skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's part of the reason why Bitcoin is seen as V1 tech that's being moved away from and other cryptocurrencies using variants of Proof of Stake (which consumes orders of magnitude less electricity but has other potential pitfalls) instead of Proof of Work have grown more popular. Ethereum, generally considered the #2 crypto, is planning to make the switch from PoW to PoS, for instance.

There are some people who still support large-scale adoption of PoW coins, though, and you are right that they're generally willfully ignorant of the environmental concerns. The only case I can see for those is something that aims for true trustlessness and anonymity like Monero, since most PoS methods make compromises around that.

EDIT: I stand corrected. Ethereum is still laying the groundwork for a switch from PoW to PoS and hasn't yet transitioned.
Do you know “de wey” of Functional Programming?
Isn't Uber's most recent soft pivot in their pitch to their investors "cars on the road are overrated, the future's all about flying taxis"?

I just hope this isn't DARPA subsidising Uber's questionable at best business model.
That would be commercial software... It's got some other politics tho.
I don't want to participate in your multiple channel marketing, thank you very much.
I see... speaks to my ignorance on language.
That's not at all how these things work in the west. You define them as broadly as possible, then arbitrarily enforce them, because that gives you both plausible deniability and the widest potential application of your political power.
With its new ‘Interests’ feature,eBay again tries to personalize its marketplace
It’s an emerging sub field of design that calls itself “speculative design”.

Can’t speak for Google, but it is gaining traction. See for instance https://www.primerconference.com/2017/
Who is also censoring based on their ideology...
Three hundred kWh per transaction!!! That keeps my household running for 40 days!

Humanity has a pretty screwed up way of getting its global priorities right.
On the contrary, the earnestness of the presentation implies that they believe it _is_ the ethical thing to do. That is a part of what struck me as creepy about the whole thing.
I was once in the back of a 747, on the left side, when I noticed that the inboard flap section was jiggling about, even though it was retracted. I tried to remember if that was normal, and was about to get up and look at the other side, when the captain announced that any turbulence we might notice was on account of the extra engine under the wing, being ferried as a replacement for a failed one.

A question, for anyone who knows about these things: when an engine is being ferried like this, are the fan and compressors locked in place, or allowed to spin in the airflow? I would have thought that locking them would impose unnecessary loads on those parts and create extra drag and turbulence, while allowing them to rotate would require lubrication?
Quite a lot. Most sell software and support and not cloud services or similiar though.
Chia is bitcoin but with farming (storage) instead of mining (compute), plus a whole host of cleanups to do it right. So no DAG or any such thing.

One could read "Beyond Hellman's Time-Memory Trade-Offs with Applications to Proofs of Space" https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf
How can I stop an unexpected Windows 10 update?
I think people looking into it doesn't necessarily rise to the level of obsession. The incentive here was likely to publish something (rather than an emotional attachment to some aspect of bitcoin).

That Bitcoin are probably little more than coal-fired Beanie Babies likely does contribute to message board attention.
Send me emails: peterpiper0419gmail.com
peterpiper0419@gmail.com
I realize this is in jest, but consider this. The only high level intelligence we are aware of (human) has all of these ... bugs. Like getting bored, or selfish, or lazy, or malicious. There is no example of high level consciousness that we know of without those things. What if we create truly autonomous AI and it suffers from depression, or existential angst? Science fiction has focused on the evil AI problem, but what about the lazy AI problem?
If you use a fonctionnal tool on top of a non functionnal one you will end up with a non fonctionnal tool. And make is not functionnal whatever you put on top of it won't make it functionnal.
There has been a gigantic move to offchain transactions since 2015. Myself, Ive only done 3 'onchain' transactions out of the 60ish transactions ive done.

Regarding waste of electricity? Does war count?

Prior to electricity, moving and protecting gold was a major industry.

Ive read about green solutions to this problem. You'd probably still have miners, but it seems the world is moving to offchain for most transactions.
Nvidia Ends Notorious GeForce Partner Program
Well, if this sort of system is going to be the future of finance, isn't the environmental impact of it something we should consider? Especially, when we hear about old inefficient power pants coming back on-line to fulfill the new demand created by cryptocurrencies.

Edit: Don't the mining costs basically exponentially increase as the supply of bitcoin runs out as it's an exponential decay? Being bounded by an exponential function isn't a good sign.
Apple-Samsung patent trial puts designers on the hot seat
There is an argument that could be made that if that power was from a renewable source, it could instead have been used to replace non-renewable power output - all of bitcoin's power usage combined is several coal burning power plants, I'm sure.

Second there's the fact that most of that power is changed into heat. I don't think the heat emitted from anything using electricity is significant enough to have an impact on climate (outside of the cities at least), but still.
China Approves Toshiba Microchip Deal, Signaling Thaw with U.S
It depends. If they can be traced back to a single person, they are. However you also have dynamic IP addresses - multiple people using the same IP..

I wouldn't call it a gross violation.
well, this joke didn't go over well ha.

The man went on rants about C++ I can only imagine what he has to say about JS
Can you describe in what way you believe this program to be evil?
Only about 10% of energy consumption in the US comes from renewable sources... https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=92&t=4
Basics of Image Classification with PyTorch
Accessibility is a much harder problem for the Windows and Android platforms, because they're dealing with a bigger and more open ecosystem with a lot of legacy baggage. Apple's very tight APIs make it much easier for software to be accessible by default.
Beanie Babies can be reverse engineered and replicated.

Bitcoin cannot generate copycat coins(on the BTC blockchain). They are rare numbers.
What fields do attract the smartest people in Japan, in your opinion?
Exploring ways to prevent cataracts
This is a really cool use of canvas, nice! :)
Companies cannot sue over GDPR violations (neither can individuals). People can report violations to the GDPR watchdogs who will investigate and could eventually hand out fines.
Even that can be disputed. They typically have quite different domains of applications. Gamedev is seldom done in C; operating systems are seldom done in C++. Their different level of abstraction ends up having them applied to different things.
Some music based ones that I use daily

- spotify.com

- soundcloud.com

- mixcloud.com

Others

- Raspberry Pi

- Wix.com
How is the company governed? Have you considered becoming a worker cooperative and creating a democratic governance structure? Does the non-profit structure allow for that?
Gold is generally a one-time investment though - you could smelt it into a bar at a high initial energy cost, but after that, transferring it is free. As opposed to BTC which apparently costs 300 KWh per transaction.
Maybe you're thinking of "grit", popularized by Angela Duckworth.

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/05/25/479172868/angela-...
You're right that's there's nothing inherently bad about energy consumption.

I would gladly use 7.7 gigawatts and more if it meant developing a cure for cancer, or exploring Mars, or anything useful really.

The crux of the issue is that Bitcoin is mostly used as a speculative asset, i.e. something with little actual usefulness except for traders basically.

Using 0.5% of the world's total energy consumption for this is an issue, imho.
Regular iMacs are jet engine loud once you throw any CPU or GPU load at them.

I think the iMac Pro is much better in this regard but it's not sustainable as a workstation machine.
I think it's interesting because it allows you to quantify the impact of Bitcoin mining on energy consumption. What would we do with our resources if this was not a viable way to produce wealth? With the continuing decline of natural resources in the world, it's worth seeing what we as humans do with these resources from an academic perspective.

Also, I imagine a lot of people do indeed think that Bitcoin is imaginary or nonproductive. Arstechnica makes money off of readers viewing their articles, so content that validates an opinion or strikes controversy generally does well.
Initial reactions:

1. Sybil-resistance (faking strong consensus by deploying cheap replica nodes you control) in a protocol like this is crucial. All I could find is this:

To prevent Sybil attacks, it uses a mechanism like proof-of-stake that assigns weights to participants in committee selection based on the money in their accounts.

2. Every non-proof-of-work protocol I've seen, including Ripple Consensus Process and proof-of-stake creates a problem of initial coin distribution. PoW systems have a clean distribution mechanism based on external resource consumption. Non-PoW systems produce an airdrop situation. Players start with no funds, and so can't stake. The creator of the network manually assigns ownership, with important long-term political consequences (e.g., Ripple).

3. The lack of an incentive structure around fees in protocols like Ripple creates bizarre economic consequences. For example, Ripple is guaranteed to lose money stock because fees are simply burned, rather than given to the consensus leader as in Bitcoin.

4. So far, I haven't seen anything in the paper regarding denial of service attacks on nodes. In other words, I see no negative incentives levied on those who can sign transactions from flooding the network with useless spam, bogging everything down.
Hello, Eunika Sot here COO of Yuser and the author of this article. If you have any questions of comments feel free to leave notes here or on Medium. We want to encourage community discussion around this very important topic and what we all can do to change the status quo. Thank you!
> This program (named "sqlar") operates much like "zip", except that the compressed archive it builds is stored in an SQLite database

> The motivation for this is to see how much larger an SQLite database file is compared to a ZIP archive containing the same content. The answer depends on the filenames, but 2% seems to be a reasonable guess. In other words, storing files as compressed blobs in an SQLite database file results in a file that is only about 2% larger than storing those same files in a ZIP archive using the same compression.

Uh.... Yeah, I don't need a complicated, incompatible version of Zip that is 2% larger. I'll just use Zip.
Then maybe trim the initial catchphrase, or the word "novel."
Amazon Serves Up New Benefit for Prime Members at Whole Foods Market
I think opensourced block chain implementation is way more transparent than the bundled derivative instruments the bankers made. The problem is that people will still invest in stuff like shit coins or use stuff like Tether where nothing is transparent
>As an aside, I remember and like the point in a children's book I read as a kid, where they vacationed on a farm, and saw that the farm workers took their time about their work, did everything at a (somewhat) slow and measured pace, and still got a lot done (and well) by the end of each day. Very applicable to the modern software field, IMO, instead of the noise, flame and fury, often quickly descending to ashes, that we see a lot of nowadays.

JFYI, in Italian there is a saying is "col passo del contadino" that roughly translates to "at the peasant's pace" to indicate someone who is working at first sight slowly but never stops and at the end of the day has done the same or more work than someone else's that works fast but takes several pauses.
> GDPR is so vague and open ended that there's no way they can ever be compliant

This is nonsense. I really don't see what's so difficult to understand. Personal information is information to which the person can be identified.
If you have money, you have domain expertise. They hired Mark Moore from NASA and Celina Mikolajczak from Tesla. Each of these people can hire an entire team of experts from NASA and Tesla.
Truly HN quality post!
PII is not a concept of GDPR. Whether IPs are considered personal data covered by GDPR is open to interpretation, but most of the experts I've talked to say yes.
I don't think it's so simple. I only hear Laurel, even when playing the higher or lower frequency. I have no hearing loss and am using quality headphones. When the audio was slowed down I could hear yannie.
Closes the article by implying that the federal government is a monolithic political entity ("the State") that stands apart from private financial interests.

And then quotes Jesus.

Way to stay true to your roots.
This cryptocurrency phishing attack uses new trick to drains wallets
Just add onto this, the grace period is normally 10-20 days some registrar's leave the domain working during this time but some take it down. Then it goes into a "redemption period" for anywhere between 25 - 60 days. In the redemption period the registry tacks on a fee that is somewhere between $60 - $200 so the extra fee gets kicked up the chain.

Registrar: Who you registered the domain with

Registry: The company that owns the tld
NewPipe has a "background mode". There's a short hiccup when you switch to "background mode" but you can still control it from there so it's not so bad.

I find it shocking that Google is permitted to charge money for a feature like that, when as far as I can tell most of the music on Youtube was uploaded without permission of the copyright owner.
It's quite a gimmick imo. The amount spent has no basis in what is needed, but simply chosen by multiplication of the guesswork of a person several years ago by the chaotic swings of the market.

It's also quite inefficient and even if it was chosen with some rationale basis, the idea of burning energy for years in the hope of providing a high enough bar to prevent a single tsunami of effort over the a brief period of time, less than a few hours and only required to match it, is one of the dumbest security ideas I've ever heard.

I'm not against cryptocurrency, not do I think it will fail in concept,
but I very much hope that PoS proves viable and will succeed this utter waste.
Reeducation camps, mass surveillance, the Social Credit System - China has made last century's dystopian fiction its playbook.
It HAS to be broad. The courts will narrow it down (jurisprudence). And why do you think it will be arbitrarily enforced? It isn't even the 25th of may and people are already feeling violated.
The question about how much costs a single bitcoin transaction is deeply flawed.
The amount of transactions a bitcoin network can process
does not directly depend on amount of electricity spent. Bitcoin network can work the same way using 10% of its current electricity consumption.
Also, lightning network will allow for thousand times more transactions with same energy cost.

Why is everyone obsessed with bitcoin electricity consumption? I wonder how much energy is required by the banking system to operate(imagine those thousands of people burning gas in cars to get to their daily work at bank). Humanity spends vast amount of energy on much more useless stuff with just entertainment value(World football cup, all those fans coming from different parts of world in the jets, logistics...)

Also, energy is a resource like any other and it's generation and price is subject to supply/demand. The fact, that is is used on mining bitcoins just indicate, that people value bitcoin technology more than something else they would spend the electricity on.
Thanks and agreed! Good seeing ya post here btw
When I see things like this, I suspect people aren't thinking through all of the NDP edge cases. Do you really want the potential to have 2^64 NDP entries on your gateway? What about NUD - do you really want that many potential hosts performing unreachability detection?

NDP is the abominable child of ARP and an IGP and doesn't scale well. Using huge address spaces everywhere is a good way to let it crush your network.
Not many people really want to destroy all human kind including themselves.
> not even in the desires of the humans who participated in most of the dog domestication (even if some of them may have thought about it, but by then it was already happening).

Again: Can you support this claim with anything? I'm actually curious, and you seem evasive.
Creating RESTful Applications with Qt and Cutelyst
What do you think human's priorities should be?

Just curious. I'm not a scam-coin fan at all.
Good point - it's not so much that the issues of accounting for the kerf go away, they're just easier to deal with in decimal.

I usually am using materials like structural foam, carbon fiber, or metals, just used wood as an easy example.

And I'm using higher precision than most carpenters, so typically measuring with a micrometer which reads out in 0.001in (or 0.01mm) units. You can't just go from 1x12in to 3x4in pieces, you have to knock off maybe 5/64in for a kerf, which is 0.078125in so to get 3x 4in wide pieces, I'll need a board which is 12+5/32...

Lots easier to work with 1.984mm so for my 3x 10cm pieces I'll need a 304 mm wide board.

The bottom line is that once you get precise, the fractional regime which is indeed often easier to divide out by 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6... etc. turns out to be no use at all because you can never actually use those nice fractions, and you're in a decimal regime with lots of fractional conversions (some micrometers even have a fractional inch readout mode, but it turns out to be not all that useful.)

Once you're in decimal, it's WAAAAY easier to be in metric all the way.
CredSSP Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
Google Play Cards are country locked. I am literally not able to use Google Play services with a 'gift card' outside of my home Country.

For me this makes it incredible useless. I doubt they actually want to build anything intuitive for that problem.
I agree with you. The absolute worst part of being a Linux user is dealing with free software zealots.

Honestly, I wish I could just be content with Windows... or better yet, that commercial Unix was still viable.
One theoretical foundation for some of the “nudging” ideas:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/10/09/cass-sunstein-its...

> there is very little awareness in these books about the problem of trust. Every day we are bombarded with offers whose choice architecture is manipulated, not necessarily in our favor. The latest deal from the phone company is designed to bamboozle us, and we may well want such blandishments regulated. But it is not clear whether the regulators themselves are trustworthy. Governments don’t just make mistakes; they sometimes set out deliberately to mislead us. The mendacity of elected officials is legendary and claims on our trust and credulity have often been squandered. It is against this background that we have to consider how nudging might be abused.

... Sunstein’s idea is that we who know better should manipulate the choice architecture so that those who are less likely to perceive what is good for them can be induced to choose the options that we have decided are in their best interest. Thaler and Sunstein talk sometimes of “asymmetric paternalism.”

... Deeper even than this is a prickly concern about dignity. What becomes of the self-respect we invest in our own willed actions, flawed and misguided though they often are, when so many of our choices are manipulated to promote what someone else sees (perhaps rightly) as our best interest? Sunstein is well aware that many will see the rigging of choice through nudges as an affront to human dignity: I mean dignity in the sense of self-respect, an individual’s awareness of her own worth as a chooser. The term “dignity” did not appear in the book he wrote with Thaler, but in Why Nudge? Sunstein concedes that this objection is “intensely felt.” Practically everything he says about it, however, is an attempt to brush dignity aside.
Security vulnerabilities in open source and GDPR implications
Why? Google music largely works well.
People unable to unlock their doors? I hope they give a detailed postmortem.
That’s true. But like beanie babies they only have value people want to believe.

Bitcoin is not fiat, it’s a commodity. It’s not decentralized at all and there are a handful of people thus could destroy it at any time.

Sounds a lot like beanie babies the more I think about it.
It would be good if the authors would have extended figures 20, 21, and 22 out to networks of size 20,000 or more nodes. Or at least described what they expect to happen. I.e. if you have many more nodes, does the throughput remain above 1k tps?

I also always like authors who are willing to acknowledge the limitations of their work. If this work described the limitations I didn't see it; maybe they think there are none :-)
Probably never, if you think about it instead of falling back to a meme.

With tool like guns, I can get my my groceries without paying money. But that’s not very relevant to the general grocery experience.
Isn't Apple part of that music industry? Considering they have a significantly higher market cap...
Homemade Cart Pole Controlled by LQR
I'm using a NUC for a quiet home PC that I do mostly browsing but also some light web development on. Although it's mostly silent, I haven't been too impressed with the performance of it. It was one of the top of the line models in 2015, an i7-5557U. I was surprised to find it's quite a bit slower than my 2013 Macbook Pro 2.4 Ghz i5. On the Geekbench profile the MBP got almost 3x the single-core score of the NUC and 1.7x for multi-core. Real world performance of the older macbook is noticably faster.

It has made me think that instead of getting a NUC, for a quiet desktop system I should have just gotten a second used MBP and ran it permanently docked in clamshell mode with the monitors and keyboard attached. (with the added benefit of being able to go portable when I want to)

Neither the NUC nor my MBP is completely silent but for my purposes I find that I seldom tax either of them enough to where the fans become audible enough to be annoying. Still, I do find the difference in performance between them to be apparent just in things like iteration time on web development and IDE responsiveness.
I was considering getting some of these devices but things like this scare the fuck out of me. Let alone if Nest goes away you end up with some useless bricks. Any suggestions for self hosted smart locks?
Makes sense, as Americans tend to live in a bubble :)

Some of them from the top of my head, that you might or might not recognize: Asos, JustEat, Skyscanner, SoundCloud, LastFM, DailyMotion, Raspberry PI (foundation more than company though), Shazam, Mojang, Skype, King, Spotify, Klarna, Trivago, Xing and BlaBlaCar. I'm pretty sure some of these are quite popular in even the US.

(maybe some of them are not having their HQ in EU anymore, but they certainly had at one point)