skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Can Bitcoin really survive without an ever-increasing price?

Requiring ever-increasing price as measured in some other currency is not what defined a pyramid.

Requiring unsustainable growth rate which must eventually consume all of the available number of something limited is; most strictly, a pyramid scheme requires exponentially increasing number of participants at a rate that exceeds population growth (usually on the scale of requiring the entire population to participate in a very short period of time.)

To not be a shrinking role in the economy, Bitcoin may needs a long-term growth rate (once coin mining is exhausted) equal to the growth rate of the economy (which may or may not be always positive over the long-term, and if it is may only be logistic), but that's not a pyramid.
The fact web pages like this exist, and are popular, and make it to the top of Hacker News is all you need to know about git's ease-of-use and mental model.

That Perforce and SVN don't get such things should also tell you something.

(Which isn't to hate on git--it's a great tool.)
That's an operational cost, not a capital cost. ;)

Comparing capital cost between the two is also fun. Creating a literate person who can perform arithmetic certainly requires more resources than creating a person who can "merely" pedal a bicycle. There's a lot of embodied energy in a person's education, and the cost reflects that.
OK, let me rephrase. How it is "legal corruption"? What's corrupt there in people trying to convince other people in their point of view? Is the "corrupt" part that the people doing the convincing happen to be rich and thus must be evil? What exactly needs fixing here? Should Kochs be banned from political advocacy? Should TPA be prohibited? Should opposition to municipal projects be banned? What exactly here needs fixing?
I'm not even making a value judgement. You get left wing billionaires and right wing ones. They all have their pet political causes.
No one is saying "pay bartenders less." We're saying "pay bartenders higher, fairer wages so that they dont have to depend on tips"
I should have said "Gentrification + Poor choice of how you're tearing down neighborhoods to create super-cool multiplex buildings"
It's not much the fact that gentrification happens, but how it is been happening. Usually - find an old building that's been abandoned or a depot. or some poor folk's homes - buy it for little, nuke it down and rebuild something that doesn't blend in and is usually so tall that hides the sun, but that you can slot up and resell for a big margin.
Yeah, my bad. Must've been "reverse" then. I just remember the revert/reverse dichotomy.
The flipside is that the standard library from Java / C# are huge, large enough that there's basically one complete and proper implementation.

In JS land, you have multiple different implementations with different feature sets and behaviors. Code written for V8/chrome/node may behave differently in safari/jscore or IE/edge/chakra or firefox/spidermonkey.
I would not want to trade on an exchange that claws back profits.
That sounds quite chaotic and impossible to keep stable. I wonder who was responsible to find problems and fix the master after messing up?
> It is extremely unlikely that the bid side of the orderbook is completely empty

It still happens quite often. In practice, the buy-side order book doesn't vanish. It just goes from $19k, $19k, $19k to $17k, $9k, $2k. The liquidating exchange hits the $17k, and then the $9k. Now you have a trade at $9k which (a) prompts further forced liquidations and (b) causes everyone to panic.

> loss is either socialised or paid thru the insurance fund

Insurance fund? Who is insuring Bitmex?

[1] https://support.bitfinex.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004555165-...
Tribalism has been around for the entire course of civilization, and has decreased over time since we got the idea that it's a bad thing. So if civilization seems like it's in trouble now then it seems unlikely that tribalism is the cause.
I manage a multi-million Crypto Portfolio
Yes, and they aren’t the only ones.

We really have no idea how bad the situation is in China.

Their total debt (public, personal, and shadow) to GDP is suggested to be as high as 1660% of GDP. This a staggering amount of money.

What we are seeing is probably the greatest financial crime in history. There is absolutely no way the markets can contain this once this runs its course.

For now no one can do anything. Every time you try to bet against China, more analysts are simply paid off or the Bank of China props up the stock against your shorts.

http://www.baldingsworld.com/2017/10/23/everything-we-think-...
We don't really need an all-out conventional war with China in order to check its rise. We just need to make a sufficiently credible threat. Americans are more than willing to go to war in order to do this, we did it all throughout the Cold War, for instance, in order to check the USSR. That was only 50 years ago. This particular geopolitical dynamic goes clear back to the Middle Ages.

Why we are not threatening China at the moment is a complete mystery.
I don't know what "not the worst choice" means in this context. MtE compositions are generally vulnerable. Are there more flagrant ways to be vulnerable? Sure, I guess?
The problem I have with your criticism is that the word intrinsic has too many definitions to be useful for communication. Even within economics it means very different things when applied to companies vs. stocks vs. options.

In this context, not a specific technical use, my best understanding of intrinsic would be the value of something apart from any external forces or interest (extrinsic value). The intrinsic value of gold comes from its usefulness as a material, or from its attractiveness, not from the fact that it is accepted as a means of exchange. The fact that a US Dollar is accepted by the US Government for payment of legal debts is an extrinsic factor, just as its general usefulness for exchange of goods in the market is extrinsic. Intrinsically it has as much value as any other pretty piece of paper.

However I can see that there is a worthy distinction to be drawn about US dollar vs. Bitcoin in the recognition of the former by the US government and other parties. I just don't see intrinsic as the best descriptor for that quality.
> FB has such deep roots into their lives, giving it up would have a huge effect on their lives

Then our task is to persuade them that the huge effect would be positive!

This reads like an episode of Black Mirror, only scarier because it's not science fiction: https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical...
Ah, so we're into fractional reserve territory. Never mind, I hear there are cryptocurrencies that will save us from that.
> The system sucks but that's how it is, if you don't want to tip then you can always eat at McDonalds or other establishments without wait staff.

Or you can simply eat at that establishment and not leave a tip.
So there is a great conference series on practical Machine Learning and Data Science called PAPIs. It's organized in locations all over the world. The next one is PAPIs EUROPE in London in April and then PAPIs LATAM in São Paulo in June. The website is http://www.papis.io and you can see a selection of talks on the youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHMa1aYqXIQPnQD34W-ejQg

Disclaimer: I am one of the organizers.
"My steak arrived cold? Try paying your rent this month now!"

Unless you are an uncaring psychopath you should pay servers in the US for bad service as well - everyone should be paid for the labor they do. If they aren't doing an adequate job they should be reprimanded or fired. That's not your job though, that's their boss's job. You don't know if they are just having an off day or the problem you had was caused by someone else.

Furthermore, most places pool tips so you're probably docking the pay of a really good server.
Of course and you can't knock him for doing that. It's good, good for him. We could at least acknowledge that others didn't accumulate that wealth because their standards for business were higher than his.
New study shows this might not be the most peaceful time in history
name other cartels and i will provide their competitors
I have no idea whether that will happen, just trying to express what I think the rational case is for investing in Bitcoin today.

Goldbugs / conspiracy theorists have a line of argument where they describe all the fiat currencies that have ultimately experienced corruption and hyper-inflation. So I think it's fair to say that running a fiat currency successfully for more than 500 years is something that is unprecedented in the history of the world.

So over a long time horizon this makes Bitcoin extremely interesting. It's not a question of whether 1 BTC will one day be worth millions of USD, it's a question of when. There is a good chance it will be hundreds of years from now if at all.

Much financial risk is in fact sovereign risk in one form or another. This doesn't mean it's rational to hoard gold or BTC, but for entities that have a long-term view of their own future, it makes sense to care a little bit and to diversify.

Even if 10% of the long-term entities diversify into Bitcoin, that alone will drive the price up substantially. It's far too soon for that to have happened.

We are also entering an era where politics are once again a bit part of international exchange, which adds additional sovereign risk for many areas of international business and financial planning.

But Bitcoin faces the same kinds of risks as governments for corruption, mismanagement, etc. The genius of it is that the governance model makes it a lot harder for one party to really control what happens with it.
I don't think measuring the average speed is even remotely a meaningful measure.

Imagine

scenario 1

3 users with gigabit
4 users have dialup
3 users have nothing

Scenario 2:

4 users with gigabit
6 users with nothing

Scenario 3:
10 users have 50 Mbps

In scenario 1 the average is 300 even though only 30% of people have real internet access and 70% either can barely send email or have nothing at all. Scenario 2 is even better at 400 even though most people have nothing.

Another way to look at it is that one person with gigabit is as good as numerically as 20 people with real internet or 100 people with basic internet.
Literally drops after the article is published. From ~19,338 to now ~18,469
https://www.bitmex.com/app/insuranceFund

And cascading margin calls are possible, but it seems like all exchanges except for gdax/coinbase have a strategy to handle it.
Bitcoin wallet can be seized and the transactions are traceable and public, so a sufficiently determined actor can figure out who has it and how much.
Then enforce their cut with violence.
Personal investors/prop traders have been able to short for years. Investors who aren't allowed/don't want to have direct custody of assets haven't been able to short until now.
When Are Lexer Modes Useful?
By flipside are you suggesting that managing multiple feature sets/behaviors across implementations is a good thing?
No, because our system of approvals does not treat re-import the same as direct import.
Another interesting element about the local index is that it might be usable for discovery. Essentially there's a local cache of the Web in the user's browser. Much of that local cache has semi-structured data thanks to JSON, and we've begun to take advantage of that with a secondary indexer called WebDB [1]. It's feasible to imagine an API where apps ask the browser to search for files or Dat archives which match a certain spec. For instance, "Give me all user profiles which match the following JSON schema." Since the local index is curated by the user, this will naturally hit results that have some connection to the user.

The concept is of the browser as a user agent, crawling the Web from the user's input set to find relevant data, rather than an objective "map and rank the world objectively" engine like Google does.

Other than this local index and distributed indexes like YaCy (which are very neat but a lot of work) there's also the traditional hosted indexes. My hope is that people will be able to self-host their own indexes privately, as an extension of their subjective local index (but with a larger graph searched). However, there's still room for traditional search engines to crawl dat sites as well.

1. https://github.com/beakerbrowser/webdb
> he has conflated single-step in situ debugging (which does in fact suffer from limited utility in the context of an OS kernel) with debugging writ large.

Where does he do this? The quote is only about single-step debugging.

> So as he rejected in situ debugging, he also implicitly rejected postmortem debugging and dynamic instrumentation

Do you have any evidence of this? It seems to me that dump traces and kernel probes have been an important part of Linux for many years.
Sorry, but you don't know git if you think Mercurial is even coming close.

That is not trolling btw. It's really possible not to know what you can do with it if you haven't learned it in depth.

The "Git Book" is what you should read. And you read it once, you read it indepth, and then you're done. After that it's also only 5 minutes of googling, but you can do a lot more. At that point you can even program a simplified git if you want.
Author here. I made this because finding package sizes of front end libraries was a pain, especially after modular javascript caught on.

You can also see size results now when browsing a package on yarnpkg.com (look for "Size in browser") or as a sheild on some repos (WIP).

Suggestions welcome.
This discussion makes Bitcoin fans look like bickering, factional children.
Personally I think this is fairly obvious too. If the government prints a whole bunch of dollars and gives them to somebody who will just put them in a Scrooge McDuck vault so that they can dive in to them the net impact on inflation will be nil.

Less obvious is the strong dampening effect that industrial slack has on inflation. Printing more dollars can mean more cars get shifted off the lot instead of the same cars going for a higher price.
"If amoral profit maximizers design AI, it's very possibly gonna be an amoral profit maximizer."

The argument from those concerned about AI is richer than that. Any AI, and indeed, any Intelligence in general can be viewed as maximizing its results along a certain gradiant, no matter how complicated that gradient may be. If an AI determines that improving itself would help it achieve its goals, and there isn't some sort of natural limit to intelligence that would stop it, the first one to develop will improve itself until it is exceedingly good at maximizing that metric, whatever it may be. Even if someone quite altruistic comes along and programs this first AI to "maximize the happiness of humans", and gets even a slight bit sloppy with their gradient, they may create an AI that optimizes the universe for human happiness by converting the entire universe into human pleasure centers being stimulated at the maximum possible rate, and nothing else that you might be concerned about, such as your forebrain or visual center or anything else that you may think makes you human, but the highly altruistic and very well-meaning AI programmer neglected to specify in their definition of human.

Here's another way of looking at the AI concerns: Let us stipulate a magical force in the universe that constrains AIs to be "fairly benevolent". Can you, right now, mathematically specify what a human is, and mathematically specify the best thing for humanity, in such a way that you are willing to 100% commit yourself and all humans to those definitions, rigidly, and for all time? And are you comfortable with the fact that it probably won't be you deciding?

For context, I'm not necessarily a big believer in this argument, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth at least thinking about, and characterizing correctly.
But is that the problem here? I mean, yes, if the rules about importing went away this problem would vanish over night, but let's ignore that for just a moment and imagine this same problem exists on a world-wide scale (it very well could!).

How can a newcomer get into this market and undercut a competitor who can essentially drop prices as low as they want without losing their profitability?
I would love to have a car that became an inefficient train on the highway. I believe tens of thousands of people in Los Angeles would pay a lot of money for one. It isn't the ideal for the future, but it would still be a very desirable product.
> However, if the people of a country are asking that too much be "given" to them (I.E. more than the country actually has), who's going to stop that?

The external actors from whom such goods must come will, as historically they always eventually have.
Here's a way to think about it using simple identities.

1) Nominal GDP = Money Spent

2) Nominal GDP = Price Level * Real GDP

3) Money Spent = Money Supply * Velocity

Therefore

4) Price Level * Real GDP = Money Supply * Velocity

So if supply doubles but velocity halves while real GDP remains constant, then there's no effect on prices.

Economists call this "pushing on a string".

The Federal Reserve increases the money supply when it buys securities like Treasury bonds and collateralized mortgages.

This puts more money in the hands of banks, brokers, and wealthy investors who used to own Treasury bonds and collateralized mortgages and now they own money instead.

Banks, brokerages and wealthy investors don't spend money as fast as regular people do. The money sits idle in savings and bank reserves.

That drives the velocity of money down as supply increases, and it's exactly what happened over the last 10 years: https://imgur.com/a/dtVJq

As M2 supply doubled, velocity dropped a lot. That's why the value of a dollar didn't halve even though the supply doubled, tripled, or quadrupled depending how you measure it.
That makes the biz-speak story posted on the KT website all the more distasteful.
By “should,” I’m saying it ought to be structured this way, not that it actually is at this time.
I realize it's Canadian, but here's the unit I'm using: http://www.homehardware.ca/en/rec/index.htm/Indoor-Living/Sm...

It's definitely accessible on the mass market!
The problem is that all of the Bitcoin futures are cash settled contracts.

This means that they are not resolved with delivery of the commodity and have no direct influence on the underlying markets.
I've always found this flowchart[1] wonderful and concise for handling this problem (that is, how do I fix the problem I've made for myself with git)..

1: http://justinhileman.info/article/git-pretty/
SourceTree keeps the same language regular git uses. But I highly agree. JetBrains IDEs add their own lingo out of support for multiple version control plugins I'm sure but its confusing and easy to screw up. SourceTree is the one GUI client I want on Linux...
This is simply untrue:

"The issue you have with git, is that untrained developers have a hard time using it."

Please re-read my first post, up above, which started this thread. I wrote:

"But all of that stuff is trivial compared to the major flaw:

Graphic designers, writers, HTML/CSS frontenders, managers, data analysts and QA staff can’t use Git, even though they all used Subversion."
This is great!

We had a problem with piracy for awhile. We spent nearly a million dollars on some of the best licensing software out there and over 2 years of tweaking it to try and eliminate all attack vectors and we still had piracy. We learned even the best anti-piracy methods will be broken eventually. In the end, the proper solution was pretty simple... we just rewrote our application as a web app and now only people who pay can login.

I mean come on people, if you're using professional software and expect to be paid for your work, pay the other professionals for their work too.
GitHub's Atom editor recently added git operations. I use Atom but haven't had the time to try the git wrapping. Has anyone else used it?
It's runaway capitalism
It's runaway socialism
It's runaway what-ever-ism

As always it's hard to take anything from buzzfeed serious when they are so obviously biased in everything they post. What ever thing can 'runaway' is a threat to civilization, from pollution to propaganda in the news.
Not surprising from a publication who has editors that openly support "full communism"[0].

Buzzfeed "news" is the last place I look for an objective article.

[0] - http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/the-wrap/article/BuzzFee...
Also on this topic, remembered this post from a year ago collecting cutaway illustrations of the London Underground: http://londonist.com/london/transport/london-cutaways
Of course, there's SeriouslyGuysUseThisLimitedCoinOnlyNoOtherCoinsCoin.
I was going to suggest this. Create a GKE cluster and play with it for a while to see what you’re supposed to have. Then you can create one yourself from scratch once you understand the target.
Your identity verification is being reviewed, and should be updated shortly. Gemini is currently experiencing extremely high application volume and there may be delays as the compliance team completes the review of your application.
It is called the woodchipper for a reason
It depends on who gets that pile of shiny new cash!
Gates is doing this because in a few short years he went from America's darling super rich success story, to the monopolistic Satan most of us tech people remember. He was not prepared for being vilified so quickly and completely during the anti-trust years.

Same thing as Andrew Carnegie: After the violent putting down of steel worker strikes, Carnegie was seen as the devil himself. He was so upset that this would be his legacy, Carnegie went about doing charitable work to change his image. You probably have a library he built within 50 miles of you, no matter where you live in the US.

Gates is doing the same thing. He does not want his legacy to be that of a businessman, but rather, that of a philanthropist.
It's not an article. It's an essay by a science fiction writer.
That book is surprisingly nuanced, full of good advice like:

- The best paired squatting methods, for when there's no good tree available (takes a lot of trust).

- Advice to look below you before using a cliff.
> Something like Google search could possibly work in a decentralized fashion.

How? Let's suppose I trust Google to crawl the Web and present a plausibly-accurate result to my query. This works because I communicate with Google using TLS (so I trust that Google is in fact Google), Google is the one performing the crawl, and I put my faith (for purposes of this exercise) in Google's editorial discretion and good judgement.

How does a distributed search work? What does my query look like? Where do I send it? How can I gauge how much I trust the response?
A trick I learned in college where the bank was on the other side of town: use your Debit card with pin at the grocery store and get cash back.
if they doubled money supply and distributed it 1 for 1 to all current dollar holders then in theory the expected price increases (inflation refers only to money supply amount, despite popular usage) would occur before any of the new dollars were spent into circulation.

if they doubled the money supply, evenly distributed it AND those new dollars were all spent at the same velocity then the expected price increase would certainly happen.

distribution & velocity are huge.

the ability of the new dollars to debase the old dollars only happens when they are spent into the economy.

the first parties to get and spend the new dollars receive the benefit side of inflation/price increases.

these bankers and economists will try to take credit for anything that has a positive twist to it, statistically speaking, but dont be fooled the central banks have very few tools and common sense + gut instinct is your friend when you're living underneath a government instituting financial repression (macroprudental policy).
Couldn’t have said it better myself. I am so grateful.