skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Your "1" is true, but you prefaced it by claiming that it was one of the "major things" the parent was missing. I'm pretty sure he wasn't missing this, as indicated by the sentence "This uptick has been benign because its been limited to Marijuana".

I think the thing OP's post was missing is that the distinction is important: we wouldn't expect the same trend to carry over to things that are not "benign," like hard drugs.

> This is tautologically true if you define addiction as mental illness, but would you really claim that no one regularly uses heroin because they became addicted to after starting with prescription painkillers, rather that they use it regularly only because they have an underlying non-drug related mental illness?

So, yes, this does happen, but no I don't think it's really a significant cause of drug addiction in the United States: https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/a3z98b/big-pharma-didnt...

Otherwise, yes, I am arguing the vast majority (or maybe all?) people who are drug addicts have some underlying mental illness, and I don't disagree that is tautological: that's kind of the point. Truthfully I don't think we have the data but I also wouldn't be shocked to see a large portion of the people who become addicted to prescribed painkillers and then end up using heroin afterwards come into the injury and prescription with some kind of mental illness which predisposes them to addiction. Ie: you are a construction worker, you are depressed, you hurt your back, you get on painkillers and it escalates from there. But the vast majority of people prescribed these drugs do not become addicted to them and I think that's telling.

But really, that doesn't matter to me, the only thing I'm really looking for is a classification of people who are addicts, however they got that way, as "sick" instead of as "criminals." Again: let's not put people in cages unless we absolutely have to.

Which brings me to the other distinction number 2 adds which is that Portugal's approach is decriminalization not legalization, like with Colorado and marijuana.

So there are at least two distinct ways in which the Colorado Marijuana situation don't apply.
They are also only sold with a prescription.

And while I know US has an opioid crisis this prescription thing seems to work here.
Bitcoin's energy usage is getting a lot of press of late. Deservedly, I think - it is a bit ludicrous. None of the articles I've seen really manage to get at the economics of mining, or what's likely to happen in the future, though. A Big Think article projected that by 2020, at the current growth rate, Bitcoin will use as much power as is generated globally today. Obviously that's not going to happen, something will give and that something is likely to be Bitcoin's price.

But even though the articles I've seen are pretty fluffy, they probably stem from an underlying issue that makes Bitcoin different from traditional, energy-heavy industry: The value produced is not directly connected to the energy expended in production. Bitcoin would work just as well with a small fraction of the hashpower it has today. Security is an issue, but surely it must be over-secured many times over at the moment.

Unfortunately no mechanism seems to exist to balance security vs cost, except for the crash-boom market cycle Bitcoin constantly goes through. How much hashpower is needed? The question is moot as there is no way to moderate it, and I'm starting to think that may be Bitcoin's biggest design flaw. (Market forces will certainly bring the energy cost of mining down one way or the other, but it's not clear how much damage will be done to Bitcoin in the process.)
In 2015 Heads-Up Limit Hold'em was solved: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6218/145.full
Having more shipping ARM devices gets you closer to that, even if these devices have a locked bootloader. The more robust the ecosystem around ARM with UEFI gets, the more the parts become commodity and if there's enough demand, someone will start shipping them with Linux or unlocked bootloaders.

(Hate UEFI all you want, but standardizing on something is much better than the Android world where every SoC requires a custom bootloader and if the manufacturer doesn't support the kernel you want to run, tough. Having a standardized platform to run on means you can have a Linux distribution that supports running on any device that supports the standard.)
If you are processing at high volume, it might be cheaper to run a cluster rather than use Cloud Functions
Yes, we could argue back and forth about what is fair and what is standard. But what did the contract, agreed to by both parties, say? Was Level3 in the wrong to sell Netflix a product that they could not deliver without violating their prior contract with Comcast?

I agree it sucks to be a consumer and get shafted by these shitty deals, but let's at least be honest about how we got here and what the powers that be are actually gunning for.
You mean, like poker?
https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2017/january/AI-be...

Actually machines can have an even higher advantage in those cases, because they can be much better at estimating probabilities than humans. Think of card counting, for example.
Yes, that is just the time for the initial (or production) build.
The dev server is not as fast as it has been initially, but it is fast enough.
It doesn't have to be sold to the end-consumer; but it does have to make a profit for the producer/distributor (e.g. one of the big pharma companies) if you want to disincentivize the black-market producers. Probably this would mean that the government itself buys the drugs from the pharma companies, and then gives them away for free to prescribed+registered users. It's the fact that the pharma company has someone to profit by selling the drugs to, that incentivizes clean/pure/safely dosed drugs to be produced.
It's not simplistic. It's simple. And a fine solution.
Oh, and also, I use my own domain on top of having a backup of my emails.

What this means is that if all recovery options are not working and I'm actually locked out, I can fix it.

I own the domain, I own my past emails, I can still get emails. Maybe I'll lose some emails for a day, but that's it. If I want to prove my identity to FastMail, I can also prove that I own the domain.

But the point is, getting locked out of something as important as email is not gonna happen due to my screw-up. It's more likely for a support loophole to screw me over.
Lot's of people are developers because they like building things, solving business problems, understanding users technical needs... I'm amazed that you think the only kind of satisfaction people can derive from their work is by constantly chasing the new and shiny.
You are confusing what the Bitcoin Core software currently does with the original intention set out in the white paper.
Intellectual laziness is reading "both parties are a joke" as "both parties are the same."
More power usage = greater overall cost of energy production. That's true regardless of method of production. We are not now, and never will be (barring radical changes in our economic system) living in a world with abundant energy. Bitcoin miners compete for energy with other industries, driving total energy usage up. Ultimately, there's a cap to how much energy we can produce on Earth, and you'd be surprised how close we are to that limit, assuming production growth similar to the historical average.

Edit: To expand on the last claim a little, I was thinking of this:
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

The graph of Earth's surface temperature assuming 2.3% yearly growth in energy consumption is... illuminating. Basically, in a bit over 400 years, the surface temperature on Earth would reach the boiling point of water, not due to the complex effects of climate change, but simply because the amount of waste heat generated by energy production and usage will exceed the Earth's capacity to dissipate into space. Obviously disastrous temperatures would occur rather sooner. Unfortunately our societies hinge on constant economic growth, which, in turn, seems to hinge on growing energy usage.
There are other communities they could go to. There are plenty of other thriving PHP communities that you could move to, like Laravel or even Drupal. I just don't know how you look at all these successful communities that have lots of talent, conferences, meetups, etc and say "wow they all must hate wordpress"
Most people don't - they just pay the minimum required out of their pay every year once they've reached the threshold.

But getting rid of it does make it easier to borrow more money for a house, etc.
I am sure this topic will be full of whataboutism - what about x, y, z industry's emissions?

Here's the thing - Bitcoin hung the energy albatross around it's neck long back - First by choosing SHA based PoW, then the one of the early transactions in US being calculated using the energy required to mine those and then most of the sold equipment focusing on hashes per watts consumed.

No other industry other than automotive has tied itself to energy so strongly. So, it is quite disingenuous to not answer this criticism without devolving into whataboutism.

There has been a solution in form of Proof of Stake but that has it's own issue.

I am sure there will be more energy efficient PoW in the future, so let's wait and see if Bitcoin is going to cost the future or not.
"a while" is a bit of an understatement.

Leela zero (the main alphago zero replication project) is a crowd sourced computation effort that's going to take a fairly long time to get anywhere.

And from this paper:
> "Training proceeded for 700,000 steps (mini-batches of size 4,096) starting from randomly initialised parameters,
using 5,000 first-generation TPUs (15) to generate self-play games and 64 second-generation TPUs to train the neural networks."
Right right, but my comparison was between giraffe and AlphaGo , not neural networks and Stockfish.
You can't really extrapolate the current growth rate. There is a maximum total mining revenue even if Bitcoin becomes the only globally used currency. The electricity usage likely won't exceed this unless miners begin to sell heat and displace traditional heat generation sources.
Ziff Davis has bought Mashable at a fire sale price and plans to lay off 50 people
Toffee insurance launches in India
Talking about clean-energy yet failing to compare CO2 emissions but merely refer to GWhrs is totally missing the point.

Several big Bitcoin miners are setup near or just being powered by hydroelectric dams or other renewable energy sources. And all of them of course target low costs, which a lot of times means that there's an oversupply of power in essence helping in some cases use energy that would go to waste otherwise.

You have to compare the gold or bank industry's to Bitcoin's mining emissions. Gold is constrained by the gold mines positions, uses oil a lot, unless someone does a proper study, all this articles are just sensationalistic articles by clueless journos hunting pageviews and likes.

Sidenote, funny how this is filled under "Currency Manipulation"
Are there popular games where the best human players are not near the limit of what is possible? Obviously you can construct one to be hard for humans (large 3SAT problems, or even big arithmetic problems), but I wonder if there is one that people enjoy.
s/They/Apple/g

Err... This could of been said about Apple Inc a few weeks ago then they go and have the root password issue.
It’s easy to conclude the inefficiencies brought on by the abuses of the financial sector have done leagues more damage to our “clean energy future.” Poverty cuts environmental concern clearly out of the picture.

-typed in the mid-winter warmth of x3 GTX 980 Tis running NiceHash
I either gift the app or send the link instead of just the name. That turns it into a click instead of a search.

An unambiguous search would take a paragraph to describe.
Was youtube still flash based at the time? If so then that would make sense.
Proof of stake will solve this for Ethereum by not burning processing power to secure the network. We'll likely end up with several of these methods and even if proof of work is still part of this it's likely much more specialized and just a small part of the system we'll end up with. So for the future this really is no problem at all.
IMO it should be done like this. You have a hot wallet, probably on your phone that has a half key. You keep a QR code somewhere else with the other half. Combine these two and you have the cold storage private key. Additionally you could have the full private key in a safe or whatever that you never touch.

In this system you can top up your hot wallet by specifying all transaction details and then scanning the QR with the half code to sign the transaction and send it off.

This would roughly as secure as some sort of 2FA method. The attacker needs to have both the phone compromised, and the paper with the half key compromised.
If you read the Wikipedia page and the linked ruling, you'll see that the language is very specific to "Operating Systems on Intel Compatible PCs".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....
A buy in India and make in India story
This is something I'm less familiar with but it seems like these have APIs as well?

http://docs.alfresco.com/5.0/concepts/API-intro.html

Maybe now I see what they're saying about being "Stripe." Many headless CMS already exist, that's not what they're innovating on. They're claiming that they have a simple UX like Stripe, compared to other solutions.
If you like Kuhn, you'll like "Theories On The Scrap Heap" by Losee. A chronicling and criticism of the different views of science.
I found one a few years ago: http://kmkeen.com/c100p-tweaks/

But I do use it as a production machine.
Ask HN: What are the best sites to get freelance jobs?
I'd call myself a developer and a "computer" expert, especially relative to 99% of the people I know in real life. I've also been in the bitcoin game a long time. I run full bitcoin and monero nodes. Absolutely none of this is easy and frankly, at times it can be absolutely terrifying considering the sums of real dollars you may be transferring. To think that the market cap of Bitcoin and Crypto in general is where it is is actually shocking considering how absolutely UNfriendly the entire endeavor is from step 0 to actually buying, selling, transferring coins or buying goods and services.

When using cryptocurrency becomes as easy as pumping gas or sending an email or depositing a check - watch out, because it inevitably will become that simple. It will make the run up we've seen in 2017 seem absolutely darling. I'm certain the usability will come. Personally, I'm waiting for Square Cash to figure it out and then integrate with Twitter.
> According to the change-of-control term, 9.1 in the agreement, Mozilla has the right to leave the partnership if — under its sole discretion and in a certain time period — it did not deem the new partner acceptable. And if it did that, even if it struck another search deal, Yahoo is still obligated to pay out annual revenue guarantees of $375 million.

Wow. What a phenomenally bad deal that was for Yahoo and Marissa Mayer
> “There was a point whenyou could not find a single Portuguese family that wasn’t affected. Every family had their addict, or addicts. This was universal in a way that the society felt: ‘We have to do something.’”

To be noted is when is it more useful to decriminalise, compared to conventional methods?
I would say there is a point, say 5% or 10% population already users when it becomes more beneficial to decriminalise. This works because most of the society has already seen the problems associated with drug use. Anything before that (say 0.1% of population are users) and you may end up encouraging non-users since the legalisation may be seen as a form of approval from the state that there is nothing wrong with drug use.
Net neutrality only concerns edge providers, which do not deal with international data transfer.

Net neutrality rules prevent ISPs from changing their customer's traffic, and their customers are not international.
Shogi is a fun game, it always feels a little sad that it doesn't get more exposure outside of Japan (and my understanding is that, by and large, in Japan it is considered an "old persons" game)

Because captured pieces change sides, there is less of an "endgame" scenario, and as a beginner (like me) it is very easy to put too many captured pieces back into play, which makes it hard to defend everything and essentially you end up giving them back to your opponent
Horrifying: https://i.imgur.com/RepliZd.png

I dig it.
Golang solves memory fragmentation by allocating more intelligently. I assume you know about tcmalloc?
I appreciate everything you just said and agree that this could work well for some people. On the other hand, reading it through the eyes of the 99% of people I know who can barely check their email, everything you said may as well be written in Klingon. It is simply too difficult for most people to understand.
Seems like the meta-language (compile-time expressions) is now pretty much full fledged.

Long gone days where template meta-programming was the only way to do compile-time code generation and constant checks.... at least that's my impression of the latest language-level features.

I have not worked professionally with c++ for a few years now, but his piece from the article, just seems rather powerful incarnation of the compile-time programming.

constexpr auto add = [] (int x, int y) {
auto L = [=] { return x; };
auto R = [=] { return y; };
return [=] { return L() + R(); };
};
Yeah, not bad points. Especially licensing questions. I was asking, after all: why.

Personally, though, I'd be happy if I could convince people to take time to view my half-finished code and offer suggestions, support, or improvement. I run too many half-baked public repos as is because I usually get carted off to, or distracted by, other projects.

I guess the maintenance thing depends on your personality, and the state of your project. If it's under development, you don't have to worry about everybody so much. If you're trying to run a release, sure. Even then you can ignore everybody and just tell them you'll do as much and that it's only there for auditing.

But if you're trying to convince people to download your native, unreviewed application? My questions were very directed, and not general, so my intention wasn't to sound so sweeping as that.
I don't believe that energy would "go to waste otherwise"; if it was priced low enough (and it should be, if it's going to waste), it would make economic sense to build distribution infrastructure, and it wouldn't be going to waste any more.

Energy is really fungible, one of the most fungible commodities. Hydro can easily substitute for coal, oil, gas and nuclear elsewhere. This makes your defence especially weak.
Calling out "whataboutism" only makes sense if the supposed "whataboutism" is meant to distract and bring up an unrelated topic. But the argument here is that no one comments at all on other "frivolous" pursuits that take similar if not more amounts of power. As I've mentioned in other posts, no one complains about the energy usage of video games and porn. It can be argued that video games, porn, and Bitcoin all have utility. So why is it a problem for Bitcoin and not porn and video games?

That's not whataboutism, that's calling out inconsistent logic by detractors.
Price of a Pomsky Puppies affects another breed Dogs
Trying Dgraph with genomic data
> Unfortunately no mechanism seems to exist to balance security vs cost

Bitcoin does include a perfectly good mechanism to balance security vs cost: the transaction fee market. Users decide how much they want to pay in transaction fees.

The reason for the high electricity use today is the temporary block reward for mining each block. The block reward halves every three years. Once it goes away, the only thing funding Bitcoin's electricity consumption will be the transaction fees users pay. Obviously if Bitcoin does not provide enough value to users, they will not pay high fees. Electricity consumption will naturally go down to a level that matches the value people get out of the network.

Remember this next time you see an article complaining about Bitcoin's electricity use. I haven't seen a single article about this written by somebody who understands the difference between the block reward and the transaction fee market.
Race Reports for Ultra Runners iOS App
The attacker only needs to have compromised the device which spends from the wallet file
I am not being facetious. IMO, it is not warranted for anybody to break laws in retaliation to another person breaking a law.
Examples like this really make me miss fold.

return functools.reduce(lambda x,y: x&y, ALL_SETS)
Quite a situation. Mozilla has basically one paying "customer" and it can only be one of two search engines.

The concern here would be if they burn bridges with Yahoo, than they have less negotiating leverage with Google.

I forget, is Yahoo search based on Bing, or is it the other way around, or is that deal dead?
I'm a Prime subscriber and can watch amazon prime videos on my Android Device. You should check the play store again.
Don't forget about opportunity cost. All that productive energy that we turn into heat, could have been used for something else, no matter how much renewable energy production (or, rather, conversion) we have.

It could be used for carbon neutral or negative fuel production, for example, to keep things like planes in the sky and world travel cheap without harming the environment.
5 Brilliant Ways to Get People to Spend More
How the Russia investigation looks from Moscow
You and I seem have the same general problem: family members influenced by "right-wing" media that have been convinced to hate anything to do with "liberals", without actually defining who or what a "liberal" is.

On top of that, both of my parents have been conditioned to reject anything remotely vulgar, so friendly comedy like John Oliver simply promotes their biases rather than breaking the ice.

It's a frustrating problem, and I have no idea how to approach it.
I think I disagree with him here.

I tend to think that examples like his (polarizing topics) are distracting to the message of the content.

I teach students, and they are, quite literally, paying me for my knowledge and experience about that subject, not for me to distract everyone with my personal opinions about unrelated issues. I doubt that any of them even know my political beliefs.
I can use the amazon app on Android to watch prime videos just fine. Casting to chromecast qith localcast app. So what are you all talking about?
Cryptography is a necessary lesson that we need to teach in 2017. Lowest common denominator is a hard threshold to design security for.
LTAlang: A simple to-JavaScript compiler
It's not nonsensical, but it does imply some assumptions about a free market and the social contract.

Governments exist to benefit their citzens. A free market is a great benefit thanks to competition forcing out businesses that don't prioritize their consumers.

This assumes perfect competition though and it assumes a lot of things that are not realistic such as there being no barriers to entering a market. Clearly there are massive barriers to becoming a new ISPs so some non-zero amount of regulation is reasonable.

tl;dr:
It's reasonable for a captialist government to intervene when the free market fails to incentivize businesses to benefit citizens.
At least for Bitcoin, it’s going to be cheaper and easier just to go to a traditional bank or money transfer company. Unless you somehow have a notion that using it will hide the money from the taxman...