skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems like a thoroughly thought out version of a DAG (directed acyclic graph) based currency. I don't have time to go through it with a fine toothed comb, but I'm curious about others' reactions.

There are well known problems with DAGs: lack of incentive to run full nodes, tip choice attacks, flooding/spam attacks if there are no fees, and many and varied types of Sybil attacks.

For flooding or spam a transaction proof of work isn't enough. Not only does it "waste" a lot of energy (though at the edge nodes where it's less visible than mining farms) which negates part of the purported benefit of a DAG, but it's vulnerable to ASICs or botnets. If you can short a cryptocurrency on any major exchange that supports short selling then it will get attacked with the goal not of stealing coins or censoring transactions but of just destroying it.

Tip choice attacks combined with Sybil attacks can be very sophisticated. Tip choice is "random" but randomness cannot be verified. 3, 18, 593, 3, 3, now prove those were not random numbers modulus 1024. You can't of course. So I can non-randomly choose the transactions I link to. If I combine this with some sophisticated analysis of the network's transaction structure and physical topology I might be able to skew the network in some disastrous way over time in ways that would be completely undetectable since my apparently "random" tip/link choices were not in fact random. Then I can do something like short the coin and do something nasty to the network.

Attackers can be very very creative, and attacks only get better.

Last but not least: there is no mining mechanism in a DAG coin, or at least I've never heard of how one could be done. This means DAG coins are "Big Bang" coins that begin with all the money that will ever exist. This is problematic from an economic point of view and opens a huge can of worms around what is done with that money and how it is distributed to initial holders.
I guess my view of the situation is that the massive collection of data only becomes a problem in situations where we can absolutely not trust our government, and if things get that bad then we have much bigger problems than the government having a lot of data about us. At that point they don't need evidence of wrongdoing to drag people into the street and shoot them, so it doesn't matter to me if they have it.
Why the obsession about energy consumption from mining bitcoin? It is because many people still consider it imaginary or non-productive? It is because, unlike many other markets, it is fairly straightforward to find upper and lower bounds for consumption?
That's my question as well, the introduction says:

> Specifically, the system operates by repeatedly sampling
the network at random, and steering the correct nodes
towards the same outcome.

Obviously random sampling could be trivially manipulated if anybody can spawn nodes very easily. I expected that the "fix" would be in the "Snowflake" algorithm but I don't see how it prevents that:

> When the protocol is correctly parameterized for a given threshold of Byzantine nodes and a desired guarantee, it can ensure both safety (P1) and liveness (P2).

But isn't that threshold effectively infinite? If you look at something like the bitcoin network there are very few incentives to maintain full nodes. Meanwhile if having a majority of nodes let you cheat and steer the network (which is not the case for BTC thanks to PoW) the incentive to spawn a huge amount of byzantine nodes would be very high.

After that the paper introduces the notion of "confidence" which might be the key to unraveling all that but I haven't yet fully understood that part. I don't have more time to look into it at the moment, hopefully somebody else will.
Doctors for example are not allowed to tell everyone about your health problems. I don't see why the same rules cannot work for telecoms.
The buried lede: the author is COO of a "Gamified Creative Social Network that distributes blockchain-powered rewards", which is why the article makes a hard turn into blockchain halfway through--the premise is "internet behemoths are keeping millennials poor, but we'll make you rich!"
Fining everyone makes sense to me. Why limit income? Cities do the same non-discriminate ticketing/fining as well.
This comment would be less silly if the above hadn't made it clear that the "honour" is entirely from a western point of view.

It is then up to any japanese / non-western readers whether they give a shit about the honour conferred by some westerners.

Honour (like most things) is subjective and varies from culture to culture. Perhaps the day a universal register of honour is established you can post your comment again when some westerner applies to give honour to the japanese again.
Can anyone speak to whether this style of video is use widely internally at Alphabet X, or if this is just an anomaly? I'm not talking about the content, just the practice of sending around videos about ostensibly intellectual ideas that have very little content and instead rely on music/imagery/etc.? It's very embarrassing.
> Oh, and btw, with tools like NewPipe, I can listen without ads.

Just remember that for copyright holders of those songs you're effectively doing the same thing as just torrenting the mp3. ;)
> So de Vries calculated how much electricity bitcoin miners would have to consume for bitcoin mining to no longer be profitable. He assumed that electricity prices make up 60 percent of the cost of mining and that electricity costs an average of 5 cents per KWh. That yielded energy consumption of 7.7GW, which serves as an upper bound of the bitcoin network's energy consumption

That's not the upper bound, since there a monetization strategies that end up using other people's hardware and electricity. Websites that run JavaScript miners are ridiculously inefficient but also don't have to meet his profitability formula because the electricity is paid by someone different than the person/entity that gets the Bitcoin.
Do you have any examples of cases where American companies were fined unjustly by EU?

These companies can attack any fines they receive in the courts.
I provided this statement to some journalists who contacted me to get another viewpoint on Alex de Vries's paper:

His findings are not completely accurate, but also not completely wrong either. My own formal well-documented estimate is that Bitcoin used 0.09% of the world's electricity as of January 11th, 2018 (http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/). After 4 months of growth I estimate we are around 0.15-0.20% today. Therefore reaching 0.50% by the end of 2018 is plausible; not likely but plausible. That said, overall I think Alex de Vries's figures are rather inflated because he makes two errors. Firstly, his model assumes that manufacturers sell at cost and make zero profits, which allows miners to spend more on electricity. In reality we've seen Bitmain, the largest manufacturer, make billions of dollars over the last few years. No one expects them to make zero profits by the end of 2018. Secondly, de Vries makes the mistake of assuming that all cryptocurrency mining chips produced by TSMC on behalf of Bitmain end up in Bitcoin mining machines. In reality many chips are fabricated for cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin. This altcoin sector is rapidly growing. It wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that Bitcoin mining machines will represent less than half of Bitmain's sales by the end of 2018.

(This is a copy of my comment from yesterday's thread on the same topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17084253)
I disagree. I believe it is an attempt to put a stop to (mostly) US collection of EU citizen data - or at least to give EU citizens some ability to control what foreign entities are collecting (and monetizing) about them.

The EU uses large fines as a fairly effective threat to dissuade organizations from doing things that the EU believes are not beneficial to its members. Of course it's not perfect, and of course there are political motivations as well... but Europe (and other lower corruption countries, for that matter) have grown tired with the US and its money-above-all behavior.

US citizens will benefit from GDPR because it will force some change in behaviors of profit-seeking entities.
It's not illegal.
H2 fuel is absolutely practical and we're integrating it into designs as we speak. However, we are using Cryogenic Liquid H2 (conforming to IMO IGC(1)) which msy be stored at atmospheric pressure, not compressed gas, although additional regulations for shipboard H2 storage are emerging as the popularity grows(2). It's not dissimilar from carrying LNG.

Biofuels still release GHG's (2), not just carbon), and it's arguable how much is recovered. The Nitrogen released still contribute to acid rain. Why go through this messy hassle and guessing game when we already have a perfectly environmentally clean cycle of breaking down H20 into H and O2 via renewables, then recombining the H with free O2 in fuel cells to produce e- and exhaust only water?

1. International Code for Construction and Equipment of Ships Carrying Liquefied Gases (http://www.imo.org/en/OurWork/Environment/PollutionPreventio...)

2. http://gcaptain.com/classnk-releases-guidelines-liquefied-hy...

3. http://biofuel.org.uk/greenhouse-gas-emissions.html
Serious question... has there been a bigger waste of electricity in any commodity trading or in any internet trend?

A the cost of a single bitcoin transaction (~300kW) could power a use home for more than a week [1]. How is this even remotely defensible by people who participates in coins and also make posts about climate change? Seems very hypocritical to me, because I’m pretty sure it’s not those “filthy denier types” that are wrapped up in the coin game.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3
Honestly, no point in waiting. I paid for google music for a couple of years before switching to spotify. Spotify is a lot better - more music, better recommendations. about the same price.
I guess they’re starting their IPO roadshow by trying to stay in the news as much as possible.
There's nothing inherently bad about energy consumption. The raw amount of energy consumed is a useless metric without determining how much of this energy is derived from clean/renewable sources.
I assume it works the same way as renting a server. you can get a vpn for $10 a month and it's not unimaginable to make 30 times that back with whatever service you run atop that.
Perhaps this is the technology behind https://chia.net ?
I have no idea how European court systems work so sorry in advance for what may be stupid questions. What is stopping any company they try to sue from levying investigations against the EU itself if they are not compliant? Does the EU have any sort of executive power that would investigate companys or will it be another VW incident where each company will check the box saying they comply regardless of actual status
Not just that--quality too. Enjoying your 4K computer screen? And you're paying for the highest-tier Netflix subscription to get 4K content? Well, unless you're using Microsoft Edge, you're capped at 720.

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444
Tinfoil hat on:

>What's interesting about the data is what Apple has -- and what it doesn't.

should probably be rephrased as:

What's interesting about the data is what Apple decides to send me -- and what it doesn't.
At that point, what's to stop them from forcing me to present myself at the interrogation booth anyways? Does it matter if they have data "proving" that I've done something wrong, or if they just make it up?
Another interpretation: IT is really hard, especially for people who don't do it for a living, who thus have less time to learn about it. Writing legislation about IT is equally hard, if not more so. The EU may honestly care about the impact of IT on privacy, but not have the technical ability to write adequately precise legislation about it, or even insure that their own institutional IT is in compliance (assuming it really isn't, and I am not a lawyer).

Do not ascribe to conspiracy, what is adequately explained by incompetence.
I want to echo this. Please talk to your manager and/or HR about what's going on. If they know you have a "disability" (again, this is the legal term, though it's not my personal favorite) and are seeking treatment, they are required by law to provide reasonable accommodations and most likely cannot fire you.

Depending on the company, there may be a number of resources they can help you access, from paid or unpaid leave, a new work arrangement or reduced hours, referrals to programs, etc... This is not an uncommon issue, and you're probably not the first to come forward with this kind of thing.

Personally, I know how difficult this can be, and how it feels to not see a path forward. But there are ways to work through this, and things can get better. You might be surprised how helpful opening up about this at work can be.

Sending you good thoughts and support. You're not alone.
I was talking about tool like rake in ruby and scons in python. they are not declarative at all. But most important is that if what your are building needs you to set env variable ect... I don t see how it could really be done in a functionnal way(without side effects).
Agreed, and thank you! Come join us!

Another major upside to forums is the ability to easily directly connect to folks. I've made many friends that way over the years in various forums, and business partners.
So bots can post fake letters there.
At this point, are these papers simply to reduce the cost of verification?

It seems thats the only problem in the crypto world, but I dont know if verification will ever be scalable.
This reminds me of the scene in the Indiana Jones movie when someone comes up and starts challenging Indy with a bunch of flashy sword moves. Rather than engage him that level, where he is definitely outclassed, Indy simply draws his pistol and shoots him: https://youtu.be/anEuw8F8cpE
>I know, I know … it’s negative reinforcement

No it isn't. It's positive punishment.
Thanks for signing up! I have the same hope, let's see how it goes.
Generically, it's possible to get jobs with technology stacks you don't know. E.g.

1. Find company that does both what you do now and what you'd like to do. Get job you're more qualified for, then switch internally to company.

2. Apply for jobs that interest you even if you don't know the stack, give compelling story about wanting to learn new things, and give evidence you can learn new things.

Longer version here: https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/01/23/job-with-technology-...
We have something like this in Germany. It's called Abgeordnetenwatch (www.abgeordnetenwatch.de - Agbeordneter is, in this context, a member of the German parliament).
You can find out who your local representatives are and ask them questions, which are hopefully publicly answered.
When did tech reporting become the thought police and a guardian of the status quo?

They seem to react to anything more exciting than a new phone release with fear and scorn.

Exploring concepts and ideas is how progress happens and it's telling how they see "Duplex" - the most impressive tech showcased at these keynotes - as a misstep.
I know what Kolmogorov complexity is, I was trying to get at something else: removing boilerplate is one thing, but the other extreme isn't all that helpful either. When discussing information theory, one should always remember that white noise has the maximum amount of information, so the theoretical best scoring programming language of your measurement would be indistinguishable from white noise. Hardly productive, right? One of the key things about higher programming languages is that they add structure and patterns - in information theory terms: redundancy - to make it easier for programmers to follow what is going on.

I mentioned APL because programs in it usually consist of a handful of symbols with very little repetition. The symbols/performance ratio is really good for APL. Or to be even more on the nose: think of code golfing languages[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_golf#Dedicated_golfing_la...
It's not that sysadmins cannot do the work you are rightfully proud of. If there are two basic things that differentiates your statements from those of a traditional sysadmin it is these.

1. Design.
2. Discipline.

Where these two values are dispensable long term devops and the new world shine through. I've worked in both worlds and the only mistake is assuming one size fits all.
Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16032643

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16051337

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16056076
I concur that there's an ivory high tower that a lot of well-educated people preach from. Saying you're a third world citizen won't move people like that. Being dismissive or even antagonistic against such people just turns them off from even interacting with you on here. It feels good temporarily but it doesn't solve anything.

I encourage you to well-document what you see. That takes time, patience, and maybe a small amount of money. Put it into a website (there's plenty of demos on here that show how easy it is), put it into a blog (again, plenty of demos and resources), and link to it here on HN. There's no guarantee that it will do any good. It might not even make it to the top of the news. But it will at least allow you to show exactly where you're coming from by linking to your own personal experience.
450,000 women missed breast cancer screenings due to algorithm failure
Would you prefer data be exported in a particular format such as CSV or Excel doc?
I don't see why death should have no bearing on the decision if the risk of death in each situation is different.
State broadcasters have a larger surface area offering a more political goal. After all, it's state-run.

Most people can see this effect more clearly on the state-run news outside their own country.
Are there any EU based tech firms? As an American I honestly can't think of any besides Nokia and that's more manufacturing
You made it much further than I did. Basically I read (what little I read) as a entitled young person complaining about the world being the way it is. I wasn't rich at her age but I certainly didn't expect to be. If anything the internet behemoths are selling millennials the idea that they should be rich and maybe that is the travesty.
... the diameter is 299,200,000 km ...

The distance light travels in a kilosecond.
This might be different in the German 'market' but it rarely takes more than a few weeks to have a high quality copy of the cinema movie around.

There are at least 2 sites that have a way better selection than any video store, amazon or Netflix ever will have.

Except that some hosts force you to watch an ad (30 secs) it is literally the most comfortable way to consume anything.
Yes, it's just about working with people who are doing things of interest to the Army. Army leaders have been saying for a while that, without partnerships, there are areas in which the Army can't keep up with the pace of technological change, the spread of new technologies, and what people who haven't historically had access to military R&D can do with those technologies. For example, mines used to be limited to a relatively few armies. Then somebody figured out how to set off stacks of stolen explosives with a cell phone and we had to deal with IEDs.

Also, my command executes about 75% of the Army's R&D budget and does a fair amount of engineering for Army and other federal organizations. All that totals up to about $6 - 6.5 billion a year. That's a lot of money, but not enough to keep up with everybody everywhere in every field of interest to the Army. So we partner.

As far as exclusive vs non-exclusive, there has long been a segment of the military industrial complex that takes Army research and builds things to sell to the Army (and we have programs to help them do that), or to turn the research into civilian products. It goes project by project, so I don't make blanket statements. That said, the open campus idea that was pitched to by the lab to our commander is pretty much exactly what it says in their press releases. My general understanding is that people like military contracts, but if you restrict them to a military contract then the people with some of the best ideas lose interest. Again, that's just my understanding because I'm sometimes in the room for various discussions. If this were an official query I'd have to check with several people to give an official, informed reply.
Because it brings people together. Crypto bashers meets Sustainability preachers. Just connect two popular sub-trends and you are golden!
Keep in mind that we're seeing a leak taken out of its context. We have no idea whether the "immediately coming up with" was one location over and not leaked.

(... which leads me personally to ask the question: what was the intent of the leaker here? ;) ).
World’s Largest Goodwill Region Launches Career Skills Development Program
Is it really worth blaming the tool? Has reimplementing make for the 50th time really improved things?

The fact is, building software that requires 500 dependencies and 500 sub-steps and 500 configuration options is going to be complicated. It's complicated in the same way that implementing an operating system is complicated. There's no way around it. The complexity is there because it's inherent in the problem.

But it doesn't have to be. Instead of spending 300 hours implementing Shake, or Rake, or Bake, or Cake, or Jake, or Take, why not spend those hours cutting down the complexity at the source? Trim your dependencies. Stop putting so many sub-steps and configurations into your build systems. Cause it's the build systems with the 500 dependencies and 500 the sub-steps and the 500 configurations option that are harmful; not the tools
Undoubtedly true when looking at the continent overall, but the salient point is that coyotes are thriving today in suburban and in some cases even urban environments. These are not areas that were ever owned by wolves, and to the point of the blog post, areas that require coyotes to "play the game" well with humans.
Future Workforce Report by Upwork.com (2018) (infographic)
> That's not to say this fetishization of Lamarkian genetics doesn't make sense inside Google. The median salary for the people there is $200,000 and the system will probably cough up Hondas if not BMW's.

This is a problem I have with all tech companies who are designing products used by hundreds of millions, if not billions, of humans - ranging from farmers in Germany to factory workers in India or mothers in Ecuador or ...

How can the employees of those companies - a group of people who are used to driving Teslas, getting their groceries delivered, etc - relate to those users and understand them in any meaningful way at all?(replying that a bunch of Google UX designers once spent 3 days in the Philippines doing “user research” is a terrible answer)
is there a great alternative to gmail for instance that does 99% of what gmail does for very little amount of money?
At heart, I disagree that that Google's "values as an organization" differ from "sell more ads, make more money." For sure, there may be individuals with loftier goals and some of them may even have positions high up in the organization. But in the end, it's a corporation, and in the end they all have the same goals.

The whole presentation strikes me as insulated and disconnected from reality.
Slightly OT: For us on our farm back in Iowa, the clever animals were the raccoons. It got to the point where we had to put locks with keys on the grain bins; metal hooks and clasps---even some requiring refined motor skills to open---were not enough to keep the buggers out. Fortunately, they couldn't pick the locks. :)
You’re being down voted, but this was a useful comment for me. Made me realize that there’s plenty of energy being spent to mine and handle other commodities too, e.g. gold.
Or grunt, npm, gem, etc... etc... etc...

I don't know about brew and the MacOS ecosystem.