skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've wrote an article in 2014 to answer some of your questions[1]. More specifically, on the value of bitcoin as a currency and where the value comes from:

---

3.2 the currency

Bitcoin was introduced to the general public as a cryptocurrency in 2009. Apparently bitcoin was introduced as an alternative to FIAT currency for online payments.

But there is a fundamental design decision that makes, bitcoin as a currency, contradictory: bitcoin is deflationary by design. There can only be produced 21 million bitcoins.

Initially I thought that Satoshi5 made a mistake. But given the genius that takes to create the state-of-art cryptographic protocol that bitcoin is, a mistake from Satoshi was hard to digest.

So my bet is that Satoshi had a deep understanding of macro-economics and consumer’s psyche. He knew that mainstream consumers wouldn’t have any incentive to own a currency that is inflationary with no inherent value, backed up by no one. Since there was no other to way to force someone to own bitcoins - Satoshi was not in a position to force the proliferation of bitcoin - the only way turn bitcoin mainstream was to make it deflationary, to give bitcoin users something to aspire on, a good return on investment.

Hence I believe that this was a kind of forced decision, to make bitcoin acceptable by the masses and it was a successful decision in my opinion, otherwise bitcoin might had never took off.

I can’t tell if my theory is correct of course. But if it is correct, it paid off.

3.3 no currencies, only assets

Bitcoin, in my view, was never meant to be a currency. It was never meant to be used at least directly, for online micro-payments, as the original paper states.

If an average consumer has reason to believe that bitcoin will raise it’s value, the consumer will probably choose to hoard and not spend bitcoins when he can spend USD which is an inflationary currency.

And there is a very good reason to believe that bitcoin will continue to go up in the long run. The reason is bitcoin’s scarcity. Of course prices don’t go up for ever, but no one can tell for sure when prices will go down. So even when in doubt, most consumers will choose to spend an inflationary currency.

So in my opinion, bitcoin is a failed currency. It was meant to fail. It was meant to be used primarily as value storage medium and only in lack of other options as an exchange medium.

Of course for bitcoin to be considered an option for medium to big investors, the price needs to stop fluctuating so much. It is a common pattern for new currencies to fluctuate, but since bitcoin’s characteristics are way more similar to gold than FIAT currency, I think that it’s clear by now that bitcoin should be considered an asset (investment) and not a currency. We will see in a couple of years how this will play out, but I don’t think this will change.

---

[1]: https://www.convalesco.org/essays/2014/02/11/on-the-matter-o...
Atlas Obscura send emails regularly with new stories, people post them when they get them.
Sure. Keep in mind I'm not an expert. I also have to write some assumptions first, I apologize for the length.

There are ups and downs. The bigger the up, the uglier the down (1999 vs 2007).Money gets flooded and scooped (interest rates are as much proactive as reactive).

Inflation is aimed at 2-3% because that's what people ignore but it keeps this fable called money going for all (rich get richer, the poor get regular inflation based raises, all is happy).

Credit cycles are a thing, but can be extended by injecting money in the system (as long as nobody objects, inflation is near 3%, and interest rates are reasonable).

Bailouts work up to an extent, at some point (because I can't draw charts) the math catches up, and heavily QE will become worthless, this risking inflation or deflation. No matter the outcome, one or the other must happen, or like the Bank of Japan, the government starts buying bonds and stocks with it just to keep the pretense money are still worth something.

Based on the above (and I'm aware the story is longer and somewhat with more details) USA has a way to go for a complete endgame.

However, the money flooded so far in the system, are bigger than ever, and the next down will be probably more ugly than ever.

So, when it's ugly it's somewhat benefitial if people can get some sort of jobs.

With all the assumptions from above, and it really doesn't look like from here that Trump came with the idea (he would be boasting). He's doing what any sane central bank will do. So he's told what to do, and believes it's overall the right thing.

- Make sure outsourced jobs vanish. It will cost businesses now, but maybe if they get awesome tax cut, they won't complain.

- NAFTA will probably go away, Americans will get to do stuff that free trade did. If employment on domestic grounds is good (and not in the service industry, but factories and stuff), when it gets bad, people (or a bigger fraction of them) will have jobs, compared to if the service sector is doing great now.

- Based on the continuous QE volume, the next credit cycle will be the worst.

- If I had to guess, tech stocks will crater the worst. So all related tech visas will also go.

- He repealed Obama care, because in a recessions, most people won't have health care, but won't pay penalties. Not having it, is horible, but the population seems somewhat adjusted to the idea of not having health care ( and a revolution hasn't started over that so far, so they can do that).

Related reading: USA losing the Petro dollar. Bitcoin being worse than the tech stocks and cratering more. China bonds being risky right now. That report from IBS (October?) where they wrote that china/India are fully integrated in the world labour and main growth stopped, wages will restart going up after two decades. Upcoming Australia's housing crash (because resource export stalled, and other factors). Interest rates raising again, so other overextended housing markets will get corrected (starting with Canada, UK, Sweden).

The world economy is complex and it's all fluid all the time, but at this point, this how it looks to me.

Apologies for the length.
You can add a third party domain to BlogSpot. It isn't hard at all.

That may not get the result you personally want, but it is completely do-able.
feels like a fear and smear campaign to allow the government sweeping authorities and regulations "for everyone's own good" that probably offer little help to the problem the fear and smear campaign was calling out.
All it takes is a single trade at a $100M valuation and, for that nanosecond, that's the value of Bitcoin.
You don't know many drunks, I guess. Lots of people fill the glass much more than they are supposed to.
DDOS some of the biggest miners while simultaneously deploying a large force of compute power to exceed the 51%, even for a few minutes?

This is my best guess, and I'm legitimately curious if it's a believable threat.
A bit clearer than the initial empty press statements, but I guess we'll have to wait for the detailed post-mortems and changes to see how far their understanding for the various concerns goes. Not much detail here.
It's interesting that you'd compare supporting Trump with being LGBTQ, part of a minority or a woman. One is a conscious decision, the other one is part of who one is. You might be a Trump supporter today and a Trump detractor tomorrow, but minorities don't get to change their gender identification, skin color or the reproductive organs they were born with. Trying to compare the two is ludicrous.

The victimization complex Trump supporters seem to have internalized is such a bizarre thing.
The problem, as I see it, is not with the GUIs, it's with the CLI. Just look at the `reset` command: it does several different things, depending on what switches you give it. How would you represent that in a GUI?
I hate that Mozilla constantly updates FF and everytime it's like a round of russian roulette with regard to installed addons.

Mozilla decided it's no longer compatible? BOOM! GONE FOREVER!

Oh, you relied on that one? Welp..
A flaw was found in the hash function they rolled themselves which doesn't build confidence there aren't more vulnerabilities to be found:

https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-io...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/amycastor/2017/09/07/mit-and-bu...

To make things even worse than rolling their own hash function, they're claiming the flaw was intentional! This makes them hostile and untrustworthy to the open source community if this is true and further erodes confidence they know what they're doing if this is their attempt at PR spin:

https://hackernoon.com/why-i-find-iota-deeply-alarming-934f1...

> Next, and in my mind most damningly, Sergey Ivancheglo, Iota’s cofounder, claims that the flaws in the Curl hash function were in fact deliberate; that they were inserted as ‘copy protection’, to prevent copycat projects, and to allow the Iota team to compromise those projects if they sprang up.
Small robotic probe accelerated by a few nukes (positioned along the way by conventional ships) hitting a blast shield?
Rewriting shared history fits the metaphor pretty well.

But you can still chop off your thumb in your local history, and that's safe to fix - you just have to know where the duct tape is.
I read some other news story on this today. Is there an actual apology yet? And if not, does it matter?

In my mind, no apology is better than a 'sorry you were upset' non-apology, but there are apologies that manage to seem genuine as well. As I write this I am reminded of the show 'The Orville's "apology tour"... I don't necessarily think an apology is needed or helpful.

Always interested in examples of corporate PR, whether negative, neutral-ish, or positive.

Edit: obviously I don't care enough(?) about the specifics of this instance... Hopefully it's also obvious that I appreciate the chance to evaluate the community's response to a favored company. Mozilla seems to be allowed quite a bit of leeway.
It's only easier to copy the directory if you haven't done the due diligence of learning git properly. It's a tool to avoid doing the ripcord approach -- ever.
> These days, the average British pour of wine is 250 milliliters, “larger than the mean capacity of wine glasses available in the 1980s,” writes Marteau.

Wow that’s a big pour - you expect to get 4-5 glasses of wine out of a standard 750ml bottle, potentially a little more than that if you’re ordering by the glass in a restaurant.
There is no rule in HTTP that mandates the user-agent must navigate away from what it's currently displaying to show you the payload of an HTTP error. It simply says [1] that the error "SHOULD" (in the RFC 2219 meaning of SHOULD [2]) be displayed to the user. Because of this, most browsers display the payload, but some show a built-in "friendly" error page if the payload is under a certain size.

Because of the language in the spec, the server can't rely on any particular behavior. If it reliably knew that user-agents always display the payload, the body of the 4xx or 5xx response could contain the exact HTML of the page you were just on, with the details of the error spliced in. Understandably, few people do this.

In late 1990s, early 2000s browsers, a status bar was commonplace which tended to show parsing errors, script errors, and other errors the user probably couldn't fix; nowadays these notifications have been moved to the console or log and are hidden from non-power users. A HTML form property could be used to signify that the form be submitted out-of-band, and have the results logged instead of updating the document view. With HTML5, they introduced the 'async' tag to allow linked assets to load without blocking rendering, so conceivably the same mechanism could be used to mark forms, if any user-agent were interested in supporting it.

The point is, extremely minor changes could improve usability in this particular case, using semantics that aren't breaking new ground at all, but quite simply no one has done it.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-6.5 [2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2119
The upper bound is how much capital can be deployed to pump it up.

It's one thing if hedge funds are pouring in, another if housewives in Japan (if the press stories are to be believed), but at the end of the day there's a finite amount of capital that will be pumped into it, as capital wants to go to other investments, too.
I have heard that such small glasses were a) somewhat necessary due to the difficulty of glassmaking in the 1700s, and b) not a problem when you have servants following you around keeping your glasses topped up.
What if a lot of your friends and family are on it, and some interesting people you don't know yet are on it, and your favourite brands… aren't?

What if our secret advantage is that not everyone is on it?
Toyota not giving up on fuel cell, but now banking on electric, too
What system do you want to move it to?
A pretty typical "sorry we got caught" post.
UK companies hoarding Bitcoin to prepare for ransomware attacks – TechRepublic
The lightning network allows the payer and the payee to be anonymous from each other, which could be useful for some things, like for example anonymous charity donations.
If you actually read the article, I'm pretty sure you'll find the words "we're sorry" in there.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing after leaving the prior comment. There is exchange-to-other-currency volume (largely BTC as store of value), and then there is exchange-as-money volume (BTC as currency).

In theory you subtract the former from the total transaction volume ($4.6B over last 24 hours according to https://blockchain.info/stats). Unfortunately that gives me a negative number ($4.6B - $5.4B = negative), which at first suggests the methodology is wrong, but then I remember that not all currency-exchange transactions happen on-chain. Send BTC to GDAX, then buy/sell/buy/sell/buy/sell, then receive $$$... all that could be as little as a single blockchain transaction.

I'm sure someone has tried to determine how much of BTC traffic is closed-loop within the BTC ecosystem. I doubt it's much. Anyway, I'm ratholing.
Huh, I've been wrapping my ML models into a flask app and deploying it as well. If you don't mind me asking, what are you using the ML model for, and what are the current suck-ass parts of deploying it?
I mean, the average person didn't exactly have servants.

Glass-making concept makes sense to me though.
Still heavily disappointed with Mozilla I this case, especially due to the previous outrage with Pocket.
Certainly it would be impossible for NASA in it's current state.

Don't underestimate the gap between a science/jobs program like NASA vs what happens where there is an acute national interest. A derelict alien spacecraft would present an objective that no world power could ignore. Nation states taking enormous risks and spending hundreds of billions would make our current space program look like hobbyist work. In that setting, I would hesitate to say what is impossible.
The first sentence reads: 'We didn’t think hard enough about how our actions would affect the community, and we’re sorry for letting you down.' So yes, they have apologised.
The amount of negative press this received nearly cancels out all the positive news from Quantum's release barely a month ago. It's such a shame that the years of hard work and effort on the dev teams are being overshadowed by such a ridiculous marketing mistake. For a browser that is one of the last big proponents of a privacy-centered, user-first web, these kinds of mistakes can't happen... period. Now it's nearly back to the starting line on re-gaining user trust again.
Cool paper. I used to work in the space industry. When I said "We don't have the technology", I meant there is nothing at Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 6 using NASA's ratings. Current state of the art is TRL 1 or TRL 2.

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/trl.png
More stupid? Alcohol kills 16,000 people in car crashes alone. 88,000 alcohol related deaths a year making it the third most popular cause of preventable death.

Then there’s it’s relationship with sexual assault and date rape as well.
Back in the day a Royal Navy sailor's daily ration of beer was a gallon, or a half pint of 115 proof rum. I don't think the dainty wineglasses are a good indication of volume consumed.
Building a Poor Man’s Deep Learning Camera in Python
Not on the basis of this description. Ideas are easy, execution is hard. I think most regular readers in this space would have little difficulty identifying problems and giving a napkin sketch for a solution.

Who is the audience for three paid ideas a day? I don't see VC firms using this, startup launchers only need, at most 2 or 3 total and only until they find one good one to execute on.

The value in sale of ideas would come from sime of the followup to a good idea: some minimum marjet research to determine audience size, proclivity and ability to pay for a solution. Call it a rough outline for a business plan.
20+% business/personal tax vs 5% CC fee. Which do you think is the bigger motivator there?
I just hope this makes the outraged people quiet for a while. This is a clear apology and Mozilla seems to have learned the lesson. Let’s now show some love and support for this powerful open-source organization.
Are historically accurate classic size wine glasses sold today? They look classy.
Tip for new tig-players: whilst you can use tig perfectly fine with just the keyboard, it does support using the mouse. Just add `set mouse = yes` to `~/.tigrc` :)
But.... why? And what browser on gods earth are you going to switch to that has the same respect for privacy as Firefox (excluding poorly maintained FF forks).

It's a blip, one you where not affected by at all and in the scheme of things not major compared to other vendors. But hey, boo mozilla uninstall everything and use lynx/curl!
Yes. See Harmonic Experience: Tonal Harmony from Its Natural Origins to Its Modern Expression by W.A. Mathieu

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/114365.Harmonic_Experien...
> European countries are doing very well on the list of riches countries in the world as measured in GDP per capita. That would be quite surprising if their large public sector really were so horribly inefficient.

What do GDP and government efficiency have to do with each other?
I'm sad there are no drawings in the article :( Julia Evans drawings are amazing. If you've never seen them, you should check the strace zine : https://jvns.ca/zines/#strace-zine

But it's still a very interesting blog post !
This is one of the biggest issues the internet has in general, at least where freedom of speech is concerned. There is no such thing as public property online, and even with alternatives technically existing, this makes it all too easy to de facto censor speech by denying someone an audience.

Indeed, I think a lot of people miss that the nature of public property and governments not being able to censor free speech did basically guarantee people an audience in the olden days. Did you have a message you wanted people to hear? Protest in a heavily trafficked area (like a town centre), and you had an audience of thousands or even millions, regardless of whether they wanted to hear what you had to say or not.

Imagine how much less useful political movements would be if corporations owned everything in the real world and the people protesting had to do so in their own homes/some private property away from the public. That's the situation these social media sites have set up.

But hey, I guess it's not a new thing, nor an issue exclusive to the internet. In some places, a shopping mall or other corporate property might be the 'heart of the local community', and like with Twitter and Facebook, they could ban those they don't like and de facto censor their speech too.
Ok, Mozilla Employee with the fresh account.
It just popped into my head. No doubt others have had it too.
With the bone-conductive headphones (And the Pixel buds to a large extent), you do hear everything around you.

From what I started reading on the bone-conductive headphones, it'd be no different than having a speaker mounted on your bike in terms of being able to hear around you.
I wonder if "process changes" include actually enforcing the already-existing rules around Shield deployments that were outlined on their wiki.
> Over the course of the year Firefox has enjoyed a growing relationship with the Mr. Robot television show

This line is just absolutely crazy by itself when you think about it.

Why does a browser team have any kind of relationship at all with some TV show? What is going on?
So what are you moving to if they fail your challenge? (I've asked myself this question, and apart from "try something exotic like Qutebrowser, prepared to move back if it doesn't work out" I don't see a better alternative personally)
Where did this post go? Did the author get a takedown?
The example of summation is really what "fold" in functional programming languages does. Pure functional programming is close to the idea of mathematical notation, particularly in the sense that "equational reasoning" is possible.

Another functional idea related to the concepts you mentioned is the "where" clause:

"A notationally distinctive feature of ISWIM is its use of “where” clauses. An ISWIM program is a single expression qualified by “where” clauses (auxiliary definitions including equations among variables), conditional expressions and function definitions. Along with CPL, ISWIM was one of the first programming languages to use “where” clauses." (From the page for ISWIM on Wikipedia)

If this sounds good, see Haskell etc.
Apology does not mean instant forgiveness nor does it mean do-over.

It's a sad day when I now have more trust in Apple and Safari than I do in Mozilla and Firefox.
This was an inactive extension that didn't do anything unless you activated it, right?
We really need a fork of Firefox with all the garbage removed, including the ability for Mozilla's marketroids to push things at us remotely. (Also "telemetry", DRM, Pocket, spam on the new tab page, etc.)

A browser should just be a tool which answers to the user. I want my browser to be like a pair of pliers or a bicycle, neither of which have relationships with television shows. I think Iceweasel was essentially this, until the Debian project abandoned the effort.
> The amount of negative press this received nearly cancels out all the positive news from Quantum's release barely a month ago.

Which is silly, IMO. What did this addon actually do, besides be installed without user consent? If this article is correct, the addon was installed automatically but was not 'activated'. Seems like a fuss over nothing, to me, but somebody correct me if I have the details wrong.
You can have an SNS topic configured to message you on a key creation event via Lambda worst case. We’re talking maybe seven lines of code here.
The record of the last few years is directly contrary to popular belief that they are privacy-centered.

This wasn't a mistake, it was the inevitable outcome in a culture which has lost sight some time ago of its nominal core values.

House should be cleaned before trust is reearned.
Reminds me of the exploration vs. exploitation problem in ML/RL.
And what about the non-transparent bug?

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1423003

And no updates on the public bug, and it was summarily closed:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1424977

That hardly inspires confidence on transparency.
I love the height of winter, and the cozy feeling it's companying darkness brings. Where I live we only get 4 hours of sunlight in December, cut even shorter most of the time due to clouds.
Add-on was also closed source.

"Here, let me push closed source partner marketing materials on your bandwidth to you."

Directly contradictory to espoused values they trade on. Shameful.
Keras and deep learning on the Raspberry Pi
Perhaps the average person in the 1700s with a specific glass for wine did?