skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would have to agree about Ethereum being not much more than a tech demo at present.

A few months back I tried to learn building an Ethereum distributed app, or "dapp" as they call it. I installed my own Ethereum node to see how that works.

The Ethereum toolchain is a strange combination of actual JavaScript (command line tools + REPL to a live node) and a pseudo-JavaScript called Solidity: a custom language inspired by JavaScript but with abundant new syntax for developing smart contracts. That doesn't seem like a good idea from a robustness point of view -- did anyone ever say "I know, I'd like my money to be handled by immutable JavaScript functions"?!

Still, I can see the mindshare appeal of reaching the widest possible developer demographic by making everything look "web-like". I would be OK with that choice if the platform worked as advertised, but it doesn't, and it just keeps getting worse.

I spent about $100 on deploying my toy dapp's smart contracts, and then I gave up. Debugging on Ethereum is a nightmare. It seems very easy for a non-obvious bug that's not caught on the testnet to make a deployed program go into a loop and burn through all the money you allocated for it. With today's USD/ETH rate, my failed $100 experiment would have cost $300.

Even if I had got the app deployed, who's going to use it when fees are this high? Nobody wants to pay $10 to store a piece of data in my dinky little dapp. The whole concept of dapps is ridiculous with the current Ethereum implementation.

Ethereum is a victim of its success: the network is congested, fees are running sky-high, and my Ethereum node has stopped working because of the exploding demands of storing the blockchain. Realistically there doesn't seem to be anything the Ethereum founders can do to fix this on the short term, which means that there will be a painful implosion as the network goes useless until it's replaced by a new sharded Ethereum (which will naturally come with its own growing pains).

My conclusion is that Ethereum today is like MongoDB in its first year: breathless promises of "web scale" are in no way matched by the reality of what the platform can do... But like Mongo, it's in JavaScript and has a formidable hype machine, so people will flock in. Eventually things will get better, I'm sure.
It's just a simple Markov chain model, obviously included for laughs.

That said, a relatively simple character-by-character RNN would probably have been more interesting.
Once you have a large body of answers your score will just keep going up.

Mine has gone up about 40% in the last year and a half, despite not having time to answer any more questions.
I was eight in '68, and remember it well. The shootings, especially the Kennedy one, the strange Mexican olympics, the Czechoslovakia debacle, the American election, TV of longhaired protesters, and of course Apollo 8, which at the time I considered by far the most monumental event of the year- and still do.

The Vietnam war made no great impression. It was a constant stream of background noise in my European childhood, I don't recall one single specific episode of it, let alone any idea what the whole sorry thing was about.
I just want to say as a person who has to live with tinnitus, (too much gunfire in my ear), I could swear sometimes I hear the same ringing but it's an outside source. I've always just rationalized it away, but I still notice it.
If you want to get into the mindset of what it was like to deal with the black death, check out Plague Doctors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDz0OrRZOZ0
As I stated in my other reply to you, I am very well aware “intrinsic value” is a specific economic term. I was speaking exactly to that term—what it means, what it implies—and disputing the logical sense of the term itself.

You have twice now in your comments made a host of assumptions about my intentions and the coherence, relevance, and applicability of my statement. You’re ascribing an awful lot of impossible-to-possess knowledge of my mental processes here.

The notion that gold has intrinsic value—despite the longstanding place that notion has remained in social and economic thought for quite some time—is inconsistent with reality. There is no damage done to gold, its value, its physical properties, or economics itself to point out this inconsistency. We’d be better served to use terms that reflect and remain consistent with reality. And when it comes to economic value, the harsh reality we ought to always keep in mind is that no value is intrinsic—despite how frequently it feels (or even seems sensible to believe) otherwise.
Async processing with sync semantics?
I walk around fully aware I am one slip and fall away from inescapable, permanent financial ruin. I have insurance, but my $8,000 deductible means if I break my leg falling down a flight of stairs, I'll be in bankruptcy court once the cast comes off.
Haven't used google's search engine in years. It was obvious to me back then that google products are designed primarily around googles's incentives, and the user second. SEO seems like it would be something great...if the "optimization" was in fact user-centric but it's not. I don't like being guided by algorithms and I don't really shop around for stuff online. When I search for something, it's usually for some very specific type of information. I mean I'm usually pretty sure about what exactly I'm looking for. Granted, most people probably don't use the web the same way I do so it's not like I expect them to do what they do differently. I just don't use google, and whenever I do tell someone to "google it", I'm being sarcastic and probably not in the mood to answer questions that can be answered with a few minutes at a keyboard.

Furthermore, when someone links me to an amp.whatever page, I might be in an even worse mood if I have to talk with them about it afterwards. imo, Google and facebook algorithms are half of what's causing most of the conflict and hate on the internet these days. The machines have literally taken over, and they've started with our minds. YouTube suggestions have devolved into nothing more than a rabbit hole that gets scarier the further you follow. Either they are completely out of touch with what people want or the mentality of society/humanity is way more fucked off than I'd ever imagined it could be. Until they provide actually useful and configurable settings for people who can think for themselves, I will not return to using these products.

Besides, how fair would it be for me to freeload off an ad company's services when my hosts file hasn't allowed an ad to load in my browser as long as I can remember?
Not just for archiving, but also for playing at higher framerates and resolutions. 30fps games give me headaches but the same game running at 120fps can make a huge difference.
It's borderline impossible to accidentally get methanol poisoning from distilled spirits.

The vast majority of cases you hear about on the news are due to spirits being cut with industrial methanol, or people accidentally drinking industrial methanol in the belief that it's ethanol.

Poorly distilled spirits are going to taste bad, but they aren't going to kill you (except for ethanol poisoning).

Also, if it was methanol poisoning (deliberate or not), they'd have severe vision impairment, which we haven't heard anything about.
This article was painful to read. Am I on the science side of Buzzfeed? /s
I think that is a pretty cool project there. I like it but I don't know, do you get many people using it? I think there are quite a bit of forum platforms out there.
No. It was very likely microwaves.
Alright, let us at least screw around with it, please.
And, let's not diminish this: it's probably to blame for polio existing at all now.
Some guy on a forum running circles around a group of us doing some golf/puzzle programming in Haskell. Made me realize how much I had to learn, got me into functional programming.
Good point and thus, trust only coins traded minimum on two exchanges and have similar curves.
I feel that its actual potential utility as a crypto currency platform is more important than its current position as an IM platform. A better argument would be to point out what happened with Kik
Where does RaiBlocks fit in here? It moved up to top 20 in market cap due to being decentralized, instant, feeless, and scalable. However it still faces the issue of being too volatile for everyday use.
is anyone actually surprised? LinkedIn is even more hostile than Facebook. scum of the earth.
Look at this thread... the only thread on this entire submission, all stemming from the same post. I’m not the one posting flamebait, and I wasn’t the first to react with incredulous disgust.

If you want to improve this site, I’d start to crack down on non-technical submissions about cryptocurrency. They’re as bad as stories about Trump for predictable bullshit, and equally predictable squabbles along ideological or self-interested lines. It’s a cross between boring and grotesque that so much time is spent here saying essentially nothing about the latest ICO scams or currency forks. What part of this is intellectually satisfying or engaging?

Worse, the daily dozen+ front page stories about this crap displace genuinely interesting submissions and discussions.
> with no loss of safety.

That simply isn't true. Accepting a blockchain blindly without validating is the Bitcoin SPV model. In ethereum it amounts to an undiversified risk that the two mining pools needed to constitute a majority hashpower (ethermine and f2pool) will not violate the protocol, or-- if you are accepting state with few confirmations as final-- that _any_ miner will not violate the protocol.
Yeah, the dichotomy in this conversation is strange.
Interesting perspective
ISP’s have to move all that bandwidth as well. Netflix has servers on ISP level where they pay for i’d imagine, I don’t think that there is a way to do that with Bitcoin’s data.
Do people dislike them? I only know them for open-source projects.
that's not Android keyboard. That's Google keyboard. Solution: use a different keyboard. I've used the AOSP keyboard since I started using Android. Sure it's made by google but it does what I say rather than what some proprietary idiot robot thinks I think. While your'e at it, use the send feedback function to let them know you hate it.
What about....
Article's point not being about Vietnam war.
Good news We're probably not living in a computer simulation
More and bigger sharks are coming into this space. Which is perfect.
That's nothing. I mixed up Bitcoin and mining and "Minecraft economics" having first heard about both on the same day. Needless to say, I'm still poor.
I’ll take a look.

I live in Amsterdam and the city is developing a serious problem with housing and income distribution. There’s a huge portion of the housing stock owned by social housing and a red-hot debate on how does it affect - contributes or mitigates - the problem.

My theory is that unit size is the greatest mitigator, whereby more affluent buyers move out to the countryside to buy larger properties. If larger apartments were allowed in the city — lower tax or land lease prices — it would trigger a price war among Oil Barons over that penthouse on the canals.

Opinions?
Sadly, no solution is available for the psets. Personally, I don't see any value of assignments on the web without solutions as you cannot be sure of your answers.
I didn't know reputation was measured in millimeters.
The address Bar in Firefox is great for this. I fire off a fraction of the searches I used to after switching.
I think you may have some misconceptions about what consistency means in this context.

> In and eventually consistent system, the programmer must consider what to do in the case of data failure.

Eventually consistency has nothing to do with data failure; the real-world effect of eventually consistency is stale data, which you can't generally tell is stale.

> When building a user authentication system, who better to decide what to do when you can't access the user database than the person writing the user auth system?

I think you're talking about availability, not (eventual) consistency.

> Also, it means that joins must be done in your application.

There is nothing preventing you from doing joins in a strongly consistent database. Google Spanner supports JOINs for example [1].

> In an eventually consistent system, you know if you created a table scan, because you have to pull back a full table's worth of data

This also has nothing to do with eventual consistency.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/query-syntax#join-hint...
> If you're using a trusted third party, why are you even using a blockchain to begin with?

This is a common misperception of the benefits of a blockchain. It's like saying, if you are trusting a third party on science, why use science at all? You don't have to verify science yourself, but know that you could repeat the experiment if you wanted or needed to. The fact that the blockchain _is_ fully stored and verified by a number of distributed parties, and that you do have the ability of downloading and verifying if you want or need to, is enough to keep the system honest.

Now this statement does make sense if you are referring to your private keys. Don't ever let any third party hold those for you.
Kohler Numi – the toilet with computer and Internet
> I think most devs will do the right thing, you think most will do the wrong thing.

This comes down to culture. I wish I knew how to create a culture where devs do the right thing, from a culture where they ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Maybe you need the very clearly Netflix model of "Fire every ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
Also, it gets ever harder to keep up over time, as good links either go away or deteriorate in value.

Perhaps not coincidentally, both the Yahoo Directory and DMOZ have been entirely shut down.
I had to google it too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise,_vibration,_and_harshnes...
I want to try this sometime (working in sales) for the same reason
It provides a pretty good incentive to keep that Google cookie in your browser though (as well as your access to your interests, online purchase history, address book etc. etc. ad nauseam)
Not as a wrapper, but an official Lambda runtime model. This Go release points to a much more interesting way of doing so (RPC) than what I had previously imagined (stdin/out/err).
That's the same thing here, though, since physics is a scientifically descriptive endeavor. Our conceptualization of the universe is limited by our perception of it, and thus the whole idea of "what the universe does" is fundamentally entangled in what we see it doing and how we can talk about it.

So that the universe "optimizes" something must be true, given that only one past is observed. It has to have been optimizing for the past that we see. (It is perhaps more remarkable that we can make accurate predictions of the future, but this more or less seems to be a side-effect of optimization requiring some notion of continuity.)

Our descriptions of nature are clean because they are based on observations of the past, which are the exact phenomena the universe appears to be optimized to produce. All other possible results are merely counterfactuals in our brains, and having those encoded in our theories would make them noisy and inaccurate. (And the best evidence for such counterfactuals being 'real' does exactly this by introducing quantum indeterminacy into the theory.)
I always thought Blackberry had the best autocorrect experience. My old Blackberry would occasionally surprise me by catching something I wouldn't think it would know about, and after some initial tuning never ever frustrated me. It only enhanced my experience.
I'm wondering if rackless Ruth, Google's bean-counter-in-chief, is behind all these. At Bing, bean counters often had calculated that if you cut down index to half (after certain size), you reduce half of the cost but don't lose half of the revenues. So there is a sweet spot where you can maximize revenue if you are willing to let go few demanding customers. When quarterly results needs a little push, everything is a fair game. I bet Sundar Pitchai doesn't want to look bad as "CEO" who can't meet analyst expectations.

I definitely miss old days of Google. After Amit Singhal left, things haven't been same at all. He had resisted unexplainable AI getting in to search features. But as he left, RankBrain had Ai-driven feature that is 3rd most significant. That feature is the reason why you often see pages even if they don't contain keywords and even a phrase you had specified. Those old guard knew that trading explainibility and little bit of revenue with slight decrease in customer sat wasn't worth it.
I don’t think it’s just the rarity. It’s also trustless, secure and easy to transfer. For ex, with gold, you’d have to carry blocks of it to move it around. And even then, you’d still don’t exactly trust it’s source 100% unlike bitcoin, where everything is in the ledger.
I think we are nearer to 'Fixed Odds Betting Terminals' [1] than the dot com boom. Even the most absurd excesses of the dor com boom seem quite rational in comparison the situation today. I think that it really is somewhere between straight gambling and how we imagine the tulip craze to have been.

What is actually needed to understand the situation today is a ringside seat to one of the devoted believers that has shut down their whole life and decided to gamble away their girlfriend's inheritance on fake coins. The way it takes over a person's life is a bit like crystal meth addiction combined with joining a religious cult. For these people there is no way out, their fear and greed locks them in to going all of the way. These people are not going to make any money, just lose every penny they can borrow.

With dot com there was not this low barrier to entry for essentially gambling, people did not cut themselves off from society in their little pyramid scheme cult. I find bitcoin really horrible and I am glad to have studied it close hand. I do google the coin names and it seems that everything considered a hot coin by those dedicated to the cult is blatantly a scam.

I think there is good money to be made in bitcoin for me just by documenting the fall of an individual and those around due to the obsession. Storytelling matters and I have a lot of very good material coming out of this bitcoin thing and the crazy things people say. All I have to do is keep good notes and the story should write itself very nicely.

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

I liked this comment in the original article, which is far too flippant for HN but sums up how nonsensical everything bitcoin is to me:

if this article wants to be taken seriously it needs to have a header image of some real, metal-stamped bitcoins with the logo embossed on them, all round and shiny and gleaming. Preferably it would also show two cupped hands with the bitcoins spilling out of them. Otherwise I don't even know what we're doing here.
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USING NMAP TO PERFORM AN XMAS SCAN TechyTalk
Social Innovation Disinterest Puzzle
Hi fragmede! Jeff Barr is a busy man and his blog these days is mostly focused on new products or super major features for existing ones. Lambda releasing Go support definitely toes the line (at least in my mind) but we made the decision to go with a post on this blog which has a focus in this space. Jeff is quite fine though and I talk to him almost daily!
I’ve gone back to using a local client recently, and being able to search/grep text files I know are in a dir has made me feel much less like I’m going insane / dependent upon capricious mystical forces.
>On the other hand my ability to focus on a task has dropped considerably. I am no longer able to code for 1h straight. I would say that 15 minutes is a victory. This is a problem I will try to fix somehow during 2018.

My suggestion is: don't try to fix it. As an engineering manager with a team of more than 5 people, coding is no longer the most impactful thing you're doing. Making people and the team do better is far more leverage. As a fellow EM who also loves code, I've stopped coding at work. I find there are many, lot more impactful activities I can do: from hiring activities, onboarding & training, making oncall better, spending more time with my high & low performers and building bridges with fellow EMs, PMs, executives and other stakeholders and so on.

Also, you've not mentioned 1:1s. With a team of 12, 1:1s take a lot of my time (I do weekly 30mins - this is a lot, but has been essential to spot issues early and support people better)

Good luck for 2018!
You can add a plus (+) before a word you require to be in the search results. Eg. "+VBS array loop". You can filter out word by prepending a minus (-). You can surround exact phrases in quotes (") and you can even allow synonyms by prepending a tilde "~"

Example query: +vbs array ~loop "magic number"

If Google does not find anything it will remove some parts so that you will get any results at all
Achoo Why letting out an explosive sneeze is safer than stifling it
Agree with above, I'm not sure why that comment is most upvoted, it's poorly written and the author doesn't seem to have a good grasp of distributed systems concepts.
It Costs $43,500 to Deploy a NEO Smart Contract
Years ago when I interviewed for a Software Engineer position at Google, the person I was matched to eat lunch with between the interviews was from the Search team.

I asked him these exact questions. He said, the last time he checked, quoting a single word to mark it mandatory worked for him and that he definitely would know if it didn't.

I didn't insist much at the time but I knew he didn't know what he was talking about, and it made me lose hope that this feature would ever come back working like it used to.
SpaceX and Boeing Slated for Manned Space Missions by Year's End
CHX is still right in what they say. The point here is that Google override peoples searches based on some random fuzzy logic, and whatever you've searched before, regardless of whether you are logged in or not.
Super Netflix
It also has the potential to ruin their business by introducing a token into an app that doesn't actually need one.
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I'm alive and well! Due to the number of launches we have to pick and choose a subset for the main AWS Blog. Stay tuned for some cool stuff...
As a point of comparison, approx. 1MM people own Bitcoin, and I imagine that when you add in all the other cryptocurrencies it's not a whole lot larger.

In 1995, 40MM people had access to the internet.

The internet was a lot more established at the time of the Dotcom boom.
I understand, but there's a difference between doing work for you and helping you get there. Imagine a sexpression representing C data types the following two ways:

(pointer-to (integer))

(integer (pointed-to))

We could very easily print a decl for the second example by printing the two atoms seen in order:

int *

But if we want to print the first correctly, we will have to prepend to a string in order to correctly display the decl. That is, we will have to change our traversal order: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_traversal
Didn‘t they drop the + operator when they launched Google+? I thought now you have to surround your term with „“ instead of +?
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