skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What if we put "beginning" as in "before it was even called the Internet"? Indeed, ARPANET, which came online in 1969, saw fast growth in the United States in the 70s. Nodes came online to use it, not to make a quick buck.

People use cryptocurrency too. For value transfer, and to a more limited extent, for dapps like Augur. You seem to be criticizing the delta between the lofty hopes for it and it's actual usage. The early internet did not have such lofty hopes, so its growth was more organic. If you take away the pipe dreams from crypto, you have a remnant skeleton that i'd argue very much resembles the early internet.

> Of course the effect on the environment will continue to be pointed out: Ethereum's energy consumption is growing and the use cases are nowhere to be seen. So far, "plans" in the cryptocurrency space never go as expected. Satoshi didn't expect persistent forks and altcoins, for example. Vitalik advertised Ethereum as a "world computer" but it can barely stand when only 14k users are trading cartoon kitties on it. He also said Ethereum's "code is law", until he changed his mind and forked the network due to a hack. Please excuse skeptics for holding accountable those that do not have a history of consistent and successful results.

So, I said there are plans for solving the energy consumption issue. And your counter-argument is what, exactly? That sometimes people didn't foresee everything that might evolve? Help me understand the argument that you're making here.
Firefox for Android definitely has some rough edges compared to Chrome, but it is also one of the very few mobile browsers which supports extensions I really hope that whatever they've got coming down the pipeline is up to the task, because it'd be a shame to lose yet another outlet for user customization.
The main use case for block chains is quite obviously to skirt government regulation: black markets, unregulated securities and quasi-securities, etc. A secondary and related use case is to avoid the hassle and complexity of old fashioned equity and other fund raising constructs and to make easier international wire transfers.

Putting ethical concerns aside: these are very large market segments. Cryptocurrencies may be overvalued but there's definitely a real use case. It's just not a use case that governments, banks, or conventional VCs like.

I feel like all the claims to the effect that cryptocurrencies have no use case are ignoring the obvious.
Ran into this recently, there’s a meta tag you have to set for it to properly target mobile and not just scale it down https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/audits/ha...
In context, I mean that the fastest trader takes all of the profit associated with the price correction in response to new information. Your example isn't relevant since you placed your order without access to the new information. In fact, after seeing the new information, you may realize that your order is now a losing trade--but too late, HFT has already arbitraged away your inefficiency.
Author here, happy to answer any questions :)
I have never felt I had any doors shut. Dropped out of CS after my first semester when I got a job doing ops overnight and was being paid to learn more than I was learning at school. Best decision I ever made (almost 20 years ago now). No debt.
This article has more details: https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/09/distributed-ledgeroasis-la...

Some highlights from the article are below. Seems like a smart team tackling interesting problems, but as with most projects in this space, raising crazy amounts of money way too early.

1. Raised $45 million (!) in pre-sale financing.

2. 'Song says that her project has solved the scaling problem by separating execution from consensus.

“For each smart contract execution, we randomly select a subset of the computation nodes to form a computation committee, using a proof of stake mechanism. The computation committee executes the smart contract transaction,” Song wrote in an email exchange with TechCrunch. “The consensus committee then verifies the correctness of the computation results from the computation committee. We use different mathematical and cryptographic methods to enable efficient verification of the correctness of the computation results. Once the verification succeeds, the state transition is committed to the distributed ledger by the consensus committee.”

By having the computation committee working in parallel with the consensus committee only needing to verify the correctness of the computation creates an easier path to scalability.'
I think that the EVM hasn't found its great use yet. But Cryptocurrencies in general are being used widely for international currency movements and as currency in distressed countries like Venezuela where the 'black market' is just the regular market due to government instability.
TLDR: there’s no universal criteria for code quality.

Imagine you have 5 programmers. #1 works in a web development company, writing a CRUD web app in SQL, PHP and JavaScript. #2 is coding C and developing an embedded firmware for a PC component. Also works on the driver for that component in the Linux kernel. #3 writes some COBOL for a half-century old system running in a bank. #4 works in a game studio developing a level editor for yet to be announced videogame. #5 is a researcher working in a university, mostly writing Mathlab but occasionally some Python and R.

The ideal simplicity/correctness/performance tradeoff is totally different between the five. Just like any other tradeoff, or generalization, or methodology, or approach. All 5 are writing code, but the software they’re creating have totally different requirements, expectations, lifetime and budget.

I never saw articles generalizing stuff across all engineers: aircraft, biomedical, marine, telecommunications, etc. However, I saw many articles, this included, that tries to generalize across all software development.
The answer is obvious if it is a top tier school.

If it is not a top tier school, a degree might still be useful in these cases - there are companies that will filter out resumes that don't have degrees attached to them. Second and more important, if you apply for work visas in other countries, degrees matter as most countries have some kind of point system and you get points for age, experience, degrees etc. It will also be useful if you want to get into research later on.

One of my friends was making 60K or something, then he did part time MBA from a top tier school. His next job got him 150K, and it was a quick climb both in terms of money and responsibilities from there.

So yeah, degrees are worth something.
> Had they simply kept using the API, it would have naturally evolved over 20 years.

Honest question: how simple would this have been considering the fact that they switched to an entirely different OS, as coldtea points out?
Works like a charm, thanks! Maybe I buy some of the local contributors a beer.
"...then you're just not thinking very hard."

Seems with all the rampant fraud that it's the developers that aren't thinking very hard.
I was. I refuse to use "/s" though.
I am reminded of this classic snark from The Elements of Programming Style (1974)[0]:

"Some compilers allow a check during execution that subscripts do not exceed array dimensions. This is a help … many programmers do not use such compilers because “They’re not efficient.” (Presumably this means that it is vital to get the wrong answers quickly.)" (Page 85)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Programming_St...
I've definitely transferred assets to someone anonymously (not for anything illicit, it was strictly a non quid-pro-quo charitable act) using Bitcoin. I did not want this person to know who I was because I didn't want them to feel like they owed me anything.
There is no mechanism in this paper (or in a standard VAE, or GAN) to encourage that a single human-understandable semantic quantity should be captured in a single dimension of the latent code. So, in general, it won't happen. "Blondeness" is spread out over all dimensions of the latent code. Therefore the method in this paper (summarized by matheist) is totally reasonable. There are other autoencoder-type generative models that try to concentrate each attribute in one dimension, usually by using the class labels as an additional input. But that is not the focus of this paper.
This is one of the most naive, starry-eyed posts I’ve ever seen here.

If you deregulate securities you’re just going to see a whole bunch of senior citizens fleeced by high tech boiler rooms.
This reason is more important than either of the reasons you list:

VC/PE firms are, by and large, staffed with professionals. ICO investors are, by and large, amateurs (I settled on this word, after starting with several less nice ones).

Amateurs are much more likely to get scammed than professionals.
Exactly! Thank you!!
I’m not sure this is a good solution, but maybe it’s the best “general” fix.

Basically an OS should be able to easily identify when you’re using a platform password field for instance and not interact with the IM (although that causes problems with assistive technologies). But the OS can’t really handle every third party reimplementation of password fields. Presumably a 3rd party solution would be able to rev faster and stay more up to date than the OS. (The risk balance when the OS is involved is higher than for just the IM as if it does break you can always remove the “visor”, but doing so in the os is harder.
> It’s used to stun animals before slaughter

What? How? Carbon dioxide is well known to cause a painful death. Why the fuck are they not using nitrogen?
Parallels Desktop Lite is available on the Mac App Store with all of its sandboxing restrictions because it uses Hypervisor.framework: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/parallels-desktop-lite/id108...
In the research paper they use trusted computing hardware... just the opposite of trustless
Golem has a working product, integrated into blender. It lets users trade rendering time with each other

It works well for 3D graphics because it's easy to verify the work was done and it's low risk. With more encryption research the model would work for more types of computing
But if you think it's all a fraud, or that there is no value, then you're just not thinking very hard.

Seriously: Where is the actual value of crypto currencies?

I can see specific (limited) applications for the blockchain.

But you assert that people (who may have thought long and hard about the utility of crypto currencies) are lazy thinkers.

At the very minimum you could provide an argument instead of throwing around insults.
To be fair, each service has its own variant. That's increased cost, but each service should have aircraft that'll work well for the individual service's requirements.

The F-15, F-16, and F-18 are all multi-role aircraft, and are fairly unarguably the world's best in their categories. There's no reason to think the F-35 won't be in the same class.

As to the A-10, I believe the F-35's primary ground support approach will be from pretty high altitude, using smart weapons. That kind of approach will even work against first-tier opponents.

If you need "low and slow" close air support while shooting up the enemy with cannon, the Apache seems a better fit. The AC-130 is somewhere in between...note recent AC-130 variants have been getting longer and longer range weapons to decrease vulnerability to MANPADS.
> How long do we have to wait to find a valid use case for blockchains? It's been 10 years now and we're still asking the same question.

Here are some use cases that I think are potentially legit:

- Value transfer
- Prediction markets
- Asset trading/custody (not just cryptoassets, I mean, potentially real estate, equities, etc. can be tokenized)
- Venture capital that is more transparent and open (the ICO space is obviously not there yet, but I think it can move in that direction)
Thank you so much for pointing this out!
What I am saying is that a ball of mud that passes all tests is worse than something clear that fails corner cases (genuine corner cases) because sorting that out can be done. Whereas the ball of mud will definitely fail in the future and when it does nothing will help you apart from a complete rebuild. "It passes the tests" simply doesn't cut it.
I think he was implying that if you access the disk at all, your performance is hidden behind that cost.
This sort of badinage is what makes HN so endearing. Thanks!
> there a better terminology that distinguishes these two uses of memory-bandwidth?

theoretical peak bandwidth

effective/observed bandwidth
5 Killer UX Optimization Tips That Will Boost Your Search Rankings
> People use cryptocurrency too. For value transfer, and to a more limited extent, for dapps like Augur.

Soooo, buying drugs and illegal gambling? Sure, I'll give you that one.

My argument rephrased: "Because cryptocurrency investors have repeatedly made claims that don't pan out, we can be reasonably skeptical and concerned about their energy consumption until they actually fix it or at the very least provide peer-reviewed scientific analysis on how it will be fixed."
Bit of an ignorant statement even if it is IBM. What’s wrong with developers “overseas” (a completely relative term but forgivable in the YC context) why call them monkeys (not an sjw so not even going to go down that words rabbit hole). Having worked with many a yank their quality is just as variable and I’ve seen better output standard maintained by some European teams even if scale is limited.
Haha what do you know. Another day, another anti-crypto article on the top of Hacker News.

In this case, I agree with the overall sentiment. I don’t think these companies are actually “dying” though, but rather they were probably created as get rich quick schemes, so they took the millions of dollars they raised and then sailed off to some island somewhere.

From the report

> We use intensity of tweets from the cryptocurrency official Twitter account after the ICO to estimate that the survival rate for startups after 120 days (from the end of the ICO) is only 44.2%, assuming that all firms inactive on Twitter in the fifth month did not survive.

Not sure how I feel about that methodology, but probably many of these companies never planned to actually issue a product in the first place so it may very well be accurate.
nothing wrong with stealing! great artists and all that. :-)
Golem is live. Augur is going live today. MakerDAO has a very interesting stablecoin called Dai that's live. Status' mobile app is now mainnet by default. DigixDAO is live. And many more in testnet phases. But don't let reality mess with the cynical perception that the hn crowd wants to portray!
Loading data from cold storage (HDD/SSD, etc) into RAM only has to be done once on startup, though. After that single slow startup, all of the additional queries happen super fast.

Your complaint only makes sense if you only intend to perform one single query against a dataset.
I (author) think it is worth downplaying the achievements when perspective is lacking about their signifiance; Henry Kissinger wrote a whole op ed recently founded mostly on a misunderstanding of how big a deal AlphaGo really is https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/henry-k...

But I did try to not just denigrate this work, rather to both praise it and discuss the sometimes ignores flaws.
More on the different types of breakpoints available in Chrome DevTools: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/java...
This is one of the frustrating parts of database software. Where can information about the ways to optimize these parameters be found (outside of random posts scattered around StackExchange)?
"seemingly" disappear. How is this any different than, say, the banned "microbeads"? This just puts tiny fragments of plastic into the environment, which is even more difficult to collect/recycle/sequester than plastic bags and bottles. I think this is a well-intentioned, but overall terrible idea and I hope they are forced to find a better solution.
Meanwhile, Thomas Sandholm's company built and deployed and AI system that supports all organ transplants in the USA.

No deep learning though.
Tutorial on this workflow here: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/work...
I'm sorry, but that's a MASSIVE overstatement.

I kindly ask you to grab one of those bikes and do a few miles on the Burke. It's beautiful out, really hope you enjoy it.

I commute regularly on the Burke, it's wonderful. Cars are so much more of an issue on my commute. More bikes please!
I second this, I came after the change and I still didn't find it clear at all.
> humans will be at their mercy.

It was always like this. In my opinion it doesn't make a difference if some guy is more intelligent and is therefore able to suppress others or if he uses an AI that is more intelligent. For me the result is the same: I get rekt.
> Generally speaking, if my things get stolen, "it was stolen by X and not Y" is not a value-adding rebuttal. It is actually counterproductive if X (e.g., a cryptocurrency thief) is harder to gain recourse against than Y (e.g. an FDIC-insured bank).

That's certainly true. But the issues around people losing their coins and having their keys stolen can be solved by better UX and application security. Essentially crypto transmutes the problem domain, from a people problem to an application design problem. It's still a problem. It still needs to be solved, but the domain-transfer allows it to be solved cheaply at scale in a way that the human one can't be.

In other words, i'm making the claim that the issues you cited are not essential properties of blockchains, merely transient properties of their present implementations and UX. If you want to make the case that they are in fact central, i'd be happy to listen to that though.
Microservices – Check Size Before Ordering
I wonder what kind of overhead these architectures have on raw computing power...
Imposing new style on legacy code can be stupid; don't do that.

You're just adding to the "activation potential" required to make a necessary fix in legacy code. Changes in legacy code should be minimal. Nobody who has to make a fix in legacy code should be asked to upgrade its style and whatnot, that is not related to the fix.

If it has its own conventions, just maintain those.

Or else, make a commitment to upgrade the legacy code to new conventions, as a separate, dedicated task, whose goal is to do it thoroughly.

The last thing you want is a hodgepodge where code that has been recently touched conforms to one set of conventions, and code that has not been touched conforms to another.

I think a good way to approach legacy code (at a high level, big picture) is to answer the question "how much of the value of what we are doing here is propped up by this legacy code?" If the fact that the legacy code works is paying your salary, respect that; maybe those people weren't idiots.
Yes, the 'employees are investing their time' point is an established argument, this rhetoric is well-trodden.

But they're still not investors.

Putting in a considerable amount of hard cash, is a fundamentally different thing than considering the after-tax value of some possible future gain from employment ... and then putting in hard cash. (Though it's definitely a valuable calculation to make on the part of the employee.)

If someone walks around the Valley talking about how they are 'investors' in X, Y or Z because they worked there for some time as an employee, but did not invest in a round, they will definitely be misinterpreted because the premise is simply not generally accepted. Moreover, this person would either be marked as 'not understanding what he is saying' or 'purposely misleading people'.

Consider the vastly different terms attached to the equity of either side ... and that so many actual startup employees who have done modestly well on some exit and then do 'part time' Angel investing, generally participate along the lines of classical 'investors terms' , not on the terms of the employees of the startups they fund. There's a reason that this is the common standard, and that there is no movement afoot to put investors and staffers on the same terms.
Yes, this is a totally trash article but just look at how the hn crowd laps it up because it fits in with their narrative about this tech. What a retrograde place this has become.
The rate of adoption of new technologies has sped up almost exponentially over time. You cannot compare email with Ethereum because of that. If you want to compare it to something, compare it to Docker which was introduced in 2013, and now containers are everywhere, because they are actually useful.
iAPX432
This right here, I use both. Sometimes I like to just "debug by writing code to get more information"
As so often with blockchain topics, I have hard time reading if comments are satire or not. I'm assuming this was satirical?
All that stuff is in part two! https://thegradient.pub/how-to-fix-rl/

Says as much at the end... to be fair we did warn up front "The first part, which you're reading right now, will set up what RL is and why it is fundamentally flawed. It will contain some explanation that can be skipped by AI practitioners." But personally I think the board game allegory is fun and that most people tend to forget the categorical simplicity of Go and Atari games and overhype ; easy to say the main points are not new but the details are important here.
‘First Universal Wallet’ Supports EOS Mainnet and Offers Free Account
Here's some empirical evidence of chemtrails, in case this is the first of its kind that you've ever received I also suggest paying attention to the sky in your local neighbourhood at around 6am and 6pm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFL4ogRm3yc

Saying "conspiracies too grandiose to be real" may be akin to saying "organization too grandiose to be real" when only talking about one program within a multi billion dollar black budget.

That said there are indeed grandiose conspiracies that do make chemtrails look simple by comparison: https://i.imgur.com/SbCArRO.jpg
Its mostly true. Here is the patent received in 2006 http://www.allindianpatents.com/patents/198254-a-new-mix-pro...

Lots of roads in many countries have been paved using this technique however the exact numbers are tough to calculate.

The 70 micron number is sort of wrong. The films used must be less than 70 microns in thickness (relatively thick plastic bag such that they can easily shred) but they are only shredded to between 2mm and 6mm in length/width.
Also supports screenshots of arbitrary sections of the viewport: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/08/devtools-r...

And specific HTML nodes: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/08/devtools-r...
> Folks are using "simple" and "easy" interchangeably here. That's probably inappropriate.

Agreed, see Rich Hickey's "Simplicity Matters" presentation on the difference [0].

Simple-Complex vs Easy-Hard

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0
Saudi Aramco’s $2T Zombie IPO
That idea seems to hinge on the notion that the cultural acceptance of alcohol intoxication somehow "filled a niche" that would otherwise have been filled by some other intoxicant.

The first problem to overcome if one wishes to support that idea is that alcohol had other uses than getting plastered. Weak ciders were ubiquitous before refrigeration because they were safe to drink when the local water wasn't. It was also a pain reliever before there were many others and used as a disinfectant.
One of the batteries that Dad worked on back in the 1950's was for the Union Pacific railroad. It was intended to be loaded into an underground vault along the tracks in remote areas, and would provide power to run signals through most of a winter. If modern LED power draw is low enough, and the new thermocouple is efficient enough, they could run the signals off the temperature difference between the mountain air and the temperature of the earth about 10 meters down.