skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You're answering a question I didn't pose.

I am clearing up some points you seem to have misunderstood or glossed over.

> > > "In short, the regulation is needed to protect against ISPs prioritizing their profits over their consumers"

> > It's not encouraging to see that your broad, summary statement is nonsensical.

> > A for-profit business firm prioritizes their profits over their consumers by definition.

Since, as you pointed out, a business prioritizes profits over customers, there needs to be an incentive for these businesses to prioritize their customers. That incentive is either competition or regulation.

The first choice is not currently workable, since competition between ISPs is impractical.

This is the same problem that net neutrality exists to prevent, just in a different problem space: Without a free market, competition is unfeasible.

> Knee jerk "that guys not on my team" responses aren't helping to encourage me.

Could you elaborate on what you see as a "knee jerk response"? I am not seeing any here.
>People .. ridicule cryptocurrencies, dismissing bitcoin as a scam, a Ponzi scheme or a bubble.

>Wealth disparity is at record levels and the ultrarich have cornered the market on every asset class, but with bitcoin, an entirely new economy has sprung into existence. That's the pitch for decentralized cryptocurrencies: They offer hope that there might be another, fairer way of doing things.

The irony here is Bitcoin, like most other cryptocurrencies are structured similar to a pyramid scheme and highly favor existing capital to control the supply and exploiting users who join the network past a certain date where barrier to entry increases.

They tell the story of acquiring this digital asset for a small capital sum, and simply passing it off to someone else for a greater sum. The intention is not utility but psychological exploitation of greater fools.

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/86/is-it-possible...

http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-inequality-2014-1

Best estimates (2014) are that there are
about one million holders of
Bitcoin; 47 individuals hold about
30 percent, another 900 hold a
further 20 percent, the next
10,000 about 25% and another
million about 20%, with 5% being
lost. So 1/10th of one percent
represent about half the holdings
of Bitcoin and 1 percent close to
80 percent
The blog post was in 2014. This security bypass happened in 2016.

I think what we're witnessing here is that despite best intentions and past experience, humans are going to be humans. I actually felt good after reading that blog post in 2014 thinking that you guys are going to be better than most companies here.

Nope.

But I think a lesson can be learned here. The lesson is simply that humans are the weakest link. As much as you might try to add process and try to minimize, the best is having zero human capability at all. So when tptacek asks _who_ has ability to change things about an account, we really do want to know. Because those people are the weakest links. (don't mean naming names, but understanding who in general has those powers)

I mentioned elsewhere. I own my domain. I backup my emails. It's way more likely for a FastMail human loophole to screw me over than for me to need human assistance on login (which is never).
I wonder if any of the 'political' code has worked it's way via cargo-cult programming into production
I live in the Peninsula (San Mateo County, CA). My side of the street is mostly rentals (2BR townhouse duplexes) costing about $4k/mo. The other side of the street is single homes, 3BRs that go for $1.6M. If you want good schools for your kids in the Peninsula, $4k/mo isn't a crazy rent, you might be able to go somewhere else in the area and pay $3k, but maybe you care enough about your kid's future to pay the extra $1k/mo for better schools... so you have a lot of people who are tradespeople or who are struggling to save much after they take care of their kids, but a lot of the homeowners are probably worth $5M at retirement.

My former next door neighbor had to move far away because she just couldn't afford it anymore, but probably at least a half-dozen families on my block could plausibly have net worths in the $5M range. In a neighborhood like this you see $70k and $10k cars parked next to each other.
It was a reasonable proposition, look at all the users funneled by IE and Edge to Bing. Google isn't a be all end all search engine, outside the English language sphere, Yandex, Baidu (albeit propped up by China) and others either dominate or take a large chunk of the search market.
Stylish yet Cozy Bridesmaid Dressing Ideas for Winter Wedding – A2zWeddingCards
Microsoft did recently increase system requirements quite a bit, I believe with the Anniversary Update.

And well, he specifically said that operating systems go through bloat and debloat phases over and over. XP to Vista was quite a step towards bloat. 7, 8, 8.1 partially debloated that again. 10 with its telemetry and increased online focus seems to chew on that, again.

But even then, it's not like Windows is a miraculous feat of efficiency. There's functionally equivalent Linux systems with down to a quarter of the resource usage.
> It has also reduced drunk driving rates.

What happened to the overall DUI rates, though?
Depends on the incentive scheme to stop malicious actors. Current form of "PoW" relies on computational hahsing to stop the attacks.

PoS, an alternative "work" scheme, relies on staking and risk of losing coins to stop bad actors. The person who gets to mine the block is still hashing and creating the block.

Ethereum, as an example, started out with PoW but soon moves to PoS. So, it is trying to avoid a situation like Bitcoin were highpowered hashing (a word coined by Satoshi) and electricity is in focus.
Probably because it would be a massive cost, on the level of a nationwide program to eliminate homelessness. And the portugal model doesn't seem to really wean people off drugs, unlike homelessness, so it's just endless money being funneled into maintaining addicts, which in time will keep growing since drug use is legal.

We'd probably run out of money if we tried.
way easier to understand complex syntax than reading yet another foo(bar) example.
Drowning students in debt so they are basically forced to work for evil corporations who do evil things.
That doesn't really change the point much, does it? Installing your own non-Windows OS on a machine is a very small part of the market. Providing security for the people who will never install a new OS on their machine (not even a new version of Windows) is serving a much larger part of the market.
That's 1% of global energy usage, and you say it isn't worth writing about?

*edit yep math's wrong. It's still a shitload of power and worth writing about.
Stockfish plays like an ambitious amateur in the first game, giving away a piece for two pawns on move 13.

Perhaps this move was justified though, as later in the same game Stockfish gets a position which is at worst drawn, likely winning. Moves later however, around move 40,
Stockfish gets its own knight trapped and the game is over.

This is not the kind of chess we normally see from Stockfish.
One day we will find out what Windows 10 sends home too. Is it "only" ad tracking data like ads, or what several security advisors suggest it acts like a key logger?

The problem I see, a smartphone is me thing. A PC of your lawyer, your doctors is a hell another dimension. And unfortunately it's a group of jobs like these that run on Windows Professional often without an admin or AD server. Guess what, it's a wet dream for them.
Funny and hot clip video
That maybe true of Bitcoin Core today but that isn't the vision expressed in the original Bitcoin. The true spirit of Bitcoin lives on today in Bitcoin Cash.
An mmap based, high-performance, highly available Android log collection library
You don't have to start from zero though. It's cool that it works with google scale resources. But it seems like it would be faster to initialize with a neural net first trained to mimic the moves of an existing chess or Go AI. And then improve it from there.

>"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said. Minsky then shut his eyes. "Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher. "So that the room will be empty." At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
No. As I tried to explain, whataboutism is to distract from the topic to avoid addressing the issue, which is not what I am doing here. What I am saying is that no one sees any problem with using energy on porn and video games, and I think Bitcoin has as much utility as those, so I don't see why anyone has a problem with its energy usage either.

My point is that sometimes pointing out people's narrow-minded tunnel vision, in this case applying an inconsistent standard to something they dislike, is mistaken as whataboutism.

Now if I thought Bitcoin's energy usage was a bad thing, this would be whataboutism, but I do not.
That sounds like an abstraction problem. I’m totally willing to accept I’m crazy. But my gut feeling is there is a lot of technical debt in representation, so it’s hard to move to the frontier.
How to Build a City That Doesn’t Flood? Turn It into a Sponge
Check your math. 13 / 110,000 = 0.00012. Or 0.012%. That's 1/80th of 1%.

If it gets to 1% -- 1100 TWH -- then sure, it'll definitely be worth discussing.
I've never seen an ad in Windows 10. Not once.

Serious question: where are these ads supposed to be showing?
Refunds and chargebacks without escrow need to also be trustworthy and easy, too.

I believe a Bitcoin debit card would do everything you say... But if someone skims my card at the pump and takes all my bitdimes, I want that to be a resolvable problem. The thing I fear most about mainstreaming Bitcoin is buyer protection.
'There Is No Privacy Online, Get Over It'
It's important to realize China is a huge bubble. They are the world's largest company. Why in the world are we supposed to have any faith in their GDP statistics? GDP growth in China has likely been negative for the last year also fyi.

One day the world will wake up and realize 20% of the global economy is gone, simply because it never existed. The consequences will be far more than just disastrous.

Also thought this was a beautiful quote: "Silicon Valley chose to imprison us in apps and call it business, when what it really amounts to is a social credit system of social gamification."
Yeah, this is a good point.

Sure, you can put the examples you want in your book. I think it's your own form of personal expression, and maybe you can move hearts and souls in this way.

But you have to own it. Some people might not buy your stuff. Others will go out of their way to buy your stuff. Own the consequences to your speech.

If a white nationalist released a book in the same way... I wouldn't buy it. They might whine about me not wanting to listen to their opinion. And I don't! I would probably buy the article's author's book. But there's no fallacy there.

People want to buy and read what they want to buy and read.
It’s just a book. He’s taken it a direction that decreases his audience. It sounds like he’s probably published and sold enough copy to be able to be picky about readership. You’re welcome to not purchase this material. He’s also welcome to write and publish it.

Otherwise, I think he could have tried to depolarize his examples or take them a more light/comedic direction. Maybe a “murder count” to classification switch clause with a silly Megadeth reference. If it fits the criteria, then put in the wc procedure, etc. there’s always a way to spice up examples without being outright biased.
I honestly had deja-vu when I saw this comment but then realized I guess it's just a shill-bot.
Net Neutrality is like preventing the Post Office from limiting the amount of packages a business can deliver, or limiting the priority of that business's deliveries unless that business pays the Post Office a premium.

The problem with that behavior is that there are some very large, wealthy businesses like Amazon who need to deliver a high volume of packages on time, so those businesses would be willing to pay a very high premium.

Since the Post Office would be making such deals with everyone, so that they don't look like they are being unfair, the big deals they make with Amazon would set the bar for every business who wants their packages delivered by the Post Office.

That bar would naturally be too high for small businesses and nonprofits, who would quickly go out of business, or be unable to start in the first place.
> The vast majority arguing like the author are not ok with this

Your critique isn't very strong when it hinges on supposing something that is not supported by the text, merely by hyperbolic "whatabouts" that you assume the answer you wan't to critique. You're putting the author in a box rather than engaging with the words that they wrote.
You don't know what your students are paying you for. Maybe it's just a piece of paper. Maybe it's specialized knowledge. Or to fulfill a cultural obligation. Maybe it's to babysit them while the find a spouse. Or Maybe it is for a political awakening. They could be paying to to be challenged.

I mean, just because I show up at the cash register and pay for a screwdriver doesn't mean you get to dictate that I obviously must be out to drive some screws. That's a very one-dimensional and frankly impotent worldview.

How the shit is democracy supposed to work when politics is a taboo subject anyhow.

>I doubt that any of them even know my political beliefs.

So I don't know what your point is supposed to be here... That somehow your students' ignorance of your beliefs justifies an assertion that they should be ignorant of your beliefs?
I think Maps was still usable through the browser unlike YouTube. And I don't think there was ever an official Maps app. At the time Microsoft's own maps were about as good...or rather Maps was often equally bad in equally surprising ways.
It's the issue highlighted in the article.

> Most users only need one wallet, but MultiBit practically demands that you set up multiple. On top of this, it allows you to add multiple passwords to each wallet, even though these aren't required.

So it gets confusing fast. Then:

> I tracked down an old version of the now discontinued software and discovered that there were multiple ways to restore wallets using MultiBit

So you got links for the old version?
Just for reference, M1 of the US Federal Reserve is $3 trillion. Compare this to the US national debt of $14 trillion or the GDP of $19 trillion.
I thought the examples sounded more interesting than your usual ones and honestly I would prefer those to whatever user login example you see usually. There are probably several that I don't agree with politically, but who cares? It's still a technical book and if people like the author's previous work I don't see why the quality of it would have changed.
Build Your Online Store for Free
Juvenile, sure. No more juvenile than the other crap people put in examples. I mean really, programmers are notoriously juvenile, what's new? Narcissistic? Not so much.
While I'm glad to see you're excited about this, take note that this is still an approach which requires that an exact model is known, the state is fully visible, and the reward is perfectly define-able and known. Progress in this setup isn't necessarily correlated with the kind of AI for which we'd need a fire alarm.
Firebase Database as back end for your Android/iOS app
This seems to be the latest meme for why bitcoin can't work. The reality is that bitcoin uses as much power as it does because it is sought after at the current energy cost. If it is important to you, increase the energy cost. Bitcoin already has a fee market, and incentivized miners. If it is no longer economically feasible to mine at the current price because of energy prices, miners will cease mining until it is economically feasible again.

Bitcoin isn't to blame for cheap energy. If it is too cheap, take it up with the people selling it at that price.
How much more common is this type of person nowadays?

Using a technical book to engage in hamfisted virtue signalling is such incredible cringe!
Cryptocurrencies are one of those cats which have gotten out of the bag, and now it is very difficult for it to be put back in.

> Short of that, China could nationalize the miners and run a 51% attack, driving the price to zero.

A hard fork which renders nearly all existing ASIC architecture useless can defeat that attack. It would be a huge cost to China, with all that mining infrastructure go to waste.

What China could do better is to disable bitcoin traffic to pass through their firewall, and that would be a better attack, because then it would be chaos in the rest of the world, with really high difficulty level, which would take time to readjust because no new blocks would be mind for a while.

Then when difficultly readjust, they open the firewall again, and now you got all these China vs non-China btc transactions to consolidate.

This is a big concern of bitcoiners, and there are attempts to figure that out, but it isn't an impossible problem.

Keep in mind, Bitcoin isn't the only cryptocurrency, PoW isn't the only consensus algorithm, the current snapshot of the chain isn't immutable. In case of catastrophic disruption, the chain will be forked, that disruption removed, and business will continue.

> When major powers decide that bitcoin is not in their interest, they will end the experiment.

This is an issue for prisoner's dilemma. Major powers aren't a monolithic entity. The interests of Russia are vastly different from the interests of USA.

A LOT of world powers are interested in getting off Dollar as a reserve currency. This alone makes any decision on bitcoin between the world powers far from agreeable.
People seem to have some misconceptions. If we assume the cost of the mining hardware becomes negligible over time, then the cost of mining bitcoin is the cost of the energy. The amount earned by miners is: mining reward + transaction costs. The mining reward will decrease over time, so in the end it should be the transaction costs.

Now, we then get that as
t --> big transaction costs = cost of energy because spending more energy than you make on Bitcoin loses money. People should be incentivized to reduce their transaction costs by going off-chain, using a POS chain, or other means.
17 years ago. It’s interesting how much things have changed and how much they haven’t. This was written a year before 9/11, for instance.
«Bitcoin's energy usage is getting a lot of press of late. Deservedly, I think - it is a bit ludicrous.»

Completely undeserved IMHO. Vastly more energy is wasted by sillier things. For example worldwide Christmas decorative lights consume 2.3 GW annually (assuming it's 3× the US), which is a lot more than Bitcoin (I estimate ~1.7 GW: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15858966) and yet I don't see nearly as many news article criticizing Christmas lights for using so much electricity... Hence why the criticism is undeserved/unfair. If we can afford to power silly feel-good lights, surely we can afford to power a revolutionary decentralized permissionless censorship-resistant financial network.

Don't forget that one of the sources cited—Digiconomist—overestimates consumption by ~2×: http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/
I think bitcoin will eventually be replaced by a PoS coin: https://medium.com/@zby/proof-of-stake-can-be-cheaper-than-p...
Mods, it's worth putting "(2000)" in the title.
Better yet - Google Maps should change the directions when someone is navigating to an Amazon office to end up at a sewage treatment plant instead
Ajit Pai knows exactly what he's doing.
Different people write books for very different reasons, with very different styles.

Some want to maximize their profits. Some want to be formal, and 100% focused on the core-topic. Some want to please every single potential reader. And some see it as an avenue for self-expression and having some "fun" on the side.

The author probably knows that his writing style is going to turn off a number of potential readers, which in turn is going to reduce the amount of money he can make. Clearly he has decided that he's ok with this. He has even gone out of his way to warn readers, so I don't think anyone is justified in complaining. He's entitled to write books in any style he finds fulfilling, just as everyone's entitled to boycott his books if they don't like it.
U.S. To Recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s Capital, Trump Says
In my first post, just after the whataboutism I have explained why this has happened. You cannot attach yourself to a metric which Bitcoin did with energy and then complain saying - attaching energy metric is wrong/unfair to us.

Pron and Games didn't do that to themselves. Still I digress.
Because bitcoin has a striking lack of middle men, unlike banking.
That’s a seriously good point. It’s far easier to understand certain concepts with an actual real world example. (Not that his examples are exactly real world...but they’re not foo/bar.)
`kill(-1, ...)` is a syscall, it's not an application command.

> this is handled for the user.

And that's how - they call that syscall.

Maybe you didn't realize. Notice the parenthesis? It's a function call in a programming language. The command line program is just a passthrough to the syscall.

And when rebooting you do need the command line program, so preventing it from passing -1 through doesn't make sense either.
Halifax Explosion
What?..

All versions of Bitcoin share the exploitative inverse log curve for distribution and work input.

Bitcoin cash further changed the difficulty algorithm to benefit ASIC miners during a very brief window of time. Fees are reduced, and bandwidth has increased but the same design flaws are shared from Satoshi's algorithm.

So you're completely incorrect.
Why can you hear this gif?
League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru

Excellently written, impactful stories, solid science and a scandal as big as Big Tobacco... I couldn't put it down and read the whole thing in a weekend.

Absorbing and disturbing. I used to glorify Iron Mike back in the day. Hearing his story and that of his family trying to take care of him as his cognitive function deteriorated was heart-wrenching. All the while as the NFL suppressed data and fought him tooth and nail from paying disability.

Key takeaway: Letting your kids play football is akin to child abuse.
I designed the audio transcoding infrastructure and scaling plan for an audio-heavy startup a number of years ago, but unfortunately the mobile app was delayed and they ran out of money before public launch.

Using other servers as lower priority job servers is a great way to increase utilization during off-peak times and save on server costs. You have to think about what happens if either a batch job or the server's main task runs away with all the system resources, so it can get tricky. A spot market might actually be an interesting solution to some of those problems, though for most of us, just using disk quotas and nice levels will be enough.
> Yeah, this is a good point.

It's not a very good point. It hinges on the idea that the author wouldn't want to read a book that did the same but had a different political leaning. There is no indication whatsoever that this is the case and the OP in this case is essentially banking on the fact that most people will assume with him that that's the case.
...you can just buy it from Apple or google's sites, best buy, newegg, etc. Amazon is not a monopoly by any means necessary.
There is no known trustless architecture of PoS.
Sounds like Trump!