skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the author of this article is making an either/or argument about centralized vs. decentralized trust when this can just as easily be a both/and proposition.

Cryptocurrencies have not yet eliminated and may never eliminate the need for centralized reputation based systems of trust. Centralized trusted systems are more efficient for reasons that may be fundamental and rooted in physics and math, and they can do things that no current generation decentralized system can do. Complex secure computations that are cheap to perform on a server are massively expensive on a block chain or other distributed system.

Yet what cryptocurrencies do offer is a system that levels the playing field between trusted entities and allows a once-trusted but now corrupt entity to be replaced without completely ditching the entire system. That's not true of things like centrally banked fiat currencies. If the current US financial system becomes irredeemably corrupt, this can't really be fixed without risking the destruction of the dollar and all assets and contracts denominated in dollars. A new dark age is a very high price to pay for the replacement of a corrupt or incompetent system.

I think an argument can be made that replacement of institutions will always be necessary at some point. As institutions become large their size insulates them from reality, allowing something like "genetic drift" to occur that gradually erodes their competence. Combine this with the fact that psychopaths gravitate toward positions of power and you have a general tendency of large powerful systems toward decay and corruption over time.

We saw a very concrete example of this in 2008 when banking institutions that had failed badly due to a mixture of incompetence, hubris, and corruption received a blank-check bailout on the backs of taxpayers and the rest of the non-financial economy. It is no coincidence that cryptocurrency went mainstream right after this, since these events demonstrated the need to start thinking about ways to devolve power away from these systems or at least to reduce the cost of doing so.

Side note: I think we've officially entered the cryptocurrency / block chain trough of disillusionment. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle
:) We did reach out to developers and got our list (Java or C/C++) from them. There's a serious parenting question in your joke. We presented the whole thing as if we were in control: it's an illusion. He could have screamed, "SCREW YOU!", and locked himself in his room. As it was, we said, "It has to be Java or C" and he believed us. Lucky!
The market will sort out the real from the fake? The market is how we got where we are. The market favors clickbait, not necessarily truth.

Don't get me wrong, I find all the calls for somebody to do something (i.e. restrict free speech) equally troublesome.

I basically think there's no solution. Liars gonna lie.
Thanks Charlie, I'm trying to get an export of old messages from Instagram. Scrolling up takes ages and I met my SO there, I'm hoping to get access to those first messages again one day!
Anecdotal: a few years ago, when Brazil was doing very well economically, I visited Chile and pretty much everybody was investing time/money to learn Portuguese, rather than English. I think it's a phenomenon that only lasted for a few years, and was heavily dependent on the current economic situation.
That's fair. I was using important to mean "worth spending the time to read" as my interests are fairly well aligned with the HN community (at least as far as my interest in Facebook-related news). Though over time audiences change, so as more of these non-stories continue to proliferate, perhaps HN is becoming more targeted to the interests of the general public and I should accept that or move on.
Ok, how about the fact that it's incredibly visible to begin with? It's being used like a PIN, a PIN that's literally printed right on the card. Who writes their debit card PIN on the back of their card?
It’s going to be interesting reading these articles ten years from now.
How do you get a $50k tax bill implies realized gain of 330k? OP states $120k gain on top of 47k salary. To be generous, i'll first assume that he has had his salary withheld at the correct rates. Federally he will owe 32253 in additional tax (short term so treated as income, and marginally falls into a mix of 25 and 28% brackets). Must be that he also is in a high tax state. I understand California the best (which also might be the highest tax state). There, the gain would also be treated as regular income, and taxpayer would owe an additional 10458. So, 42700 in taxes. Running the numbers backward to find out income from tax liability is a little trickier, but it comes out to nowhere near 33000.

So perhaps the tax bill was not quite 50k, but it's certainly the right ballpark from what I can see. Very possible that he also under-withheld during the year, or had a higher gain, or his tax bill was a little lower, or had other issues that we don't know about. In any case, not what I'd call "makes NO sense at all" or indicative of a current fundamental misunderstanding of the tax system (saying nothing about his misunderstanding prior to the events).

Now, the bigger question I have is did this happen on a foreign exchange? Binance, bitfinex, etc? And if it did, has OP let the treasury know about his foreign accounts? FBAR is a real thing with huge penalties for non reporting and lying.

https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
For those who don't get the reference to "the classical Roman fire-sale": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_firefighting#Rome

> The first ever Roman fire brigade of which we have any substantial history was created by Marcus Licinius Crassus... One of his most lucrative schemes took advantage of the fact that Rome had no fire department. Crassus filled this void by creating his own brigade—500 men strong—which rushed to burning buildings at the first cry of alarm. Upon arriving at the scene, however, the fire fighters did nothing while their employer bargained over the price of their services with the distressed property owner. If Crassus could not negotiate a satisfactory price, his men simply let the structure burn to the ground, after which he offered to purchase it for a fraction of its value.

Through this and other schemes, Crassus became one of the richest men in Rome. He used this fortune to amass substantial political power, eventually rising to the peak of power in the Roman system by joining the First Triumvirate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Triumvirate) with Pompey the Great and and ambitious young go-getter named Julius Caesar.
Christianity has always been a political tool. I'm not saying that religion in general is incorrect or that it cannot exist outside of political use in a genuine way-- only that Christianity in particular has always been used in that way.
Yeah good stuff, but I'd need to eat a ton of spinach to get enough selenium.

This is my goto site for food prep information:

http://whfoods.org/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=43

Looks like he also recommends blanching first, but doesn't call it that.
Probably worth distinguishing between starch (sweet potatoes, oats, barley, rice) & simple carbs (white bread, candy, soft drinks, etc etc)
100 apps? That must have been expensive...
Game Design: Taxonomy of Fishing Mini-Games
Some interesting research on this topic:

http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/censored.pdf?m=14...

https://citizenlab.ca/2016/11/wechat-china-censorship-one-ap...

Some interesting answers on Quora:

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-it-that-a-lot-of-Chinese-people...
You Can Stop Them Exploiting Your Data
To me, "manufacturing consent" is scarier. Fox News is ridiculous and everyone - _especially Fox News_ - knows it.

The Washington Post is as you claim, which feels dangerous. The same with the Times (and the Journal on any non-free market health policy) in the modern era - there's a lot that's left out: important context is intentionally omitted to shape the narrative or to produce an angle, which is much more malicious.

Fox News/HuffPo/Breitbart/TPM don't scare me because they're somewhere between junkfood and supermarket tabloids. It's the people who lie when they appear to tell the truth - like WSJ coverage of any single payer country - that freak me out.
the "missing matter" is not just at the galactic core but assumed distributed more thorough the galaxy. if it just were at the center, star rotational speed would follow keplerian predictions, instead they observed the same rotational speed across whole galaxy disks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_rotation_curve
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16772994
The Great Vowel Shift is why we write words in Modern English as if we were speaking Middle English. But even before then, the shift from Old to Middle English radically simplified the Germanic grammar of English. The other major change is the tendency in English to borrow foreign words rather than the tendency to adapt them to English--for example, we say television, not farseeing.

Since many technical roots derive from Latin, this somewhat artificially inflates the Romance root contribution to English.
Given that the evidence thus far shows no diet prescription holds up around the world, this is a false dilemma.

There's no reason to believe a single diet should hold up around the world.
How our SaaS startup went from 8 Weeks of cash in the bank to profitability
How do you decide what the appropriate level is, gut feeling? I'm afraid that debates over what the number should be obscures debate over the harder question of what is causing the minimum wage to have to keep increasing.

The question we should be asking is why are we devaluing the completed labor of the lowest wage classes?
Your point 3 is actually a little worse - the carry forward loss deduction from regular income is capped at $3k per year (but unlimited against both future short term and long term capital gains).
I would like to agree, but there are some strong counterexamples[1], though by the same token, I find it hard to accept that we would make policies designed to think for people on the grounds they can't be trusted to do so themselves. It points to a means-end problem at the very least.

1: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3257748.stm
Except it isn’t, it because of the way labor and employers have different costs when an employee leaves, meaning each side has a different equation for how important it is to not sever the employment arrangement.

If an employee loses their job, they lose 100% of their income, and for many they are unable to survive this. If an employer loses an employee, they only lose 1/n of their production, where n is the number of employees they have. They can handle that reduction while they look for a new employee way more than the employee can.

That is what prevents the market from being efficient.
> That is untenable, as people will always override software, whether that's through a courtroom, a government/regulatory body, or a fork based on majority consensus.

I would say every single non-naive person in this space realises this, so it's not true that blockchain proponents "desire a technical fix to social problems" in that sense. What smart contracts for eg could be good for is to leverage social consensus much more highly, rather than replace it (since like you said replacement is impossible)
"Hey, major waste company, how about you partner with Facebook and let us sift through people's trash using AI robots before it goes in the landfill? It's for....uhhh, science...yeah, thats the ticket"
Freedom of the press only means freedom to use hand cranked printing presses. That is all the founders were thinking about. They did not anticipate high throughput roll to roll printing, radio, television, or the internet. Consequently freedom of the press does not apply to any of these things.

Only hand cranked printing press manufactured leaflets should be allowed. Freedom of the press should be banned for all other mediums.

... and in case you're wondering, yes, this is a metaphor for another on-going debate and an apt one.
Introducing any very significant productivity increasing tools seems to result in depressed wages. It happened when we moved to factory production, resulting in entire families working 16 hour days 6 days a week to barely earn a subsistence living. And it's happening with computers.

When your employees produce 8% more each year, it's easy to justify giving them 5% raises. What happens when your employees produce 80% more every year? You can't stomach the idea of giving them raises commensurate with that, so you just tell yourself 'its the machine doing the real work, they don't deserve anything' and raises stop.
Definitely possible. I don't do completely unique passwords, but do do a tweak on a standard password that was unique to my spotify account. Also a quick google of 'pastebin spotify 2018' shows quite a few lists of emails and passwords posted rather recently. I suppose there is no way to know one way or another, either way I just went in and randomized my bank/email passwords to be safe.
Continued: As a though experiment: lets say 100% of crypto traders owe 1/3 of their gains (obviously not real). There is nowhere close to enough USD liquidity to handle a sell like that and it would liquidate everyone and still leave them unable to pay their USD tax bill.

The apparent USD liquidity is mostly actually Tether liquidity. There is not actual USD liquidity – nobody is buying huge amounts of BTC who doesn't already have it – so we don't even have pricing data on what the USD price is, all that data has been corrupted by systemic exposure to Tether.

Obviously the thought experiment is totally absurd but it raises questions like, what exactly is the tipping point and how much liquidity is there actually?
That's only part of the equation. Survival often necessitates taking a sub-optimal deal. Employees are very more likely to be forced into this position than an employer, who can often survive with reduced staff.
Most of us define “fiat” similar to this:
1 : a command or act of will that creates something without or as if without further effort According to the Bible, the world was created by fiat.
2 : an authoritative determination : dictate a fiat of conscience
3 : an authoritative or arbitrary order : decree government by fiat

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fiat

Most cryptocurrencies have value because of a mutual belief that they have value, but the overwhelming majority have not been mandated for use by some authority yet.
> I'm basically down to the Wall Street Journal in my daily reading selections.

Because.... somehow you think the WSJ, owned by Rupert Murdoch of all people, is not biased (start with [1])? Is it possible you're just selecting for the particular bias that creates the least amount of friction with your existing world view?

[1] https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/02/01/wall-street-jou...
That is incorrect. You've just defined P2P such that no commonly accepted P2P application meets it. At a minimum every P2P app you've likely ever heard of or used, baring maybe one exception, has at a minimum used third parties for orchestration.
Northerners with a vitamin D deficiency, 3rd-worlders with iodine deficiency, vegans with B12 deficiency, carnivores with K12 deficiency, women with iron deficiency, etc- yes, supplements are quite helpful, when you're acutely deficient.

But if you're not actually deficient, they can be legitimately harmful, and your average person reading HN is probably not acutely deficient in any of these things you listed except possibly vitamin D.
It seems to me that you're arguing broadly that space regulation, generally speaking, could, in principle, be good. I agree with that.

Now, do you have any arguments in favor of the regulatory restrictions on SpaceX lauch videos?
I understand your point, but in times of crisis, (like the Myanmar situation) I think the idea of no solution won't find much takers and people will be desperate to "do something".
My wife is the only non-dev, family or friend, male or female, who I ever convinced to switch to Linux from Windows/Mac and who actually loved it and stuck with it despite me being a major Linux evangelist for about 10 years. Coincidence? (Although sadly I've now caved and use Mac and she's on a Chromebook. Fucking kids have ruined us!)
Unrelated to the content, this is the best way to archive a presentation with notes that I've found. Much faster to read than to see an hour long video and not as cryptic as a bunch of mostly content-free slides.
Workers have less power to increase wages than corporations have to increase revenue and profits.

This has occurred, arguably, because of right to work laws and the reduction in organized labor (which previously negotiated wages with more power).
> (5) Ensure that unenhanced data collected by licensed private remote sensing space systems concerning the territory of any country are made available to the government of that country upon its request, as soon as such data are available and on reasonable commercial terms and conditions as appropriate;

#5: The forign policy / state dept / military parts of the US govt want to minimize potential risk of domestic US remote-sensing companies accidentally or deliberatly antagonizing a foreign government... seems prima facie reasonable.

To gain leverage during diplomatic negotiations, a foreign power could take the position that one of our "so-called" private civillian satellite companies was actually a front for a state intelligence operation. It would be difficult for state dept to provide evidence to the contrary if they didn't already have contacts with each private space company.

Is anyone aware of a diplomatic complaint ever being made along these lines? Maybe in the cablegate archives?
Hey thanks for the response. Of course it's for the target audience, which was my overall message. The person I was responding to was arguing that people in general should know how an OS works, which is complete nonsense.
This is where an understanding of power structures and hierarchies helps.
I hold a particular perspective and have expressed it - that's all there is to it.
Is it possible that low skill jobs are simply less valuable to the economy than before?
If you don’t at least have a grip on the past, you’re destined to repeat its mistakes.
There are waaaayyyy easier and cheaper ways to get your private information than by a massive, distributed covert operation designed to make your encryption implementations slightly easier to brute-force.
It is taxed as regular income so 10-40%
Here is how I have rectified this for myself (though I am not the hardcore developed of some on HN, I've hacked a lot of stuff together for fun and profit).

Developers rarely know what users really want in advance. Hell, even users don't know what users really want. Re-writes are time consuming (and, to me, boring), it is easier to do the minimal amount of work first, demo that, take feedback, and then build it out.

However, going into this you need to have faith in yourself that you can deliver something good, and on time. If you have that confidence in yourself that you can deliver the functionality expected in a reasonable time frame, you can possibly be more comfortable selling ahead of your delivery schedule.
If it was all short term capital gains, then yes, but he would still have realized gains way over what the tax bill is. That wasn't specified in the post though. Usually capital gains refer to something that's taxed at a lower rate for assets held for more than 1 year, 15% (or 20% if you're in a higher bracket)

How tax/financial-illiterate do you have to be to pour ALL of your realized gains back into altcoins going into the next year?
> I wonder if there have been any explicitly Athiest regimes?

Some, but not all, regimes in the Leninist (and Stalinist, etc., derivatives) tradition were/are, and early the French Revolutionary regime briefly was during the period of the establishment of the Cult of Reason (which, while called a “cult” with good was, was atheistic and thus not a religion in the theistic sense), but that was soon replaced by the Cult of the Supreme Being (which was deistic, but not atheistic) during the Terror.
Words don't influence people, people do!
Lynx, plus I have made my own enhancements over the years for the way I like to browse.
We 'must' decouple compensation from the actual value being created by workers because workers are far too productive with modern technology. If compensation was related in any way, even a very small way, to value of the work being done, wages would raise so fast that there would be enough jobs for everyone, people would work less and all those promises of the wonderful future technology would bring would actually happen. And that is unconscionable.
> Proof of work is valuable in itself?

This is actually an interesting way to analyze it. The trust created by PoW apparently does create value to many people.
> we need a solution to give people at the bottom high(er) quality lives.

Training and safety nets, funded through tax revenues.

Keep in mind, the national minimum wage in Australia is currently $18.29. The entire US has been getting a discount on minimum wage labor for decades, and everyone is kicking and screaming now that those workers are having their wages ratcheted up to what they should be making when accounting for inflation [1] [2].

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/01/04/5-facts-abou...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/21/adjusted-for-inflation-the-f...
While I agree with you to a certain extent, I feel you may be underestimating just how much sway Fox News, conservative talk radio, and Facebook have with rural white Americans. When you (intentionally or not) only get your information from one source, at some point it seems you stop questioning it.
Imagine playing that game in the 1950s about computers. IBM thought there was a market for maybe 5.
All the evidence to date suggests that banks are much more capable of providing useful financial services than blockchains. Can you give a counter example of a real world use?
Comcast, AT&T and Verizon pose a greater surveillance risk than Facebook
Just heard of "The Great Vowel Shift" on the "Lexicon Valley"[1] linguistics podcast, which covered the idiosyncrasies of English spelling, and how the vowel shift was a large factor in how pronunciations diverged from their spellings.

[1]: http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2018/0...
Hmmm. Excel has supported SQL queries against itself for at least 20 years. This includes select, insert, update, delete
Gotta love how he begins saying he was bashing the tech in December(when the market was on the rise) just so that no one can tell him "everyone bashes bitcoin when it's going down".

Venmo is centralized. I cannot use it as I live in a third world county with no access to it.

Paypal sucks. It takes 5% from the seller and it has power over your money, they can(AND HAVE IN THE PAST) seize it whenever they want.

I had my salary confiscated once over a mistake in the bank. I telecomute, working for a company overseas, and the fees are stupidly high.

I find your lack of vision disturbing.
> Most cryptocurrencies have value because of a mutual belief that they have value

So, "they have value because we agree that they have value. Because we say so".

That's exactly "Fiat".
“I thought I was losing my mind, but I was actually losing my sight”
There is not much pop culture from the 1950s that is just as fresh today as then, but Lehrer’s work is remarkable for its staying power.