skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been a holder and believer since 2012 but this is one thing where I've always disagreed with the community--not so much the ecological aspect but the value argument based on production. Bitcoin's overwhelmingly libertarian user base had no time for this kind of discussion because it was too close to the labor theory of value.[1] But if you work it out you can actually get a solid argument for a current "intrinsic" value, taking into account expected future returns, etc. We're starting to see this with the markets for mining contracts where the unit is (mega/giga) hashes per second. Seems to be homologous to a forward contract.

But in any case the production aspect seems to have been totally ignored when it comes to valuation whereas with every other commodity--oil, corn, cotton, copper, etc.--it means everything.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Help:FAQ#Where_does_the_value_of_...
A better analogous structure would be the structure used in Git.

The only major difference is that Git is a DAG while a blockchain is restricted to being a tree.

What do they have in common?

A block is a commit, containing a metadata and a hash pointing to the preceding commit.

A Merkle tree is a tree, though restricted to having only two children; trees in Git also contain the hashes of its children.

A transaction is a blob, the new file to be included in the next commit.

And if I recall correctly, the Git protocol was devised against a similar issue of centralization - SVNs. If the SVN could not be reached, then you were not able to access your repository. Since there was only one ledger, it meant a single point of failure.
Nice job cutting off the actual number of things requested, to make it seem like it was much smaller than it actually was:

> when they asked to have 22 types of records available.
>The next halving could cause a transient effect in the network where the number of machines mining on the network drops dramatically. This may have the effect of miners selling off their Bitcoin and the value falling.

This is not how markets work. Anything knowable about the future is reflected in the current price.
>I'm not saying intelligence is bad, it's obviously valuable, but in certain communities (ahem) there seems to be a blind spot around the relative importance of intelligence in relation to other factors of being human, particularly social components.

Thank you so much for pointing this out. Intelligence is valuable, but that doesn't mean it should be valued above all else.

There is an important differentiation between this and dis-valuing intelligence as well (e.g. anti-intellectualism).

There are a lot of highly intelligent people that never do much of anything with their life. There are people who are not highly intelligent but do great things. That doesn't even start to mention how complicated it is to talk about degrees of intelligence. IQ is one aspect, but there are many others. It's very difficult to even talk about what is meant by High Intelligence generally speaking.
So it seems conservatives are upset at SV for taking down articles full of misinformation and for silencing white nationalists. I know companies don't have to adhere to the 1st amendment, but neither of these things would be covered by free speech anyway.

I'm terrified that so many on the right now have an adverse relationship with truth. It immediately politicizes every conduit of information. I'm not sure how we as a country get through this. Will there come a point where eventually they come to their senses? Will it get worse before it gets better?
I accidentally cought LastPass doctoring their terrible track record of security in wikipedia:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15756044

This was just over a month ago, and published only here.
Why would you want a consensus? In what financial situation would you expect the bank to say: this entity says the account has X, but those two entities say it has Y, so I'll accept Y?
Our pediatrician's recommendation is to limit it to 2 hours a day.
This is untrue, where did you learn this?
You can also have structure and strong separation between different parts of the system inside a monolith.

I see the point of microservices for cases where you want to use different tech stack for one part of system or need special scalability. I don't see the point in going that route to only have separation between components or being able to split work.

If you are afraid that you won't get the monolith architecture right, you should be afraid of the same thing with microservices.
Agreed, overall they're safe. I'm just pointing out that the time of the phase-out in the US is effectively FAA-mandated due to the airlines not wanting to retrofit the fleet, as e.g. BA has apparently done.

This is an interesting bit of trivia, and not something you'll find in airline press releases since for better or worse it's going to make them look worse in the eyes of their customers.

There's ~500 747s[1] in service. So 30k/500 =~ 60yrs, or a 25% chance that one will blow up in the next 15 years. So this seems like a reasonable retrofit given the cost.

I assume that the FAA knows what it's doing and 12% oxygen helps, even if it's not 9%, similarly I assume they've taken into account the risk of retrofitting existing planes, since they started explicitly mandating that in 2008.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_747_operators#A...
Leech Block for Firefox or Chrome Nanny on Chrome do a great job of keeping me from veering too far off my intended path without too much configuration...

Just setup domains and the times or limits you want to restrict them.
This can't work. Patent law changes and is often retro-actively applied.

Though to your point, AFAIK examiners and their bosses hate to have patents they allow be overturned. It is noticed. But often, patents are invalidated based on changes to the law that occur after a patent was allowed.
Microsoft's crimes have been well documented, no need for me to provide sources if you're not familiar with any of this, Google is up and running.
“Audit” (sorry I can’t think of a better word) compliance for visits by government agencies (regulators, what have you) are STILL in 2017 a great place to start a software business. The first product I made and sold on the side was for small trucking companies to do safety compliance in a specific niche. It was such a crappy app built on MS Access but it helped my customers sail through DOT audits. The DOT auditors had seen nothing like it. Customers loved it. A friend went on to turn the product into a sizable business.

Small businesses face more regulation each year. This isn’t a value judgement about regulation, just take a look at the Federal Register. It’s just a fact of life. Agencies and congress are hard at work adding to the CFR.

This is perfect work for the solo developer who wants to own a little niche.

Steps to get started.

1. Befriend small business owner or compliance person in small-medium sized business.

2. Ask how much time they spend on compliance, and how much it costs when they fuck up. Establish a unit cost.

3. Sketch up a paper prototype and iterate with the initial customer.

4. Build basic demo, show to your first customer’s colleagues. Get feedback.

5. Get group of potential customers to commit to buying at a specific price (discounted for them taking a chance on you) and to write you a check up front. Promise a delivery date of what you’ve agreed to deliver. (You can promise full refund if necessary but get a check to get through sales objections).

6. Hold checks. Don’t cash.

7. Build the damn thing

8. Deliver

9. Fix initial complaints because you’re a bozo not a wizard harry.

10. Sell to other people in your niche.
And here's an existing HN story that discusses this in much more detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16001275
Be careful with the term ‘empathy’. The contemporary use of this word (reflected in your definition) conflates a few different concepts in a potentially confusing manner. An ability to predict how others feel can be used, to put it simply, for both good and evil. A sociopath has high empathy. Do you want a sociopath as your manager?

A better set of characteristics to look for might be: sympathy, compassion, consideration, honesty.

‘Empathy’ as a term actually has a shaky and very recent etymology which reflects some of the contradictions it plays into. A loose translation of it’s origins is to express sympathy, which has a slight technical from what it means now, because it has been widely adopted as dignified form of sympathy. The difference from the classical term sympathy is that empathy is more correlated with communication than intention. Why has it gained in popularity? A socio-cultural argument might center on the fact that empathy carries less vulnerability than sympathy. There are some serious implications here.

The general problem with the focus on empathy is the loss of a bigger picture concern with being sincere. It’s analogous to short-term concerns vs. long-term concerns, where short-term concern is to provide immediate comfort and long-term concern is to provide sustainment and survival. A highly social workplace will value immediate social relations like expression of compassion while overlooking important long term values like honesty and less-empathetic forms of sympathy.

Ideally, we would maintain both, but these simplifications of the issue are unlikely to support that outcome.
Maybe I start with the opposite prior, but this is absolutely mind blowing to me. The future truly looks much brighter now. If they couple this with their automatic translation (which will only get better), in a few short years you will be able to travel to an arbitrary country and use your smart phone to chat with people. Separately, I dream of the day when someone will release a personal language coach. I used one to improve my English, and I paid more than $xx per hour (a lot). Can you imagine paying $2.99 to get one with no time limits?
You'd cancel the subscription and order the favorite candy from amazon :(.

My friend received a selection of wine each month from the local store. After a while his tastes narrowed to a specific grape. Cancelled his subscription and now he goes directly to the store to get those wines. Candy Japan needs to work on retention.
As with any submission you think is not appropriate for HN, use "flag".
The irony is that while the words are stupid (“alignment”, “intentionality” and “end-state visions”) - this pretty good actually.

Most white collar jobs are full of 'waking sleep' - and if we focus on outcomes, and drive them forward with intentional work - we would be more productive.

"Bullshit jobs" - if you doing anything to move the ball forward - like working a checkout or pumping gas - your job may feel meaningless, but it's not BS by any means. Middle management tends to be the most BC. And many gov. jobs.

"US employee now spends 45% of their working day doing their real job. The other 55% is spent doing things such as wading through endless emails or attending pointless meetings."

This is part of the job. Communicating is work, and we can't be 100% efficient at all times.
> ... and then people will use it to discount any audio or video they don't like.

I consider that to also be a big impact. If recorded events are now only hearsay, it's going to be a lot harder to prove what actually happened - both in politics and in court.
I think event organizers should be told so that they can take steps to protect other attendees. And if the victims would rather reconcile and restore their relationship with the abuser, why would they go to court? Somehow you want someone to spend decades in jail and be deported, but being merely avoided is somehow too much - that's an odd value judgement.
Start by not assuming that the poster is endorsing it; maybe they just want to share something relevant and stupid being spread around. Maybe it’s a discussion piece, centered on the flaws in the piece.
If you have enough karma there's a "flag" button, but I don't see any reason to flag PR pieces that have useful information in them
Only a cheeky jab but in fairness it was the first thing I saw in your job ads

> Parse.ly is looking for a motivated Business Development Representative [..] The position will be based in our New York City headquarters

Do you have any concerns of having a HQ and remote workers? From what I've seen and heard from mixed businesses the remote workers tend to become second class citizens when it comes to benefits/promotions/salary/etc. How do you avoid that, if you do?
How so? The market is just what people are willing to pay isn't it?

Do you think the precious metal markets are wrong?
Ask HN: New York Times Submissions by New York Times. Is This OK?
Lately, I've been seeing a flood of posts from NYT. Is this an attempt by Times to get HN traffic? Is this allowed by moderators?
This how I feel about most "Agile methods" going around like SCRUM.
> “I’m not necessarily in favor of rolling back a lot of federal regulations,” said Ms. Ten Eyck, a Democrat who serves on her local town board. “I’m in favor of applying them intelligently.”

So the apple farmer makes sense, why not do that?
Generating zero-inflated negative binomial random numbers
My experience backs this up, in fact I've never worked anywhere that ever updated BIOS from what came with the machine.
Thing is that even with the limited market he has some 5 serious competitors.

As bemmu readily admits competition is eating into his market.

You name the niche you will see competition no matter how obscure.
Tech people have been spoiled for so long they have forgotten what regulation in business is even like. Start a multi billion dollar tech company? You’ll deal with some regulation when selling into certain industries, or if you decide to roll your own credit card processing, but overall it’s minimal, unless your tech is specifically to streamline a regulated industry.

Try to start a restaurant, raise cattle, farm food, or any other business that non-tech people can understand? I hope you have a lot of capital for regulatory compliance staff and government pleasing!
Scientists Spot the Spark from Ancient Collision of Neutron Stars
Don't tell me you didn't notice people that lack skills needed for their jobs diverting their attention to their strong aspects

...you mean like pretending that only the easy stuff (interacting with the machine) matters, and all the complicated hard-to-understand things about interacting usefully with other humans are completely irrelevant? :)

instead of hard skills coming from years of practice and suffering

Um, no, the "hard" skills come from playing with the machine and solving puzzles for fun. They're not "hard" as in "not easy", it's as in "not fuzzy".

Due to "nerds being clueless", it actually often works, which is sad.

I do not appreciate your insults to my status as a competent adult.

Are you sure you're as much on the side of the "nerds" as you pretend to be?
What is wrong in Pocket from top user
Practical Foundations for Programming Language (2012) [pdf]
At the point where all the bitcoins are mined, what is the incentive for 'miners' to keep processing transactions?

1) Parties who wish to transact must provide that incentive via paying transaction fees

2) The fees will be in proportion to the hash rate which is a function of the computing power/energy allocated to hashing which is related to the number of 'miners'

3) So the transaction fees will be in proportion to the cost of energy.

4) BUT ALSO anyone who owns bitcoin is incentivized to engage in 'mining' because as the number of 'miners' approaches zero, the blockchain becomes susceptible to attack (transactions are 'forged' and bitcoins are 'stolen') by a sufficiently powerful malicious party (51% attack)

5) So bitcoin's value will be a function of the interplay between the desire to transact with bitcoin and the desire to retain ownership of bitcoins

Thoughts?
I have never used Atlas, but would like to remind you that the US just passed a comprehensive tax reform which will also affect international taxation. It was essentially slapped together in a couple of months, it's big, and I doubt anybody has a handle on all the consequences yet. Based on cursory reports like

https://home.kpmg.com/ie/en/home/insights/2017/12/us-tax-ref...

I don't think things like the new "base erosion anti-abuse tax" would affect you, but I don't know so, and I don't know what other surprises might be unearthed once lawyers and accountants get back to work in January and start combing through it.
More specifically, his approach of value investing / choosing to invest in companies per an intrinsic value based on fundamentals.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/01/071801.asp
The rise of indoor navigation
The market is ignoring externalities.

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
I stand corrected. By combining that with low-leakage wakeup timer ICs and low-leakage supercap, one could indeed design a device that runs for months on a single coin cell (transmitting every few hours).
Building a Thermal Camera
It really exploded when George Carlin passed.
It's about economy of scale, which modern corporations have demonstrated that they are incredibly effective at. Bank fees that are a small fraction of each user's transaction but add up to billions for the bank. "First month free" subscriptions that only require you to remember to unsubscribe before they start charging.

When you have a billion users, than harnessing even a tiny fraction of their resources — financial, labor, cognitive, whatever — is a huge amount.

If our phones and social media apps take 2% of our attention away, that's next to nothing, but when you scale it up to millions of users, you're talking thousands of person-minds completely hijacked. It's like our brains are all running low priority threads bitcoining mining for these companies and getting next to nothing in return.
Neither of those features have been a priority, but both will eventually be built in. We'll wait for you. :^)
There's quite a few problems with this article.

First if you are going to say something is correlated it'd be nice to provide an R^2 or something to quantify the correlation. Then given that price of bitcoin and cost of electricity goes back much further than what is listed. Has the correlation been consistent? (given the fact that bitcoin has been growing exponentially I would be surprised)

Second if you are trying to predict what will happen to the price & hashrate at the next halving it might help to look to previous examples. This has happened twice to bitcoin alone and many more times on various different coins. This will also affect other SHA256 PoW coins such as bitcoin cash, which is ~9000 blocks ahead. Interestingly it's halving will happen ~9 weeks earlier, not much lead time, but it should give an indication of what will happen to BTC.

Lastly:

> To compute cost of creating one Bitcoin, I established a correlation between the number of TH/day and kWh/day as value conv in TH/kWh. To compute the value use: 606024TH_sconv*energy_cost/1600

Huh?

Where does the 1600 value come from? There are currently 1800 new bitcoins minted every day, is that what it is supposed to be? If that's the case that is the cost to get one of the newly minted bitcoins.

Furthermore it's an extremely common misconception that if you spend X electricity you produce Y bitcoins. Saying that there is a specific electricity cost for creating a bitcoin could easily reinforce this idea. It looks like the author understands how it actually works, but the wording used seems like it could easily reinforce that misconception.
This literally didn’t address any of my replies.
Once you kill a few people with your tech, they’ll demand the same regulations. It’s just that much consumer tech is crap that frankly couldn’t do the intended job, never mind hurt someone. You can compromise then identities of millions of people, but it’s just a PR thing for now.

Try that same hacker ethos with an automated vehicle, or a medical device though. In time, as tech starts to live up to its promise, you’ll find your red tape. Sure, there are some bad regulations, but a lot are the result of someone dying or nearly dying. When the equivalent of a countrywide E. Coli outbreak is a techie problem, the rest will rapidly follow.
Boeing certainly have an advantage in terms of agility. Airbus is a messy conglomerate, formed from the merger of aerospace companies from France, Germany, Spain, the US and the UK. With so many corporate and governmental stakeholders, their projects tend to become bloated and overly complex, and it's difficult for them to react quickly to market conditions. The A380 project suffered severe delays, in large part because the design effort was spread between teams in four countries using different processes and software.
Maybe whoever wrote that code was excellent on soft skills.
> For example, Germany had to pay citizens to consume power because there was a glut

That would have been great. The opposite is the case: industrial users get paid and regular consumers pay those payouts with their monthly bill. Those payouts are a cost to the utilities
What is untrue? That bitcoin has a single central ledger?

Duh, it does. If the ledger is processed in a distributed way across many peers doesn't change the fact that there is a single central ledger. If a transaction isn't in the ledger, it doesn't exist.

If I give you $10 and we don't tell anyone about it, do you still have the money? Yes.

If I give you BTC10 and we don't tell anyone about it, do you still have the BTC? No.
“A large number of people have blocked you in response to high volumes of untargeted, unsolicited, or duplicative content or engagements from your account,” we were informed. This was true; Impostor Buster had been blocked by many neo-Nazis. “A large number of spam complaints have been filed against you.” Yes, by neo-Nazis. “You send large numbers of unsolicited replies or mentions.” Yes, to neo-Nazis.

What are the accuracy metrics of the bot? Is he really sure that the bot is only sending stuff to neo-Nazis? Are you allowed to spam someone because they hold a morally reprehensible position?
I'm going to pick at one particular part of your statement; since while I generally agree with your thrust of "normalize cap gains and income taxes", this stood out: "Given that taxes on corporate income is a direct tax in investment, it's counterproductive, it reduces investment, and productivity gains that increase both wages and wealth"

I've seen this stated in a few prior debates I've had on this topic, but I'd ask the rebuttal: Why can't you make that EXACT statement but s/corporate income/personal income/? I never understood why capital investment was more a focus than consumer demand, especially given well understood properties of both marginal spend for low vs high worth individuals (low income salary workers will spend more by % on goods and services than wealthy investors) and the assertion that we are "swimming in investor money" right now. (I see the long bull market, P/E ratios, VCs over the last decade/ICOs/wealth gap as datapoints)

I'm 100% sure someone in the finance world has already thought this through but I don't know the words to search for, and my own intuition suggests that supporting demand-side consumption is going to be a far better driver for true efficient allocations of funds and market growth to support a virtuous cycle of consumerism and employment than investor money will.
Those changes are about the same for any window of the same time length for all of recent US history. St. Louis FRED has data and papers on this.

One of the best studies on intergenerational mobility in the US, using all IRS records (not sure how hard they had to work to get those) shows that mobility in the US has been fairly constant for 50+ years.

[1] http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/mobi...