skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It can still do it’s job as a currency with a lower valuation.

This is true, but it can't do it's job with high transaction volume.

Counterargument: There are ways to correct it and intermediate services between BC and users will fill the gap between verification and use....

Counter-counterargument: If you need intermediaries, Visa and MasterCard already exist and their payment system is cheaper.
That doesn't sound like a good system.
Here's another old argument from Stallman against using nonfree software, not addressed in the blog post:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.en.html

> As a computer user today, you may find yourself using a proprietary program. If your friend asks to make a copy, it would be wrong to refuse. Cooperation is more important than copyright. But underground, closet cooperation does not make for a good society. A person should aspire to live an upright life openly with pride, and this means saying no to proprietary software.

I don't agree that refusing to copy the program would be wrong. "Cooperation is more important than copyright" is a nice slogan. But copyright IS a form of cooperation. In the situation described, you have to choose between cooperating with your friend and cooperating with the software vendor. Stallman is right to point out that it puts one in an ethical bind, and a way to avoid that is to avoid proprietary software. He argues (elsewhere) that the act of offering proprietary software is really bad, because it erodes society's most precious resource, goodwill.

As for me, I have a fondness for the FOSS subculture, and a preference for free software, ceteris paribus. I use a mixture of free and nonfree software because I have other more pressing concerns, like choosing the best technological choice for the job, and ease of use, and making money.
When was that - early 2017?

In mid 2016 mass market newspapers in the UK were running stories about using Bitcoin for holiday spending money - I vividly remember having a discussion with my wife about it.
Shamir's Secret Sharing is probably my favourite algorithm for showing the deep relationship between algebra and cryptography. The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra is a relatively straightforward result to show to a layperson, and Shamir's is basically as direct an application of it as you could want.

Then the part where using integers leaks information, and how to attack that, gets a bit hairier but is still a moderately accessible way to show cryptanalysis in practice. The fix using finite fields is then probably a step too far for most laypeople, and can be used as a lesson in how the fundamentals can be simple, but the devil is in the details.
I think you described it pretty well. my version of the same: During their development Lymphocytes have 'gene cassettes' that get shuffled randomly so that the specificity of the receptor (antibody for cells, T cell receptor for T cells) is random for each individual lymphocyte cell during development. The ones that bind "Self" stuff are killed off during their development and the rest of them other just hang out waiting for something that binds their receptor. (There is a step here where T cells must bind to MHC within an affinity window to survive) If they find it the reproduce rapidly making many more cells with that specify. once amazing thing is that during that cell replication at the sites of antibody specificity the DNA copying gets sloppy, allowing new mutations to 'fine tune' the specificity of the antibody to the antigen (called somatic hypermutation). The cells that bind the tightest to the foreign antigen, reproduce the most robustly providing an 'evolution' of increasing affinity to the antigen. This stuff is only the tip of the iceberg - immunology it is amazing.
They have only themselves to blame (as a whole, not individuals) because their platform is a pain to develop for compared to others unless your code is open source so distros can compile it themselves.

One does wonder whether this situation is intentionally exacerbated by the fundamentalists. Case in point, there are people against Flatpak because it makes it easier for developers to bypass repos and their package maintainers.
Baidu Backs Neuromorphic IC Developer
> the hashrate MUST remain high if the BTC network is to remain secure

Reminds me of something else that places a continually increasing demand on resources to remain stable...

Building the Red Queen problem into currency is insane.
I didn't have issues with it and by no means is it the most egregious of the 90s - it was just designed for more or less fixed CRT assumptions. It would be say 800x600 or so as a screen.

While smaller in resolution the screens were at least about a standard sheet of printer paper and almost square.

I have gotten into a masochistic retrogames on Linux with minimal support and you see a lot of things that need emulation because design assumptions that were no brainers didn't hold long term back when Moore's law also applied to clock speeds and multicore was really niche.
> Now imagine living in a world where food makers sneakily put nuts in their products

Sure, this would be morally wrong (and also illegal). But you are basically saying that everyone is putting peanuts in their software, which is simply false. Quite insulting to those of us that do work on proprietary software.
stablecoins seem like a good idea. But, besides, isn’t buying drugs a pretty good application of crypto? I know I have derived value from that.
How to Start an Online Business from Home in Less Than a Month
So you don't eat at restaurants then?
> Because paying is the problem, and expecting that prospective employers would pay for your expenses for a test that is used to infer basic competences is at best wishful thinking.

I am cautious with this kind of statement, since this saves the respective company time to check these competencies by itself, which is a pecuniary advantage for the company (since it can obiously use this time to earn money).
One casualty you do not mention is the actual physical goods that consumers do not get as a result of the tariff 'war'.

That is, consumers spend the same amount of money, but get fewer goods in return. This is an economic loss for the consumers.

Put another way, the "no money is magically destroyed; instead it changes hands - between the private sector and the government" argument taken to the obvious limit would imply that there is no problem with the government just confiscating everything. While some people do think that, the empirical evidence seems to be that this is a bad idea: standards of living drop a good bit when this happens. So on its own this argument is not sufficient to prove that a policy is not causing hits to standards of living.
We’ll have to disagree here. The ‘why’ thing is based off scientific research on goal setting and motivation. As such there is an essential distinction from motivational quotes.
Episodes. It's a show about two British writers trying to make their show in Hollywood.
Australian National Blockchain: centralised IBM "smart contracts" for lawyers
> With dataloading, you can turn anything that would need to be a join into two queries

*two queries and a lot of extra memory consumption.
I contacted the mods about this but haven't heard back. I'm not exactly sure what happened. Maybe some people didn't like the content of the article and decided to flag it? I didn't think flagging could be used as a downvote mechanism.
At the risk of sounding overly flippant... should we (the general non-bitcoin holding public) really care whether a 51% attack happens or not?
Apparently the commenter isn't much of a city person, and may have overreacted a bit.

But they shouldn't have been downvoted for expressing that sentiment.
The legacy of Bitcoin should be studied to understand better how memes or semantic viruses are spreading through social groups and affects our inner representations or models of the world, trained by endless screaming streams of bullshit^W information we are forced to process.

There is nothing more fascinating than this - how a global Ponzi Scheme based on a few memes about poorly understood abstract concepts unfolds.
What on Earth Is Going on with Agency Campaign Measurement?
Exactly. Content has a cost. You can pay for it in many ways.
“The subway service and the bus service has become unreliable enough for people to stop using it. If people aren’t using it, there’s less money, and they have to keep raising fares without delivering better service.”

I was a daily rider of the DC metro for 8 years. This is exactly what happened there. Reliability plummeted, then ridership, and all the while major fare increases.
Off the top of my head, a good software engineer is not just a coder. They develop solutions to problems that provide value. They do so under constraints of time and resources. Beyond that, you then can get a feeling of the level of the engineer depending on the following:

- code: maintainability, instrumentation, extensibility, readability, testability, performance, handles tradeoffs in complexity, and the time to create the code.

- projects: can work independently or in a team, can work with individuals across teams and disciplines, can influence project direction, can architect solutions and choose designs and supporting tooling based on tradeoffs, can deliver on a reasonable time scale.

- people: can mentor and be menteed, can collaborate well, can lead or follow, and can inspire best practices.

I'm sure there is much more, but that is off the top of my head shortly after waking up.
Was scam from the beginning.
I don't having much to say about fundamentals. From a technical analysis point of view, according to EWT, a correction mostly happens in three strokes. First stroke was 20k->6k, second was a year long sideways move, this is the third one that will reach the extreme of the correction. In these terms, what we're seeing this last week is an extension of what was happening beginning of 2018; i.e. to ask why this happened is the same as to ask why the price fell from 20k.
My understanding is that the desired outcome is for China to get rid of tariffs and other policies that prop up their local industries at the expense of other countries. The problem before was that China had policies and tariffs that were one-sided and nobody could do anything about it. The US is big enough to do something about it.
New York City Taxi Chief: Congestion Fee Will Hurt
This is also the result of the federal governments of the world, the US in particular, choking off all the fiat<->crypto exchanges with their expanded and draconian know your customer laws.

As an anecdote, I didn't buy my monthly bitcoin purchase early this month because I've been (and still am) locked out of my ~5 year old coinbase account I use constantly because they are being required to require new forms of ID and I cannot supply it.

Even if the stupid speculation markets and their off chain antics didn't exist this would be a problem.
I am a firm believer that cryptocurrencies can offer major value to the world. But if you look at what's out there, Bitcoin etc are outdated technologies.

Since Bitcoin was always leading the charts, in my opinion the whole market had to crash, and out of that it will show which ones offer true value.

You shoudn't focus too much on price, but mainly focus on applicability and adoption/use.

Most doctors here only offered cash payments, but nowadays a lot of them offer smartphone payments. They lose 6 cent on every transaction.

Imagine a world where I can pay instantly, worldwide with a single currency, 0 fees. The technology is already here, the adoption not (yet ;).

We have email, which is basically instant, free and worldwide. Why can't we have the same for payments? Only time will tell if such a major shift can happen.
Both things can be true. 1) It probably does cost a lot of money to increase headways, run more trains, install positive train control, and otherwise upgrade and maintain tracks; but also 2) the MTA is a bloated, wasteful organization.

I have no trouble holding both ideas in my head at once.
That, and trounce the rack in uptime by a couple orders of magnitude.

Single-thread performance is also pretty high, so it'd only lose in the aggregate CPU benchmarks.
That's my point, Linux "won" without needing any presence on the desktop side. Any suggestion about what should happen with Linux and/or Linux users that ignores this fundamental fact is utterly hopeless.
Interesting point, but I think it's a fallacy.
Taking this line of argument and applying it to the social sphere - you would be arguing that there is a place for nazi's in this world (I'm just making a point - not saying you support nazis!)

Totally agree with your "good citizen" argument though. Something we should consider.
I haven't noticed. In fact, it's been a several weeks since my commute was interrupted severely. I hear the green line is doing pretty badly though.
At $80 I was mining using custom ASIC. At $20k I was trying to convince myself not to sell and that I was in it for the long run. I'm still in.
Way more comments than upvotes is a negative signal for the ranking.
Some preview of possible outcomes is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oxkvHCRrCh4LxY29KowN...
So please tell us honestly. Do you include _any_ kind of monitoring in your software to track your user's actions, errors, etc?

You have to at least understand that (some) people have a trust issue with proprietary software, since too many vendors (including Canonical btw) ship with monitoring included.
Occam's Razor - could just be a symptom of the current stock market crash.
Consider these machines can run unmodified binaries written in the 60's for the IBM 360 machines. Also 370, 390, ES 9000 and every previous z.
> Both things can be true

I believe both are and will be. But to what degree? If it’s billions on bloat, then we need a cost cutter at the top (in addition to new funding).
ETH isn't doing well either, so there must be more than the BTC cash fork in play.
When the cleaning lady asks if she should buy bitcoin, is when you should dump and sell everything.
A NYC Subway that's 20% worse than it was 10 years ago

By what metric?
I don't believe it would affect USA's financial system. There are certainly a number of individuals who hold BTC who would get wiped out in such an event, but it seems like it'd be relatively isolated.

It looks like some countries where BTC is more popular may take a bigger hit under such a doomsday scenario.

In effect, a 51% attack would cause the attacker to scam a lot of money from people in a short period of time. Then everyone will notice it on the blockchain (remember: the Blockchain is public. 51% attacks would be relatively obvious to see). After that, BTC's confidence will be broken and the value will march towards zero: no point holding a coin when some unknown entity out there can double-spend their coins. That's how it happens for other Proof-of-Work coins.

But at the same time, BTC is the biggest coin, so its the least likely thing to happen. Its far more likely that BTC miners understand the importance of their mission, and remain wasting electricity perpetually.

Some would argue that the BTC community is too vested into Bitcoin. So even if a 51% attack were possible, the people who could do it would never torpedo the coins that the own.
I am not saying that you do :) . It is more about the critics of FOSS fundamentalists. As obnoxious as some can be (often the one who contribute the less), we should still respect that without the effort of some fundamentalist to spread FOSS, we may not be able to work like we do today.
Perhaps the recent SEC action against multiple ICOs is contributing too?

Long story short, the American regulator has determined that the 2017 hype-fuelled ICOs were unregistered security sales (just like everyone said they are, but ICO promoters pretended to hand-wave away by mumbling something about utility tokens). They've fined an initial wave of ICOs to the tune of $250k and mandatory refunds to all who bought tokens in the ICO.

The catch here is that the refunds must be paid in USD, but the ICOs mostly raised in cryptos. If you did an ICO in December 2017 and raised $10M worth of cryptos but never cashed out any of it, your treasury is now perhaps worth only $2M, yet you're liable for $10M USD refunds. Any ICO administrator within reach of American regulators ought to be cashing out while they can...
Yeah, KYC/AML is totally bad because of trying to actually prevent money being funnelled into crime organization etc.

This is why I cant stand ignorant crypto-fans.
You meant to say "Legit distributed public ledger projects".
Care to name a few?
If the author didn't earn your trust prior to the exchange you won't convert to become his 100th customer and their content upgrade lost a potential customer. And if that's the case you're better off reading You've Got 8 Seconds.
Not freefall
That is so awesome!
> I am not really wanting to get into a debate about Marxism. However the ideas that have spawed from Marxism probably killed 100 million people last century. So I don't really give much credence to them and you aren't going to convince me otherwise.

I don't believe anyone mentioned Marxism or Communism anywhere in this thread. But no matter...

I'd love to hear an analysis of all deaths that capitalism has caused. And yes, I'm counting wars over resources, starvation, lack of medical care.. You know, the same way capitalists count against communists. Lets compare apples to apples.

And for a statement: I don't believe communism is a way forward. It's a 200 year old idea, that when it was implemented multiple times, has ugly failure modes. And.. the citizens end up trading one master (capitalist) for another (communist overseer).

The rest of this "Crony" vs "Corporate" seems like a word definition war. How about some good definitions before we move on.
When the alternative is making multiple calls to gather all the data you need, then yes the benefits outweigh the added complexity. But not for minimal API calls.
Market cap is a silly way to look at crypto.

A well-known and long-living company that went from $19k/share to $4k/share would be rightly deemed to be struggling, and folks would have concerns about its long-term potential.
Basically, because it's much easier (in time and money) to switch leases than it is to go through the hassle of buying and selling a house. There are some markets where owning is cheaper, and some markets where renting is cheaper.
>have suffered from proprietary software companies not supporting their OS/distros (Adobe, Microsoft, just to pick a few)

And here lies the main point - they believe that many users will simply reject their proprietary software on principle. If the community was seen to embrace proprietary, which is what I'm calling for in the article, they might just support Linux.

Also worth noting that the largest contributor to the Linux kernel is... Microsoft.
>> I absolutely support FOSS. The point of the article was to debunk some of the perceived "evils" of proprietary software.

I took it as a complaint about FOSS fundamentalists. There has always been tension between FLOSS and proprietary, and I didn't feel you added anything of value to that discussion.
This is a great/dumb idea. Let's brainstorm some more life ruining actions:

* Create an alarm to go off for every 5 mins for the rest of the day

* Share what you last copied to clipboard on Social Media

* Text a sexual suggestive gif to a random contact
If it makes you feel any better I have been cut off from my CB account since around the time I opened it, because your ID (for password recovery) seemingly has to be issued by the country you live in. (And their customer support is non-existant). My bad for being unwilling to become a UK citizen for a few steak dinners worth of bitcoin I guess!
The only way this unplugs is if it was loose to begin with.
There's nothing wrong with paid software. I'm happy to pay as long as it's free.
Spy on products and sellers at AliExpress
Dead sperm whale found in Indonesia had ingested '6kg of plastic'
Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people
Long story short: I've been working in this position for a couple of years with a colleague at the same level as me. We both lead a few product team giving them advice on technical implementation, best practices and architecture.

I've been doing a lot of work to clean up the debt that was accumulated and, meanwhile, I improved the reliability and the efficiency of the infrastructure. I wrote common components and library to avoid duplication and shared it with wiki pages on how to implement certain things correctly.

On the other hands, my colleague, is more focus on building relationships and acting like he's the manager even tho he's not. In a couple of circumstances he event tried to give me orders which is not what he supposed to do. In meetings with our manager he brag on stuff that I did sharing it as a "we did", while when he does something alone (which most of the time asks to me as well) he would say "I did".

Most of the team members know it as they always asks technical informations to me. Most of the new architectural design has been done by myself same as the library that they use daily bases.

This kind of behaviour was ok at the beginning but since our boss left and he got promoted as manager is not sustainable anymore.

So here I'm asking for some advice. I started to look for a new job already, other than that I can't find a way to make my life easier has it might required some time (European market is not that good) and I got a break to travel a bit and clean up my mind.
What is interesting, the losses of those who got in after $10k could be approximated by analyzing daily trading volumes, and the sum of loses is about to exceed by far the .com loses.

Such a huge loss of real, usually borrowed, money must affect the economy, at least in US and Asia.
Yeah, that too, though I was thinking of this:

http://www.vivo.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/reprod/semenev...
The Importance of Learning Primitive Communication Methods
The price has been bouncing off the 6k magic "resistence" for ages now. Each bounce reaching lower and lower highs. It was only a matter of time before the that energy disapated.

Technical analysis of stocks and efficient markets is a fool's tool, but BTC is fool's money so TA is an efficient tool.

Yes, I did explain this prediction half a year back to my BTC holding friends. As you can imagine; they ignored the advice.

It has taken 10 months for the trail off in public interest to feed into the pricing model. In those 10 months a great many tricks and scams have been played to prop up the price, we'll see more news about those tricks unwinding soon.
About 200 years ago it was a similar thing for 'shave tails': new Cavalry recruits. A shave tail would go on a spur ride (earn their spurs) and get their butt handed to them for about two weeks straight, or until they got the hang of riding a horse in a safe manner.
Deep Neural Networks for Accurate Predictions of Crystal Stability
Investing in crypto currencies because you believe in blockchain technology doesn’t make sense. Any good use case I’ve thought of doesn’t require public chain.

So why invest in a specific crypto? How is Bitcoin fundamentally more valuable than Ethereum? How are either fundamentally more valuable than EOS? As a currency or store or value, each have essentially the same properties. Leaks in the ecosystem, like scam ICO and products like Tether only siphon money from the market. At least gold or silver doesn’t have this problem.
2019 Heidelberg Laureate Forum Call for Participation
To be absolutely clear, and I've made this point several times in the article - I am not dismissing the open source community.

I am dismissing those that reject proprietary software on principle.

I also made it clear that we would open source our software if we could find a business model that would work for us.