add generic file blobs to my toy project in Rails pretty soon.
Facebook should really think about whether they want to piss off Romanians protesting. Christmas is coming.
1) Inherent value is a fiction. There is no such thing as value without intervening human judgement. Besides which by any sane and consistent definition cryptocurrencies have inherent value (decentralized trust mechanism... Not gonna judge whether or not it's worth the current valuations of cryptos... It's just nonzero)

2) We're living in strange times.
A very good long-form piece on the fertilizer explosion:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/lifestyle/west-...
The information about Portugal has made me want net neutrality even more.
So, you simply need to add an optional large screen, keyboard, and mouse to your phone. It has already been done. Now it just needs to be done a little better?

https://www.samsung.com/us/explore/dex/
>First, no where I mentioned current market cap, let alone its link to utility

The only substantive way to read "this was what gave Bitcoin its utility, and thus value" is through its connection to market cap.

>other crypto currencies have implemented LN and are beginning to use it

No one is near having a functional lightning network. Simply enabling segwit isn't enough. Furthermore, it isn't enough to just have the LN, but it needs to be in widespread usage for its full potential to be reached. Say some low usage alt-coin did enable a fully functional lightning network. It wouldn't matter because there are no scaling concerns for that coin to begin with. It would be functionally no different than doing a transaction with the bare network. The LN is a solution to the kinds of scaling problems only bitcoin is currently having (perhaps Ethereum as well).

>Aside from the fact that it would only give BTC 1.7x transaction counts boost

LN enables off-chain transactions and so would scale the effective transaction capacity orders of magnitude.
We didn't have Net Neutrality up to 2015. No evidence has been presented it significantly hurt small businesses. On the contrary, there's evidence it is not so: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-21/the-end-o... http://www.nber.org/papers/w22040
The G5 (and the G4) were from another time. Back in the early 2000's (and late 90's) it wasn't uncommon two have two machines at your desk. One for internet and email, the other for Microsoft Office. With OS X you could combine them both into one machine.
Remember also that at the time, breach of employment contract by the employer was a civil matter the employee would have to pursue out of his or her own pocket. Breach by the employee was a criminal matter (see the Master and Servant acts, which essentially perpetuated feudal norms into the industrial age). It was also illegal for workers to "combine" -- band together to say that either all of them would get a higher wage, or none of them would work -- and organizing such a "combination" was also a criminal offense.

Like several major sectors of the US economy at the time (and later), Britain's "revolution" was utterly dependent on coerced labor, viciously enforced by the power of the government. But some people still like to think of those times as the good old days of "laissez-faire" and government "staying out of the market".

Now, you can argue that this was a "rule of law", just a brutally repressive one which systematically granted special rights to certain classes of people, but then you're on much shakier ground.
> The idea is to create a regulatory burden so large that only big companies can afford to comply, or lobby to get favorable regulations. "It's basically a religion... to align with the interest of" politicians and bureaucrats.

Your version breaks because there's no apparent win condition by doing that. The only possible gain politicians and bureaucrats have by bloating the system is continued employment... which is not guaranteed, and does not pay especially well (relative).

They're much better off getting lobbied and doing whatever corporations want, which is screw over your constituents.
OK, let's get practical. A happened to be a reactor base class inspired by http://ithare.com ; B was a MWSR concurrent queue (scary mutexes and all) ; C was a ring buffer on which the queue was built. The goal of the whole thing was to pass plain data objects between reactors. The one "requirement" that ended up changing was that plain data objects weren't enough (we want to pass anything that has a move constructor). This means scrapping the ring buffer, and modify the MWSR queue to use something else (possibly an `std::queue`).

I used property based tests. With relatively little effort, I ran thousands of tests. Allow me to laugh at your measly 27 from atop my high horse.

More seriously, though, I don't know how I could have mocked my ring buffer without writing another full featured ring buffer. Mocking looks a bit ridiculous in this case. Same for the queue. And the reason why this is so is not tight coupling. It's because my queue relied on the functionality provided by the ring buffer, and my reactor relied on the functionality provided by the queue. If this wasn't the case, I would have written a simpler ring buffer and queue to begin with.

Also, why mock stuff when I can test my code under real conditions?

> The whole point of a test suite is that it avoids ossification.

This feels backwards. If you just mean that test suites prevent the unintended consequences of change, sure. They're like a home made type system in that respect. But if you suggest we should bend a code base just to make it "let's mock everything" testable™, then no. Don't mock stuff for the sake of it, it's a wast of time.

I'd rather concentrate on making the code usable in the first place. With small, well defined interfaces. In my experience, such designs are naturally testable.
Because once the price stops rapidly going up, if there is no other reason to hold on to it, people will sell. If it's no longer working as an investment, and it's only value is as an investment, what other reason would people have to hold it?

Unless you think the value can keep increasing forever. If that's the case, can you name one example of something with no value whatsoever, other than that it's value was known to be increasing over a certain period of time, that continued increasing long term?
I had the words "legally obligated" in there on purpose, to try to avoid a pointless ideological argument in favor of objective fact. And on that point, the Supreme Court says you're wrong: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
The energy used to mine Bitcoin is bigger than the annual usage of 160 countries
Germany also has such a big safety net that the only homeless people literally just don't want to change their street lifestyle. It's a trade off. Living in Chicago, which has a large homeless population, I think Germany is doing it right. You have less max earning potential but you also know that your basic human needs will always be paid for and everything you earn goes to a nicer house, nicer food, nicer clothes etc.
It seems like far too many of their counter arguments seem to boil down to, "This isn't already happening here, so we don't have to worry about it." If we don't want to worry about it, and we don't want those things to happen, then we should just keep the regulations in place. If you support repealing the regulations, then you support the idea of these things becoming reality, and surely expect it.