skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sorry man, I noticed that I've been downvoting your comments recently, and it's just because they don't seem very insightful to me. I don't think this comment, that is basically "PoS is weaker than PoW" without any argument is a good contribution to this thread.

It's nice that you took out some time to write up a bunch of lines detailing your opinion, but even in your own comment you acknowledge that you can't recall why exactly it is that PoS is significantly weaker than PoW.

Now I've read the Casper papers (the ones that are on the Github repository and are not yet complete I think), and I know that there's significant challenge in making a PoS that is actually solid, but I don't think it's impossible to figure out how to do it, and there are very knowledgeable and skilled people researching this topic so it's likely a suitable PoS will arise at some point.

If you'd actually been knowledgeable on this topic, you could have pointed out one of the weaknesses of Casper or any of the other PoS protocols, and I would've upvoted your comment, and then typed up a counter to it.

Now, I just get the feeling you're defending Bitcoin, which is an outdated technology which's only use is to be a store of large amounts of value, much like gold, against the new innovative technologies that are challenging it. Without even bothering to make a coherent argument, apart from describing some property of Bitcoin that we all already know.
You have to sign an NDA just to get the roadmap‽

Is it that volatile that they don't want to go public with their intentions? That's not really a good sign, IMO.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
― Edmund Burke
Can't ad-block an instagram app, and she uses Instagram to stay in touch with friends/family. Not that easy of a problem to solve.
if you think that one's good have a read about TradElect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TradElect

a super high-profile project to show that Windows NT, SQL Server and .NET were ready to run a high-availability, high-throughput, low-latency critical system, which MS could then use as a case study for Windows replacing ancient unix systems

you can guess how it all ended

you won't find any mention of TradElect on the MS "get the facts" website these days...
But there is still no way to use ndb from outside App Engine standard, right?
Besides the lack of transaction scaling, the other slightly tough thing for me about cryptocurrencies is downloading many GB of data. If my Casper node is not a validator, does it still have to download the whole blockchain? Or can it operate on a smaller dataset?

Also does anyone know what the timeframe is supposed to be for sharding to be implemented or end up in an Alpha release? It seems that will probably also reduce the minimum storage requirements for most nodes in addition to increasing network transaction rates. Thanks.
I lost 22lbs since Thanksgiving day. If considered one act, that's probably the thing I'm most proud of in 2017.

I learned that my willpower is still there, I've just been failing to exercise it.
Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14940636
This is silly. No way they would launch such a thing without ART support. Even ChromeOS is running Android apps now.
Needs the delivery guy shouting "Di Di Mau!" at you once he gives you the pen to sign your receipt.
When I ask people about the future of tech, most of them just end up listing their wish list. I wish in future we can do XYZ... Or they end up talking about human accomplishments (space, medical etc.) that they most likely don't get to partake in closely.

So last week I asked a bunch of people (techies and non-techies alike) what current tech they regularly use that they couldn't have imagined 10 years ago. Got some really interesting thoughts. Retina displays and 4k displays were definitely unexpected. Complete phone backup to cloud would've surprised many. Same with mostly waterproof phones.

One trend I noticed that people are way more surprised with hardware than software, even though AI/ML software has made huge leaps in the last decade. Maybe because sci-fi has raised our expectations for human-life AI and until we achieve that in code, it just won't be enough. But hardware innovations continue to amaze people.
>>In the mining case, the miner is purchasing equipment and electricity that divert real resources away from the production of other goods and services.

>>In the validating case, the validator is purchasing coin which simply causes prices to adjust and the economy keeps producing the exact same goods and services as if the validation activity did not exist (after a short dislocation, which would be very short in this case because few contracts are denominated in cryptocurrency).

The value diverted to coin purchases ultimately has a cost in goods and services. It diverts economic activity to non-economically productive activity in cycling capital into and out of deposits, which results in less liquidity.

I think Proof of Stake could potentially be better than Proof of Work, but the point about cost being equal across validation methods is correct in general in my opinion. There are specific circumstances where it is not true, like if producing the mining resource creates negative externalities.

Where I think the article is wrong is in neglecting other aspects of consensus algorithm efficacy, like the potential security benefits from Proof of Stake totally aligning the incentives of owners of mining capital (which in the case of PoS is the network coins) with the success of the network.
What's special about sources of randomness? Would you have the same intuition about a patented process for creating physical objects?
By the same token if you specialized in armored cars that could outrun police and were invisible to radar, you’d have no right to be shocked by who ends up using it. You’d protect diplomats and people in dangerous parts of the world... and cartel kingpins, dictators, etc.
Quit my job and created Filterbot, a free personalized news aggregator that uses ML on the users' votes to find the best articles for them. It didn't get as much attention as I hoped, but I'm learning and improving.

https://filterbot.news

I'm now also working on a "radio" music player based on the same concept.
Would love to donate to such projects (and already have, but you sound neat too).
... or more likely, to just order them - but what could they do? Double spend? Transfer Satoshi's money to some new address?
I made a lot of smoke, but not a lot of fire.

Two years ago I said I was going to clone Berzerk as my second game dev project, and made my first commit[0].

This year I basically tore the entire thing apart several times and wound up just working on general framework and game development code[1]. Some of it still doesn't work. Most of it is probably crap.

I also worked on, and have given up on, a HN-like forum written in Hack[2]. It wasn't very good, though. Just got bored with it.

I've taken a lot of Udemy tutorials for Unity and OpenGL, and gotten some Hello World stuff to run in WebAssembly.

Basically, I've either been very productive, or I've completely wasted the last two years of my life, depending on your point of view.

I also came across a pile of old cd/dvds I kept old code and short stories and things on and archived it. Found some PHP I wrote in 2004, and some old sites from when I used to blog regularly and review movies.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10819380

[1]https://bitbucket.org/kennethrapp/gamedevprojects

[2]https://bitbucket.org/kennethrapp/basedforum
Speakers, keyboard, mouse, mousepad, 4 books.
This looks great! How many people do you have working on this? How does it compare to something like Evident?
I think you're reading my intentions in bad faith. Of course police should be able to defend themselves when warranted. The law and training of the police has been shown to exhibit too broad a defintion of when warranted, at the expense of the citizen, because it is based on the subjective, ambiguous definition of fear.

This is my last clarification of what I meant as I find this conversation is a waste of time, because you are being pedantic rather than dealing with the spirit of the argument. If you follow the Roman Calendar, Happy New Years, in advance. Cheers.
The topic of this article is Google App Engine (GAE), which is a PaaS. Comparing GAE to AWS step functions (which is some wrapping around AWS Lambda) is moot since they are different categories of products solving different problems.

For PaaS products, GAE is comparable to AWS Beanstalk (or Heroku, or CloudFoundry, etc).

For "serverless" products * , AWS Lambda/Step Functions are comparable to Google Cloud Functions.

* Serverless in the product sense rather than the literal sense.
I see the “decent” qualifier in your comment, but I think the point of this article is that “decent” working conditions may rarely be an option for many poor people.

E.g., some have so few options that cleaning asbestos without adequate protection may be the only thing they can get paid to do on a given day.
First, you will need to have enough testnet ETH to become a validator.
...
Replacing 2000 with whatever amount of ETH you want to deposit (min 1500).

Is this minimum just for the Testnet or ingrained into the final spec?
In today's world, yes, I would expect a patent holder to sue.
I spent most of 2017 reflecting on the direction programming/languages/communities are going and finding ways to move the needle the other way. It seems to me that there's a lot of pressure to turn programmers to soul-less robots with zero integrity and self-esteem who will do anything for money. I quit selling my skills a long time ago to get out of that mess, now I'm spending most of my time empowering others to do the same thing.

Cixl is my latest kick in the face to the status quo:
https://github.com/basic-gongfu/cixl
> For example, manual loop unrolling is seldom a win in Java

Just like practically everywhere else.

Besides, it increases code size, and can decrease performance just for that reason, L1 code cache spills.

Intel CPUs have increasingly improved loop buffers as well. If the loop qualifies, unrolling has no positive effect at all.

Low end microcontrollers are another matter, that's where unrolling can still sometimes yield significant wins.

I think the biggest issue I had with high performance Java is lack of memory alignment control and (at least last time I checked) vector intrinsics. JNI time...
It would be an amazing and productive program for prisons to offer standardised bounties for security vulnerability disclosure.
The issue with PoS is that it just makes the rich richer, the more coin you already have, the more reward you'll get.

That's why I like NEM's PoI (proof of importance) and Nebulas PoD (proof of devotion) algorithms as a more fair staking method
Profitable remote job site built with single PHP file (4.5K lines of code)
Also seems like Magenta doesn’t have users and groups as a first class construct. It looks like there are primitives to create them in user space, but the kernel only has one construct
(Jobs) by which security is administered, rather than the many different security paradigms of a nix system (i.e. a process can have access based on what user it’s running as, uid not, SecComp control, etc). This makes security much easier to manage at the kernel level as all security granted to processes is explicitly granted rather than inferred, as is often the case in nix.

Honestly, I think the multi-user assumptions that *nix started with are largely irrelevant now. Most people don’t have multi-user needs on their devices (you can’t even do it on iOS), and even servers are moving towards single-user constructs with containers, etc. I think the an operating system built around a multi-user model will be viewed as the edge case in the coming decades rather than the norm.
>As soon as the hashing can be done with general purpose computers, the game is over, and the attacker can attack forever without any extra loss of capital, other than electricity.

acquiring that hardware (whether through direct buying or buying hacked machines) still costs money. it's just that it's easier to liquidate (compared to ASICs) when you're done the attack.
I have been working on a document management system: https://github.com/bgroff/kala-app in Django. Still needs some work, but it is getting closer to a big release.
As someone else pointed out, they overheat. So if you want to run them all day you might go down to a 30 or 25 watts.

But there are probably a bunch of other Brownian motion machines you could use that take a lot less power. Like those glitter lamps. You’d need a higher res camera.
Sounds like you're preparing/triangulating to me, give it a few years and I can almost promise it will all make sense. Just accept that you're not in control and follow your intuition and all will be fine :)
Blocking ads within mobile apps is almost impossible. Try blocking the pre-rolls in Facebook videos on mobile. And you’d need to mitm instagram’s mobile api and modify the api responses to filter out the sponsored ads.
There was a time when card games were about how much money you had rather than how good you were. Many games have introduced rotation, which has helped, but it's still an ongoing investment in the game and it's still a few hundred just to be competitive on Magic night at your local shop. But they did find the balance point that seems fair. I think video games haven't found that yet.

I'm really torn on DLC, game expansions and the like. On one hand, $60 for a new game every year is lots when I could spend $25 on a game I already enjoy. But on the other, it's an excuse to limit content up front in order to milk users. I think it's a matter of perception and companies that find a fair balance will be successful.
Don't know why you're getting downvoted, but to support your point, they consume waaaay less caffeine and alcohol than the u.s. most are allergic to alcohol. Missing sleep isn't a competitive sport. Their bodies are much more homogenous and obesity I estimate less than 3%.

Also in corporate cafes, foods are still very traditional.

Notably their eyes are relatively poor. Almost 90% have corrected vision. Often in large meeting 100% will be wearing glasses.
Thanks for the support! Would love to share donation link but it has not been set up yet :)
> promising lots of new expertise’s but demonstrating little to no day-one practicality.

That exactly describes why I can't stand the MVP trend.
> Keynesianism is simply the idea that the people in power could avert crisis doing terrible things like printing money, which is what QE (quantitaive easing) and negative interest rates is.

No, it's not; while Keynesians tended to view QE as necessary monetary policy given the absence of fiscal stimulus, Keynesians almost invariably viewed the crisis to which QE was the response as one which called for fiscal rather than monetary stimulus as the primary response, viewing monetary policy responses as poorly adapted to the situation and ineffective at dealing with it (which they generally turned out to be). In fact, Keynesianism as a modern school of economic policy is more about countercyclical fiscal policy than anything else.

I'm not sure there is any theoretical school behind the current de facto total reliance on monetary policy; that seems to more be a result of Congress being completely disinterested in dealing with the economy in any productive manner leaving the Fed as the only institution that is capable of acting than any coherent, theoretically grounded policy approach.
Frames from well known licensed 'high fashion brands' or completely made up design brands from Luxottica are not real designer brands and they are not especially high quality. They are just results of marketing and consumer segmentation.

Real designer frames come, like Ørgreen are not significantly more expensive compared to what you can buy from Oliver Peoples. They are actually better, lighter, more comfy and durable than what you are wearing now.
> It's a tag that turns any object into a smart object (still working on my elevator pitch). What it does is allow you to contact the owner of any device. Put the tag on your car and anyone can contact you about your car(i.e. if it is blocking the way or you left your lights on). Put the tag on your keychain and if you lose them people can contact you. You can use the tags on anything really.

Did you just invent a QR code with contact details? (Edit: Not saying it's a dumb idea, sounds useful.)
Not too much power though. They can explode.
Maybe. But looking more closely, I'm pretty sure that fragments have shifted, rotated, and stacked.
Free pentesting for the prison. Pretty awful move by the warden/staff though. He clearly had good intentions and had some minor requests in return which could have been negotiated (and should have been in writing with a lawyer).

And now at the next prison he's causing more problems instead of less... as clearly he doesn't trust the guards to not even poison his food now. It deteriorated the situation and caused more headaches instead of potential being a useful or zero-sum one. Including the negative press via this NYTimes article...

I don't feel much sympathy for the prisoner but in terms of problem resolution, management skills by the staff, and minimizing costs/drama they are taking the worst approach. Especially now that he's in some (probably expensive) hospital setting for some dumb reason.

Clearly they have a relationship built purely on hostility and fear with the inmates fueled by short term relationships (as mentioned they do 60k transfers a year). So many of these prison stories sounds like the staff prod the inmates into being shitty prisoners. Sounds like a bunch of drama queens in high school, on both sides.
Great organizations hire their own janitors into full-time roles.

The short-term-profit seeking that's become pervasive in our economy heavily discourages any hiring you can out-source (and similarly discourages any R&D that won't pay out this quarter).

Organizations that outsource all but their "core competencies" to temp agencies will remain fully incompetent outside their core, and due to extra layer of employment abstraction, they have little chance of seeing a cross-pollination between folks in the undervalued roles they outsource, and overvalued roles they hire for.

edit: I can't help but be reminded of this interesting article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-risi...
There’s just no getting around the price. It was (inflation adjusted) $1200 plus games.

Remember when gamers were upset the PS3 was $600 even though it was also a Blu-ray player? Remember when the Xbox One tripped out of the gate because it was $500 and not $400 like the PS4?

$1200.

There were other mistakes. You’re right development was expensive. It wasn’t as powerful as the PS and Saturn that came later much cheaper (the Saturn was also considered too expensive at $400... which was $300 less than the 3DO). They didn’t have pre-built franchises to lean on like Mario or Sonic.

But MAN was it expensive.
Most of performance comes down to profiling. You cannot improve performance without knowing the bottlenecks, and profiling is the best way to get it from real data/usage patterns.
Smalltalk has a meta API that is designed to allow introspection and modification of both static and dynamic code entities [1,2].

Static entities such as classes and methods (and depending on your Smalltalk implementation namespaces and object versions) can be modified at runtime, i.e. while your program is running you can make a change and get an immediate effect. This is now known as "live" programming, however, it is notably different from your typical "hot reload" implementation in that it knows how to apply changes for individual code entities. E.g. if you modify a method you don't need to reload the entire class or module or entire runtime. For me, this feature alone makes for a big productivity increase.

Dynamic entities such as stack frames can also be reified by the meta interface. This allows to inspect and modify runtime processes, e.g. inside a "debugger" [3]. Note that the debugger allows to modify and create new code while your are debugging. This is a powerful feature because it means that you get access to runtime objects inside of it. Ever wondered what object gets passed into your method at a certain point, what methods it knows, what properties it has? Just try it out and see for yourself!

An interesting analogy to describe this experience: [4].

For a deeper description about the ideas behind that see Design Principles Behind Smalltalk [5].

Also, most Lisp implementations provide the same kind of meta interface, and CLOS arguably provides a more flexible and higher level abstraction of these ideas [6].

As for similar environments I have worked on, there is Lively for JavaScript [7] and cloxp for Clojure [8]

[1] http://sdmeta.gforge.inria.fr/FreeBooks/ByExample/31%20-%20C...

[2] Chapters 16 http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook....

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kuoS796vNw

[4] http://simberon.blogspot.nl/2013/01/swimming-with-fish.html

[5] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk....

[6] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/art-metaobject-protocol

[7] http://lively-next.org/

[8] http://cloxp.github.io/
>>The value diverted to coin purchases ultimately has a cost in goods and services

This is incorrect, or rather it is incorrect that it is different from the Proof of Work example, so it should be discarded from the analysis.

Scenario 1) I work a paper route to purchase ASICs and electricity to bootstrap my mining business. The world got paper delivery out of me, and consumed some strained silicon and electricity for mining, which raised the costs of electricity and mining for other uses.

Scenario 2) I work a paper route to earn ETH to validate. The world is the same as in Scenario 1, but the strained silicon, fab time, expertise, electricity, etc. all went to work on other projects instead of mining equipment, leaving the world slightly richer. (Perhaps a startup was able to purchase microcontrollers for their new widget at slightly lower cost, improving the return on investment for their founders.)

Again, from a miner/validator perspective, PoW and PoS are the same, but from a global perspective, they are not.
A 10 μCi 137Cs source is not dangerous. Even here in California, you can legally throw these away in the regular trash (if solid) or wash them down a sink drain (if liquid). Compared to the kind of ordinary household chemicals people are using every day in large volumes, these things are harmless. You definitely don't need a lead-lined room.

Source: I worked in a lab
Immigration is a divisive topic worldwide right now.

Internal political discord is occurring all over the world in the form of nationalist and populists movements including europe, india, south korea, japan, and america.
I have heard about it, but I'm not sure it would help me. Thank you anyway though.
I quit what many would consider a successfull job in programming and had a sabbatical year. Moved to a smaller town and down sized everything in spending to the point where I pay $600 per month for housing, food and bills, so living of my savings haven't been an issue at all.

I have focused on things like reading (read +40 books in 2017, up from 1-2 per year), wood working, sketching, running and skiing. To keep up my programming skills I have done a deep dive in new programming languages and fiddling with some side projects. It has been an incredible year for personal development and it has changed my perspective on what things are important in life (sitting in front of a screen 40-60 hours a week not being one of them). I highly recommend everyone to do this at least once in your career!
That actually already exists by a startup in the valley:
https://zumepizza.com/
http://www.businessinsider.com/zume-pizza-robot-expansion-20...