skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because of the immense amounts of money involved, there will always be some nation which will allow crypto exchanges back to fiat. In fact this is the problem the "big boys" have in regulating crypto...create a tight noose and a smaller country will see the opportunity and set itself up to be crypto coin financial center. Once you convert to some form of fiat (JPY, CNY, EUR, whatever), you can then convert to anything else on the global markets. None of this requires you to travel to that remote country as it all happens on a website.

This is a relatively minor problem that big central banks have....they would rather have this problem then the other problem: Create a really tight noose and people stop bothering to even convert back to fiat and simply pay each other in crypto. At that point the game is up and 100 years of deficit spending, political graft, inflation...all of "modern" finance ends.
"For a proof of correctness, you need to model the environment, and write a specification or a golden model. These are just as prone to bugs as the system you are trying to verify (even assuming the tools are correct)."

I disagree with the idea that a spec is as buggy as the implementation. Some examples.

In hardware verification, a spec for a floating-point operation is typically a page or two long. The corresponding RTL implementations can be tens of thousands of lines, with many additional concerns (pipelining, clock gating, ...) that don't show up in the spec, and where the operation itself is fused together with dozens of other operations. The difference in complexity is striking.

In simple software cases, say a sorting function, the spec can be as straightforward as "the answer is ordered and has the same elements as the input array." This same spec can be used with any number of implementations, including things like Timsort where there are multiple modes and optimizations that are interacting with one another. The spec says nothing about runs, galloping, etc., which the implementation uses.

For more complex software, the spec can of course become complex. Even so, there are examples, e.g., the Jitawa Lisp runtime (https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mom22/jitawa/), where the spec is a relatively straightforward description of a programming language that is much, much simpler than the implementation. For instance, the spec here does not mention things like garbage collection and just-in-time compilation, which are fairly complex features of the implementation.

Anyway, trusting a formal proof seems, to me, certainly no less sane than trusting a system without such a proof.
It will take years to master C and Assembly. This time also increases especially for Assembly when you start learning new architectures (e.g. MIPS, PowerPC, SPARC, ARM, etc.). The best way to speed up the learning process is to use an applied approach (e.g. game development, systems programming, network programming, microcontroller programming, etc.).

I would recommend getting into building things that have already been built before (bootloaders, ISO creator's, GUI frameworks, bandwidth monitors, firewall, kernel modules, etc.) so you have some real world projects under your belt. As by widening what you work on outside of just textbooks makes you a better engineer and normally only learned through personal projects or working for an employer.
All computers have the potential for slowdown as they age because 2 things naturally happen: cooling systems clog with dust and thermal paste degrades. Both of these eventually reduce the efficiency of the cooling system, resulting in higher CPU temps. Unchecked, this can result in CPU throttling by the hardware itself.
Literally none of these characterizations of Microsoft, past or present, resonate with me at all. Maybe the company has truly turned a new page, but I still mostly see them copying others’ ideas and playing second string as a result. I’m glad they finally have some real OSS offerings but I don’t yet see any as truly collaborative efforts which keeps them on the sidelines.

But, you know, hail corporate!
Bad link, remove the trailing slash
I'm disappointed that Freifunk is not mentioned in that article https://freifunk.net/en/
Actually, bitcoin transactions do not require trust. As long as no node controls more than half the network processing power, the ledger can’t be faked. The value of a single bitcoin is a measure confidence in the bitcoin network as a useful means of transacting business. Confidence in the network is more analogous to Visa or other credit cards than to dollars or other national currencies.
Everything you need to know about cryptography in 1 hour (2010) [pdf]
Honestly, a mature institution like the VA probably ought to be spending a significant portion of their IT budget on maintenance. There's a lot of systems to maintain. And new IT systems are not always the solution to problems, especially problems that aren't actually new.

Since the phrase "archaic legacy systems" is left completely undefined, we don't even know what this means. "Legacy systems" can include stuff that was written a few years ago. I think it may actually be a bigger problem that nearly half of their $4.3 billion IT budget is being spent on _new_ systems. If this half-billion dollar contract with HP is any indication, that money is being poorly spent, and it would be better to invest in the existing systems, instead of trying to solve problems by adding more future-legacy systems to the mix.
Sounds like the VA wants out of the contract, so both sides shouting how the other didn’t meet the terms is inevitable. HPE will wind up getting a few (hundred) million to go away and the cycle of failed projects continues.
> Reminds me I have to prototype some low bandwidth mesh network to see how fast it could go with simple html4 era websites.

Please do.

We need a low-bandwidth, low-noise, no BS alternative to the festering mess that is the current state of the Internet. We need a meshnet, for information and learning, not for advertising and spam. The low bandwidth will help enforce simpler content, with less overhead.
Visual Basic is really not a good language. And it's essentially dead. Good luck finding examples, even sometimes on MSDN docs, using VB. Unless you also know C# and can translate between them, it's somewhat difficult to develop in VB.

I'm sort of surprised that Python on the CLR isn't more popular than it is; with the investments made in the DLR specifically for better dynamic language support, that seemed to be a natural move to me.
Cricut supports dwg import. I've been itching to try it out, but haven't had a chance yet. Bought mine over Thanksgiving weekend.
This is going to sound like a big old troll so please let me clarify from the get go that it isn't and I'm dead serious about it.

I think we should keep nuclear weapons around to lessen the risk of an alien invasion.

Assuming that a hostile alien species would suffer the same kind of damage as humans from high levels of radioactivity, possessing the power to turn the Earth into a ball of highly radioactive rock is a pretty damn good deterrent for what Iain M. Banks called an "out-of-context threat" (like the one the Conquistadores bestowed upon the ancient Mexicans, say- or like what we would risk faced with a technologically more advanced alien species).

So although I'm actually a pacifist and I am very worried about the prospect of nuclear holocaust (especially after hearing that nuclear weapons software runs on ... Windows XP... gulp) and although I do recognise that the threat of an invasion by an alien super-civilisation is at almost as remote as the threat from an emerging superintelligence, I still think we should totally keep a few nukes around, just in case.
Don't forget dynamic pricing.

I know it is due to historic energy markets and old metering technology, but the fact that a kWh costs the same no matter the time of day is a situation that cannot continue.
Which is ultimately backed by the American people's toleration of the government that holds those powers. Its a layer of abstraction that bitcoin lacks, which makes USD much more less volatile than bitcoin (along with a bunch of other things).
Express-Gateway 1.5.0 released with JWT support
You can still do that with some margin or padding to the text doesn’t literally touch the edges.
Because people are people, not things to buy in a supermarket, obviously.
You need to go back and read Keynes -- in a multi-asset world cryptocurrencies will absolutely weaken the ability of Central Banks to stimulate the economy through monetary policy. But the presence of highly-liquid and mildly-deflationary alternatives to cash will also reduce the need for market intervention at all since the people trading INTO crypto will by definition be trading OUT of fiat. And with fewer people holding cash off-market as a long-term investment we will have effectively eliminated the source of liquidity traps, which is the entire justification for monetary policy in the first place.

I blame the lack of enthusiasm for crypto among orthodox macroeconomists on the fact that economic history is out-of-vogue and no-one bothers to read the major thinkers anymore. But it's also ironic on the other end -- since for all of the fuss goldbugs make about Keynes, he would absolutely love bitcoin (read his war diaries!). Sure, it is important prices, wages and taxes continue to be denominated in and settleable in a national currency. But as long as that happens cryptocurrencies will be a boon not a curse, although they are also likely to bring about short-term inflation as the purchasing power of digital assets rises relative to those of traditional currencies.
And think of disabled people who use screen readers and similarly limited interfaces. A simple text-based website works so much better with these tools than a JS and AJAX abomination.
This is a great point, that no one really discusses much. Think of BTC from the point of view of a child born today. This child has no opportunity to purchase a coin for 1, 5, 5000 or 50000 dollars. How is it an equitable system of payment, where all the rewards favour early adopters?
I'm with you on the record shop experience. You can't beat digging about shelves and boxes of vinyl. I don't mean the big high street chains like HMV or Virgin (bleh), but the small to medium size store (unfortunately killed off by the likes of HMV/Virgin) where the owner and staff had truly amazing knowledge about what they were stocking.
As part of my bachelor thesis I build a tool for editing Karnaugh maps showing the map and the resulting circuit side by side:

https://thesis.laszlokorte.de/demo/kvd-editor.html

(click on the question mark icon at the top to get some brief usage instructions)
This is potentially really good news.

I would love to see real competition in this space.

I would love to see dedicated deep learning hardware (i.e., without all the graphics cruft) commercially available, with good support in TensorFlow/Keras and Pytorch. (Perhaps Google will consider selling TPU hardware?)

Even more, I would love to be able to mix hardware from different vendors and use a framework like TensorFlow/Keras or Pytorch to manage heterogeneous deep learning hardware from Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and maybe others (e.g., Google).

BTW, the moniker "GPU" no longer feels right to me. We should start calling deep learning hardware something else, like "DLU" for deep learning unit, or "AIU" for AI unit.
"Asking for a friend."
I think Steemit and the WOS ecosystem is pretty useful, too bad they’re lost thanks to the cacophony of ICOs and BitCoin’s volatility
I am genuinely curious about the trade-offs, as the bad and the ugly are not mentioned. Being realistic, there are too many moving pieces there, and yet the team of 3 remains experimental?
That depends on your definition of "world war". Currently, with the U.S.'s War on Terror it does seem like everybody is fighting somebody.

Since we're on the U.S. - they have nukes and a clear technological superiority to everyone else. I don't see them doing much for world peace though.
Golang Version Xmas, Merry Christmas
Yea, I got there through an old link on their site. I find it funny that they sell SSL certs and cloud hosting but can't figure out their own certs and links!
I don't think it's about production deployments.

Making it easy to setup a demo project means things may stay on Asure because that's the fastest path to production.
Thus it's about business migrating from Demo (Asure) > Production (Asure) vs Production AWS > Azure.
Except most of the services that are truly useful and needed, like Police, Firefighters, most roads, schools, are actually taxed and handled at the local level.

I dont think most Libertarians want 0 government, but I believe most government is best served locally where people can actually have influence and oversight.
I don't use FB, Twitter or any other social media so nothing would change there.

I do use Netflix though - ad-free entertainment for less than £8 a month - bargain!
>I disagree with the idea that a spec is as buggy as the implementation. Some examples.

It isn't necessarily as buggy as implementation, but I've worked on plenty of (non-formally verified) projects where the majority of bugs were spec bugs. If you're diligent about following the UNIX philosophy of assembling small self-contained, tightly specified (and test driven) components, this is pretty normal I think. Building the wrong thing is often the biggest problem.

The one time I did do formal verification (at uni) that was certainly the case too, though that may partly have been because the language was an overcomplicated pile of crap (Z).

One of my co-workers also told me a story about a formally verified program being translated into python and having a couple of bugs picked up on the way. I'm pretty credulous of this.
Steemit and the EOS ecosystem seem to showcase some pretty good use-cases. Too bad the cacophony of ButCoin and ICOs have drowned them out entirely
That Coq has a stronger logic is an argument I hear often, but is that really so important when the result is that it's so hard to use that no real-world software engineer is ever going to bother?

Maybe with HOL I will not be able to prove some deep theoretical mathematical result that I could with Coq's Calculus of Constructions, but if I can otherwise much more easily prove >99% of my code to be bug-free, then I would argue that perhaps it's the better "tool" for the job...
But costs can go above a certain absolute threshold. In this example, the cost may be a human life, which is unacceptable.
What about the power to tax? All governments operate within the fiat currency framework.
Unrelated: Thank you for posting unpopular/fringe ideas on HN. I often see downvotes on HN, and it frustrates me. HN is a place i visit for discussion, something that is rare on places like Reddit (imo), and the crucial part to discussion is posting interesting ideas - even if likely to be unpopular.
In fairness, nothing ruins Christmas faster than the kids stumbling across the nuclear missile submarine you bought them.
> While designed with rr in mind, CFViz also works with vanilla gdb, with the limitation that it will only visualize the rest of the function’s execution from the point where it was invoked (since, without rr, it cannot go backwards to the function’s starting point).

I'm not sure this is correct. If you have a new enough version of GDB, I think you can reverse-step and reverse-next.
Oh my god how is this a problem in the modern age?

The modern age? 100 or even just 50 years ago hospital wards were run by "matrons", fierce and experienced nurses who ran their wards like a Sergeant Major inspected a Guards regiment, everything immaculate. That system was scrapped in favour of what we have now, a fluffy blame-free culture where no-one is responsible for anything. The problem of failing to maintain standards is entirely a "modern" one, sadly.
Or confirmed what many of us knew after observing the market gyrations of the year 2000.
Transformation was a $500 word that McKinsey folks and their ilk throw down. It amusing, as the McKinsey people will tell you that 70% of these things fail, but you will succeed, because this time, <reasons>.

They usually deploy this stuff to enable centralization of large organizations with broad geographic or functional scope. These things always fail, because you cannot achieve cost savings and remotely manage the broad scope effectively.

An example of this is the ridiculous project fractured here. Tracking crap with WiFi is what happens when some CIO in HQ “solves” a problem on the hospital floor.
Hinkley C isn't due to open h til about 2030 and will cost £92/mwh

Offshore wind is currently in the £60/Mwh range. Storage is in the 250k/MWH, or £900m/hr for Hinckley production.
>"Orange Squeeze"

I am seriously, completely confident that name would fool the person it's meant to.
It fixes most of the problems with currencies in general, that’s why basically every single currency has this authority backing it called ”central banks”.

As others have mentioned, these institutions is exactly what Satoshi wanted to supplant.
Tip? Who? Whenever I get a deliver from Amazon. other than USPS, the driver leaves it outside the door and rings the bell. Sometimes I get to the door when they are getting in their car; but, usually, the car is already driving away. (The fact that some of these are annotated in Amazon as being "handed" to me is a separate issue.)
>the original idea is rarely the one that generates value

Roger. The individual with dogged persistence is where the value comes from. More so from persistence of potentially rewarding ideas rather than pursuing fickle sources of capital.

Nicely motivational and it looks like an advertisement to attract midwestern entrepreneurs, too bad this particular group is not about to even consider an individual or even a small team unless they have already attracted overwhelming interest beforehand:

"iSelect identifies and invests in promising early-stage, private companies with more than just an idea. Our companies have already raised at least $250,000 through the “friends and family” round or received significant non-dilutive financing through grants or other sources. The entrepreneurs we work with are moving beyond concept to commercialization, but require more capital for further development."

Then again they are not about to show interest unless the "single person with an idea" has already attracted interest from even more elusive capitalists whom they can ride the coattails of:

"iSelect does not lead transactions. We only co-invest alongside sophisticated investors such as venture funds, reputable angel groups or family offices with domain experience. Prospective companies must already have, or be in discussions with, a sophisticated lead investor willing to set the price and terms of the round."

Looks like they have the perfect formula to exclude individuals like Jobs, Zuckerberg, Ford, or especially Edison unless the individual has already gotten the momentum to devote more effort to fundraising than actual development of their winning ideas.

Typical.
Lightbend, the startup behind the Scala programming language, raises $15M
PSA: You might have over $2,000 worth of cryptocurrency you forgot about
Everything you wanted to know about Digital Currencies
It may be true that some University/College are interested in research and teaching more than the grant money that is brought in to the department, but there's definitely a bias there. Even more important, if you don't have several graduate students working for you during tenure (supplementing your research & teaching efforts), it's going to be hard to tenure there either. How many classes/labs can you teach without an RA/TA? Remember the big intro courses that new untenured profs get, and that teaching grads is a big part of the job! You basically have to prove you can't handle grad students in some horribly catastrophic way not to get them from the dean/provost.

Perhaps in a field like philosophy or math at a very small school it's possible with amazing individual results, but it's uncommon in my experiences which include watching numerous friends at many different schools (>10) and fields (bio, chem, phys, geo, cs, math, philosophy) both public and private.

Maybe you mean outside the US? I'd believe that. Europe hasn't gone as far down the path of non-tenured teaching faculty as the US, but due to money they seem to be starting to.
The problem in physics is that you hear about the highest high fliers of the discipline and assume most people will be something like them, if less inspired/gifted. Then you get there and find out most people are shitty, territorial and wages put you in the same income bracket as fast food workers.
That's what I used to do with xombrero actually. Xombrero was my browser of love... If I was any good at C programming, I'd port it to WebKit 2 (I actually started the project, thinking of hacking my way to really learning C and the relevant APIs, but I was daunted and gave up). With FF, which is what I use nowadays, it's way too bothersome to work with that. UBlock kind-of helps, but I do miss block-by-default days...
You never really master it. The key is to get comfortable enough with a popular technology that you don't struggle to complete your daily work, leaving your mind free to approach higher-level problems.

I got there with Rails after about 2 years of training, self-study, and the right work environment. I haven't been able to repeat that success, although I have been exposed to one or two out of these three with many other languages and tools. I think all three must be present at once to really feel that sense of mastery. Training for the theory, self-study for the practice, and work environment for the application.
This post is factually inaccurate and defamatory.

The computer was searched as part of a separate investigation (into leaks) which found nothing.

The pornography was not extreme.
> CBT

Yes, good.

> don’t nap

I think the authors insomnia may have been more of a disturbed sleep schedule & I would consider “sufficient sleep but not in a single nightly 7ish hour block” to be different to insomnia.

Pedantic blah blah insomnia refers to irreversible awakenings not simply trouble falling asleep blah blah.
I would not assume the intention is to intercept data. Assuming this is accurate, it could be tactical repositioning given recent events. Some seem to think that Trump might actually take action in North Korea. If he does, that's going to radically escalate tensions between the US and China/Russia - both of whom border North Korea, and are keen to see them remain a buffer between US military installations and their homeland. Imagine some bizarro parallel universe where Russia and China are actively suggesting plans to invade Mexico and already well established in Guatemala. If we enter into another cold war era, electronic warfare including threats on communication systems (including satellites) would likely be the new invisible 'front' as all developed nations have become heavily dependent on these systems which remain extremely vulnerable.
MTA,SPF,DKIM, PTR, WTF: a quick checklist on how to send e-mail from your domain
> Maybe with HOL I will not be able to prove some deep theoretical mathematical result that I could with Coq's Calculus of Constructions, but if I can otherwise much more easily prove >99% of my code to be bug-free, then I would argue that perhaps it's the better "tool" for the job...

Is this true though? What program properties can Isabelle easily automate the proofs of that Coq cannot?
https://lobste.rs/s/0gf6oh/mta_spf_dkim_ptr_wtf_quick_checkl...
Show HN: Command line interface for instantly building an express rest api
> If Microsoft doesn't pour a billion dollars into getting .Net ready for Linux in 2018, .Net is over.

I feel very confident stating the opposite. If Microsoft halts all investment in .Net today, .Net will still be around another 30 years at least with maintenance work alone.