skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you could design a coin that "wastes" human effort in a productive way, that might be a hugely positive force for humanity. For example, if you could somehow devise a "proof of carbon capture" scheme that was immune from reporting fraud.
How can this be? GPU manufacturers are unhappy that demand for their GPUs is skyrocketing, so they are trying to make GPUs that are less in demand? That makes zero sense to me.

Why would a GPU manufacturer prefer that an end user use their GPU for games rather than cryptocurrency mining?
I was expecting this comment to be number one. 3 comma club.
Hard to take anything this guy says seriously. Ever since he announced that he would be happy to run for vice president without care whether it was Clinton or Trump I lost interest in whatever he said. He said this after regularly blasting Trump as not qualified for being president. He blasted Bitcoin then he decided it was a must-have. Previously he blasted the stock market as a gambling den. And I'm sure there are more examples. He loves publicity and the press loves to print whatever BS he's saying today. I'm sure tomorrow it will be something else. Mark Cuban shut the F--- up!!
Good point: considering the time frame, the comp does look like a forward looking statement.
I think it's highly disingenuous to feign that bitcoin has no value.
Steve Jobs' job application being auctioned: Says he has no phone number
Entertaining people, without a question. Proof of work tries to substitute wasteful consumption for trustworthiness, which is a fool's errand.
Ask HN: Resources for Self-Studying Symbolic Systems.
The reason I'm excited is because at one point SpaceX was all hype too. :)
based on previous GIS and satellite imagery analysis work related to hilltop and mountaintop telecommunications sites... It is pretty hard to hide a road to the top of a mountain. The combination of free space radar generated elevation datasets (SRTM1/3, SRTM1, etc), free 3D terrain viewing tools (google earth pro) and free satellite imagery can be taught to almost anyone. Even if you bulldoze a small road only passable by a high clearance small 4x4 like a Toyota HiLux, it'll be easily evident from space.
How Tech Supports Hate
You can follow down the rabbit hole here[1]. There is an anecdote of a Soviet spy working in post-war London. He frequented high society and people sometimes wondered what he did. On one occasion, someone muttered to him, something to the effect "what do you do, you never seem to be doing anything, are you a Soviet spy or something [laughter]" and he responds, "yes, of course I'm a soviet spy" and people laughed it off [what a funny bloke]. Point is, this interaction shows a sort of acceptance that one in their own circles could be a spy, they could joke about it, not caring it it were really true.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_influence_on_the_peace_...
But do other languages also have "jein" (blend of German ja and nein)? "meh", perhaps.
But who's fault is that really? If a local city council or county commissioners, decide to allow a single provider to control the territory (or selectively restrict competitors)[1], why do the people affected not exercise their voting power to allow more competition?

The abuse of public right-of-ways, franchise negotiations, and unreasonable permitting processes have much more of a negative impact to broadband expansion.

[1] https://ibhc.com/right-of-way-what-you-need-to-know/
Meh, I like to think of it like my other utilities. They're, in a lot of cases, monopolies granted by government, but they seem to work fairly well in most places.

Allowing corporations to benefit from natural monopolies without regulating them is just a bad idea.
I think another aspect of the current boom in AI is that it is model-less curve fitting (to use your description), and that this is both revolutionary and regressive. On the one hand machine learning algorithms let us solve fuzzy problems that we don't necessarily understand deeply, but the trade off is that those solutions don't give us any real fundamental insight into the nature of the problem the same way e.g. discovering new physics would. So we are now able to solve all these problems that we couldn't before, but in a sense these solutions are unfulfilling because they reveal little else.
Proof of work (like most cryptography) is a mechanism to bootstrap social trust using computation as a substitute for human interaction.

The question is not whether society does fine without proof of work, but whether the PoW mechanism generates marginal trust at a lower cost than the existing social and institutional mechanisms. Lawyers, police, and the legal and state apparatus are expensive, centralized, and slow. Humans (especially educated, first world humans) are also energetically expensive to run!

Basically, you are only accounting for the cost of PoW, which are trivial to measure, but not carefully accounting for the benefits, which are difficult.
I figured this would be satire.
It's not satire. https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/12/facebook-starts-pushing-it...
Ask HN: How to push a new event-ticketing system into the market?
I have developed a new system of ticketing which can curtail ticket-scalping and justly monetise the secondary market. This system doesn't use blockchain and tickets can be bought with normal fiat currency. A major barrier to entry seems to be the inaccessesibility of entities such as Bands/Event-Organizers that face this problem. How would you overcome this problem?
>It still expends resources, but does so in a non wasteful manner.

And this is a flaw. There is a law of conservation at work here, whereby to create one source of value, another has to be destroyed. You can't destroy that first source "in a non-wasteful manner". It's not actually destroyed in that case and you've effectively double-spent it and cheated the system in a way that has subtle ramifications on the incentives and security. Even in blockchain, incentives matter and there's no free lunch.
Sounds a lot like "etiam" in Latin which if you break it apart looks like et + iam or "and now", but this site has some translations including "yes" http://archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/lookit.pl?latin=Etiam
> In many such cases you'll still want to pull backups anyway...

In all cases where you care about your data, you must take backups. There is no substitute for that step.

Additionally, you want to periodically restore your backups and test them for validity — ideally automatically. There's a saying in the ops world, borne of bitter experience:

"Your backups are only as good as their last successful restore."
stop listening to people just because they are rich. i dont even mind this guy that much, but what evidence is there that this guy knows what he is talking about?
> That’s actually a really small group and most of the people who buy ultra-luxury consumables are not in that group. Michelin star restaurants aren’t supported primarily by the ultra wealthy. Nor are niche luxuries like chocolate bars that cost hundreds of dollars.

A really small group with a lot of money is still worth paying attention to. Think about it like this, you wouldn't want to miss giving them a chance to spend that money. As the article says "To’ak chocolates—requires good storytelling". At that point it is all about storytelling. If you're selling a phone case, they are not buying just a wooden phone case, they are buying a hand crafted and polished product that came from an ancient jungles of South America, it was blessed by the shamans, and painted with pigment from crushed beetles etc.

Rich people will often look for ways (not necessarily conspicuous) of asserting their status. Spending money of frivolities like these is giving them a chance to do so. Many will understand that maybe all those claims are mostly bullshit, but they'll still buy it. Maybe just to show it off to their friends, give it as a gift, or flash it around their poor relatives and remind them what they'll never be able to afford.
thank you. this is always something people forget. if you want to claim you are a good business man, you need to show that your businesses do better than an index fund.
WTF is GDPR and what are the implications for marketing?
No sewers? I like sewers.
The said supreme quality products are made and marketed as such solely by people who understand the basic rich person need to have something to differentiate themselves from the economic classes lower than themselves. If there were no products, houses, cars, wines, restaurants, shoes, suits, hand bags, airline class, hotels, etc. that help a class to differentiate itself from the the lower one - what's the point of making money your only and sole objective in life?
PoW turns an O(log n) transaction into an O(n) one, where n is the number of transaction-handling entities.

Nowhere else is this kind of thing celebrated.
Perhaps they don't believe that GPU-based mining will be profitable enough to sustain the industry. In that case, they need to do everything they can to keep the PC gaming market alive, so that they have someone left to sell to when the cryptocurrency market crashes.
suit yourself :)
yes, but inexcusable on the part of the tinder software developers, IMHO, considering the very low technical/knowledge barrier to entry to do proper TLS1.2 everywhere now.
Price discrimination, maybe?
Seconding the recommendations for a cheap trainer + Zwift. Also, if the weather is good, find a local club to ride with outside. Although indoor training is great, nothing releases endorphins like an outdoor ride with some friends.
If you don’t have a clear distribution plan and advantage for a product in an established space, you don’t have a product. No coding, development, or engineering will solve that.

Basically: find someone who has connections or move on to something else.
"So we can look at, for example, Old Irish, where they said tó to mean yes"

Really? In modern Irish we substitute Tá for yes but it's not really yes. We don't have yes or no, we repeat the verb of the question positively or negatively. Tá is kind of 'am', níl 'am not' like

"Are you going to watch Mrs Browns Boys tonight?"
"I am not."

Are they really comparable? Maybe somewhere along the line Tá (pronounced 'taw') was taken for 'yes'.
You could also say it’s arbitraging energy for trusted computation, which is a generous rephrasing that acknowledges its potential. There might be cases where such an arbitrage is worth it.
The article is based around bundling together a lot of small points and backing it up with shaky analogies to economic theory(e.g. an undergraduate course would probably focus on utility instead of rent). It's framed in a way that I would consider more persuasive than academic.

It has a general point, in that the ultimate direction of cryptocurrency systems is towards energy efficient systems of value and transaction, but this goal tends to lead towards a spectrum of trusted/delegated behavior where proof is not a hard requirement. Much of the argument rests on trust costing as much as work, and I don't buy that. It defies what technologies do: let you leverage effort in a particular direction and get a resulting overall productivity benefit.
Also beneficial for the users ( at least theoretically ) is Folding@Home, and the associated incentives: FLDC ( folding coin ) and CURE ( curecoin ) - i.e. Mergefolding... the benefit being monetary in the short-term, and ( at least theoretically ) medical science in the long-term.
Huh. My reading of the anecdote is they laugh it off because they consider it absurd (no real spy would tell us they were!), more than acceptance and uncaring. Could be your telling or my reading. Is there more to it, or perhaps how it was related, that leads you to your interpretation rather than mine? I'm not doubting it; it's just my read.
Can you quantify the energy wasted on HDCP? My understanding is that it's typically handled by efficient custom circuits.
who Alex really is

Vonnegut:

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
SpiderOak has a high price, has been very slow in my tests and their client doesn't work well. There have been reports of throttling on large uploads. Plus they've been stagnating. All of this is a symptom of them not being popular enough I'm sure, but that's not a good sign.

pCloud doesn't do 2-factor authentication yet, which is freaking important for your non-encrypted files at least. I asked them about it because I could not believe it and they said it's "on their roadmap". But ALAS my trust in them dropped to zero. The chances of implementing reliable encryption while not getting basic security straight are next to none.

Plus you cannot trust encryption that is not peer reviewed ;-)

I haven't tried NextCloud, but ownCloud is shit. It's really slow, could not handle the several hundreds of GBs I have stored and there have been situations of users losing their data. Plus I'm not inclined to host my own stuff, because that would get very expensive.

Actually you haven't mentioned the only real alternatives ...

(1) Resilio Sync (https://resilio.com) which I use, in combination with a cheap VPS with 2 TB of storage on it (time4vps.eu in case you're wondering, not affiliated)

(2) Syncthing (https://syncthing.net), the open source alternative, which is OK, but hard to configure and Resilio does stuff out of the box, like encrypted folders

And I'm using Resilio Sync in addition to Dropbox. Well, I've actually migrated to Google Drive (on GSuite) this month, due to Dropbox Support pissing me off, but that's another story.

But the interesting part, which should be clear after a single day of usage, is that all Dropbox alternatives, except for Resilio and Syncthing, fail at the most basic task that users want, which is to reliably synchronize your files. Even the big guys, like GDrive or OneDrive, have an incredibly broken sync by comparison.

Just the other day I noticed for example how Google Drive can start deleting files from your local hard drive, only God knows why, in order to re-download them. And before that I dropped OneDrive because their client was freezing on my Mac, not to mention a couple of months back they weren't doing the one month file versioning thing, which is retarded in the age of ransomware.
> Why would a GPU manufacturer prefer that an end user use their GPU for games rather than cryptocurrency mining?

They don’t prefer anything in particular, they’d just like to keep both markets. They can bifurcate the market and earn more from each demographic rather than let one dominate the other by inefficiently adapting gaming cards to homelab supercomputing.

In one scenario, they let things continue and the mining market reduces supply for the gaming market, which makes their overall market share more brittle. In the other scenario, they increase the volume of cards purchased by gamers, securing that market, while selling more optimized, higher cost mining cards to miners. This has the added benefit of product diversity.
I disagree. There will be a line to draw between acceptable participants and unacceptable ones, regardless of the game.

For example, even though drug deals are illegal and sketchy, there is still etiquette to be followed; there is still a chance you could be "sketchy" to the majority of drug dealers.

There is a proper way to behave for random hookups, and there is an improper way to behave. The difference may actually accentuated in hookups (and other high-risk activities) because there is more at stake.
Catalonia borders France and has some similarities though.
Oc. It's not only a joy to read- it's probably more accurate in the end. You can't really capture the spirit of any of that human behavior if you try to lean on dry academic rigor.
It was covered in second year French when I studied it in India through Alliance Française.
The Practice is not the Performance: Why project-based learning fails
In comic form: http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-... ("This Is Why You Shouldn't Interrupt a Programmer")
I wouldn't really say it requires a "hero's journey" to reach when the road they have bulldozed to the top of the mountain is apparently passable by 5-ton sized flatbed cargo trucks.

It appears to be on privately owned land that is part of a huge ranch in the area. So maybe the hero's journey is avoiding angry texans with shotguns if you either (a) cut the padlock off the gate that blocks vehicle access to the road up the mountain, or (b) park your vehicle near the gate and ride a mountain bike up the road.
The Sublimated Gried of the Left Behind
Yea but this is only temporary. In the long turn (hopefully) mining will end up making gpus cheaper and better from the increased demand.
Don’t underestimate what a tiny percentage of people with malice in their hearts can do with 10000 years of opportunity.
Why Can Everyone Spot Fake News but the Tech Companies?
You hit the nail on the head but it's in contradiction with your point. Proof of work frees us from the burdens associated with protecting ourselves so that we can perform creative functions. Clearly a GPU, as a general purpose chip, is not well spent performing proof of work over something that amplifies one's creativity. But pow with asics, which couldn't have been used for that purpose, certainly helps. You could argue both are wasteful -- but an investment in security is an investment in creativity by providing a safe environment
This is a strange topic for HN.
No he can't prevent people from going to that beach, by boat and isn't asking for that. It is the easement that he doesn't want.
Every employee's stock package is forward looking in that same way, no?
Manufacturers don't like cryptocurrency miners because they don't have any brand loyalty and may not be in the market for a new GPU a year from now.

As for why they don't just make more cards: The volatility of cryptocurrencies makes manufacturers hesitant to ramp up production. They are afraid of being stuck with an oversupply of cards if the bottom falls out of the market.
ACH will be same day next month.
Or you could try to start your own company. Heavy is the head that wears the crown.
Reminds me of Navi from The Legend of Zelda, in a way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navi_(The_Legend_of_Zelda)
You're missing a key piece of the puzzle... The block producers provide value to the users in their server resources but are in turn not paid by users.

Their incentive is in controlled network inflation, between 1-5% per year and paid to the 21 block producers running the network.

In block chain more than anything incentives matter, just look at bitshares if you want to see how a network can collapse if the incentives aren't calibrated properly.
i'd say... for now
I think this is an anomaly that will sort itself out one way or another. The major reason for this anomaly is that everyone is trying to hedge themselves against cryptocurrencies 'going to zero'.

From the perspective of the card manufacturers, they don't want to chase the mining market and ramp up card production to match it as they view the end of mining demand as a potential risk.

From the perspective of the card buyer, they don't want to buy a 'mining only' card for much the same reason, with one addition. Mining profitability for the individual drops over time, due to rising difficulty. Which means any card you buy has a finite profitable shelf-life. This makes both ASICs and special-purpose mining GPU cards (basically cards with regular GPUs but no video outputs) unattractive -- they aren't worth much on the second-hand market. At least with a gaming card, once you're done mining with it you have a card you can game with that has essentially paid itself off.

I personally think it would be silly and dangerous for graphics card manufacturers to gimp their own hardware in an attempt to appease the gaming market. GPUs are useful for a whole range of things now, which could be impacted negatively by such a move (including things that might be important for gaming performance in the future). To be clear, I say this as an avid gamer myself.

The near future is going to be very interesting, especially if the sentiment that 'cryptocurrencies might go away' disappears. There is always the ever-looming 'Proof-of-Stake' also. If that gets popular, the dynamic will shift again and you might see a flood of cheap graphics cards hitting the second-hand market. That would be nice. I think that PoS is fairly risky though; I keep hearing people saying that Ethereum won't be able to deliver on it.
Very true, the internet has a memory problem. If you try to research something that happened, let's say 10 years ago, by using just the Internet you'll have lots of trouble. If it wasn't printed in one of the major newspapers you're out of luck. Not only that but you'll need to go through a truck load of data if you want to expand on what the newspapers have to say. I suspect that eventually, no one will be able to look back at the net's past since cryptography is becoming a must for everything net. If you're reading this and you encrypt your data, think about the data 10 years ago that you encrypted. Can you get to it? Maybe. Think about someone else's. I bet you can't. What happened 10 years is blurry now. If that's the case now then what will happen 100 years from now.
As the price of video cards goes up to meet high demand for gpgpu use they may actually lose sales for gaming use. Ideally they would sell to both markets at prices appropriate to each, which could earn them more in the end.

Given that they use pretty different interfaces to the cards this seems pretty feasible.
Value can be created. Cars are more valuable than the piles of metal they're made from.
Apple devices are butt dialing 9-1-1 from its refurbishing facility 20 times/day
> PoW turns an O(log n) transaction into an O(n) one

This is a weird critique. Blockchains and banks are very different in their use cases. It’s like you’re criticizing someone for choosing a sorting algorithm over a deduplication algoritihm - they do vaguely the same thing, but no one likes the sorting algorithm because it’s less efficient, they like it because it actually sorts.

If you are choosing a blockchain (algorithm A) over a bank (algorithm B), you are doing so because you want the things a blockchain offers that a bank doesn’t. You can’t do comparative algorithm analysis on algorithms that aren’t comparable.
Does it do that on the wider internet? The most notable companies supporting it are companies that have already sliced up 98% of the internet market and actively engage in anti-consumer monopolization.
Wasting human effort in a productive way is a contradiction. As long as someone, somewhere is benefiting from your "productive waste", then they can pay the miner which eliminates the security benefit from that "productive waste".

This is addressed in the article, under "MAKING THE “WORK” USEFUL (WON’T WORK)"
> When you break it down all cryptos need to waste an amount of resources equal

IMO this is clearer if you use the word "spend" instead of "waste".

> but does so in a non wasteful manner.

s/non/less/

But otherwise I agree.
I agree that the AMP stuff is not great in all sorts of ways. Short of building a mail service or search engine, what things can Mozilla do here other than capture market share away from Chrome? This last is _definitely_ being invested in...

Note that I'm asking this seriously. If there are things we could be doing that are useful and effective and we aren't doing them, I'd like to know and see if I can poke people to fix that.
Coconut oil, really? Never heard of that, I'll have to look it up. Replacing the sugar from alcoholic drinks with juice, that seems logical.
As you can see what happened to Silicon Knights.

https://www.engadget.com/amp/2012/11/09/silicon-knights-v-ep...