skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Propsal: Inner value of BTC == Power cost?
To continue the debate about the inner value of 1 Bitcoin. How about to link the value of 1 Bitcoin to the price of the power needed to create/maintain that one bitcoin?
Until mining is running, until all bitcoins are mined this would be the price to create one bitcoin at current tech level (means it decreases with ASICS/fpgas), from the point of all bitcoins mined it would be the price of power needed to confirm a one bitcoin transaction within a block.
The price per kWh would be the mean price worldwide.
>It has done quite well so far and I can't think of a better global currency with no one controlling it and with the same utility as today.

Well, how about gold?

>Maybe gold a long time ago but still doesn't fully compare

Why not? In addition you have:

a) no logs
b) no reason to trust some advanced crypto stuff (that might collapse 10 years from now due to some hole/collision/whatever discovered in the algorithms).
c) acceptable everywhere already

Oh, and it doesn't lose 70% of it's value in 2 days, like BitCoin has done in the past (from what I read).
The hiding place in 3D - Anne Frank House (virtual tour)
Have you tried having a read of The Non-designers Design Book?

While it won't make you a master designer, it will give you some basics. Notably CRAP (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity) and the basics of colour theory and typography.

I found it to be an extremely easy read with good exercises for people like me who are somewhat aesthetically challenged.
This is not the kind of content I come to Hacker News for.
Yes, I believe the country I live in will handle this better. This is our solution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repos...
Who guards the gardians ?
I agree. I'm a great designer. I design my own UIs all the time. The only problem is that everyone else hates them...
On the other hand, writing about your work may actually help you take it further, as it forces you to organize things in your head (a bit like rubber duck problem solving). That's my experience, at least.
"Be confident enough in your own adaptiveness and aptitude to realise that you could learn almost anything in a very small amount of time, if you really wanted to."

I don't know about that. I guess "know how to do something" and "do something that actually useful" aren't quite the same.
First let me explain, what I was replaying to.

The OC argument to seems to be, bitcoin and beany babes are expression of the same idea and beanie babes flopped. Ergo bitcoin will fail.

Hence the question about greenbacks, which are now not worth a continental.

Yes, you can say that greenbacks are doing great, comparatively speaking, but than if greenbacks ~= dollars and beanie babies ~= bitcoins, than you are bound to say that.. beanie babies are at least moderately successful

Which if I understood the OC correctly it is exactly the opposite of what was implying.

Cheers
Euler's identity for 1st graders
I am pretty sure I have done gem installs as the current user with the Debian packages. It could be that they changed something recently though.
I find it interesting how particularly readable the Go code on there is compared to Lisp. And I'm not talking syntactical fluff, I'm talking semantics - the Lisp dances around doing macros, toggling compiler switches (including nonstandard ones that are specific to SBCL), redefining things... the Go just says "do this then do that". And its speed is roughly comparable.
I keep a list of unread email with ideas as their subjects and work my way through them, converting each to a blog entry.
Even there, I rarely run into problems that can't be easily worked around with structures and what not. The exception I come across is when pulling values from a database when I don't know the format they're stored in at the table level, but then that's pretty bad coding practice anyway

I will concede that you've probably written more sophisticated routines than I so it may just be a case that I've not ran into problems because I've not needed to run into problems (if that makes any sense).
Possibly, but am I wrong?

As far as I understand, this is quite a real problem: no country is willing to receive most of these prisoners, except countries to which the U.S. cannot reasonably send them. Public opinion in the U.S. is hostile towards accepting them as refugees. A few have been placed to Palau, because sending them home to China would be bad and Palau is in no position to refuse such a request. Is that fair? Hardly.

In the U.S., lots of people in principle like to close Gitmo but in practice want the prisoners go to somewhere else, not settle as their own neighbours.

Sorry, I don't have good advice for what to do.
I'd disagree, just because people should respond fast when needed doesn't mean they get interrupted all the time. In a physical location, you have the option of interrupting someone when necessary, and you have the option of carrying out a real time conversation with quick response cycles when necessary.

Since these things are often necessary, you need to be able to have that happen in a remote environment.

I agree with you though on one important thing - issues of interruption have little to do with remote/local. I try to interrupt people as little as possible either way, but I don't want remote working to sacrifice on real time communication when necessary.
pretty much a repeat of:
http://thecodinglove.com/
http://lesjoiesducode.tumblr.com/

source:
http://martinvalasek.com/blog/pictures-from-a-developers-lif...
> the fact that the SAT, even when adjusted for economic disparity, is still skewed towards white men,

Did you mean to say asian women?
I have found that when I have such problems, I'm usually missing one of three things:

Sometimes I need a clearer idea of what needs to be done. Is it vague? Make it more specific so you know where to get started. Is it open-ended? Give it an end-point so you know how far you are from being finished. Am I even thinking of the very next step I need to take?

Sometimes I need a clearer idea of why I'm doing it. It's very easy to dissociate tasks from the original motivations, and it starts feeling like just "stuff you gotta do". So I take a minute and either re-associate the task in front of me with some larger or longer-term goal that is presently appealing (i.e. it doesn't have to be about "passion"), or I come up with a completely ad-hoc motive like turning it into a game or giving it some kind of constraint that makes it a little more challenging. Sometimes I find that the thing I'm trying to do is actually something I don't care about the original purpose of anymore, which quite suddenly makes it easy to stop and move on to something else.

Sometimes I find that I'm missing a sense of confidence that it's what I should be doing right now. It may be that I'm trying to work on a very unimportant thing and should switch to one of the things I keep being distracted by, but I have to consciously compare them before I can realize that that's why I'm getting distracted. Other times, I realize that the things that are bubbling up in my mind can wait, and the act of actually thinking about them and realizing that puts them to rest. I don't try to force myself into working on "the most important thing" at all times.

I try to work out these questions only when I happen to notice that I'm not really "doing" the thing that I'm supposedly doing, whether it's work or fun or even sleep. I don't try to pre-emptively make sure I have these things, either. -- I think of it as a way to answer the brain's objections to what you're doing rather than a way to force it to do what you want.

Disclaimer: I am not a very good entrepreneur.
The Desks Of 23 Successful Tech People
1. Drop molten glass in a bucket of water.

2. Let it cool down, take it out.

3. Hammer the head of the drop and it won't break.

4. Nick the thin tail and the whole thing will explode.

Here's a GIF - http://i.imgur.com/opyMkMx.gif

Here's the vid - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe-f4gokRBs#t=104s
The CPU doesn't get that hot. On a machine with an Athlon II 240e cgminer uses ~18% CPU vs the GPU that sits at 99% load. scrypt is indeed viable on GPUs, but it depends onto the available memory bandwidth which presumably lessens the impact of FPGA/ASIC if people start to push those as LTC mining solutions.
The real reason there would have been a chance under McCain is that the press, the Democrats in the Congress, and rights groups currently co-opted by the current administration would be all over his ass to close it.

Instead we have a deafening silence from all these groups that used to squawk daily about Gitmo and other government abuses while the other guy was in office.
It is your HN karma. You earn one karma point for every upvote you receive on a comment or submission. You lose one karma point for every downvote you receive on a comment. Everybody starts with one karma point.

Some capabilities (e.g. the ability to downvote other people's comments) require you to have amassed a certain amount of karma. (I can't remember how much off-hand.)
Yes, one of my kids teachers even used a sports team analogy for "uniqueness" -- "like a hockey team needs a centre, a right winger, a defenceman and a goalie, everybody has their place".

She didn't get it when I asked where the long distance runner fit in.
I get your point, but when the performance requirement is put on the table (hence a need for optimizations), in the first place I wouldn't choose Lisp.
I think this is an unnecessary over reaction. You're confusing an acknowledgement when someone knocks (basic human communication) and being interrupted all the time.

Acknowledging communication can also be: "I'll be with you in 20 minutes". That gives me the option to (in 95% percent of the cases) respond with "cool" and plan my own time accordingly, and in 5% of the cases to respond with "sorry, we really need to deal with this now, and here's why".

How fast you respond when someone tries to communicate with you has very little to do with remote/local. I love remote environments, they have huge upsides. Not being able to go to real time when necessary though is a major problem.
Totally agree - I'd like to add one huge benefit more: you create great longterm value for your future customers. Sometimes people encounter blogposts which are couple of years old and contact you - it's an awesome felling to help people in the long run. If you keep on blogging readers will follow!
This article actually makes me angry, because this kind of attitude is why I have to deal with such on amount of clueless hacks, who call themselves something they are not. Sure, if it's between you and your mom, you can call yourself whatever you like. But if I pay you to do something, and you say you are that thing, but all you did so far is read a "... for dummies" book and plan to learn on the job - paid by me, that gets my blood boiling.
I'm all for personal growth, and I've switched careers a number of times in my life, but I came prepared with long years of study each time, and at least some experience. And I was always open about it. So, please, if you follow this guy's advice, at least make sure to be open about your _level_ of being a developer or whatever.
What did you expect him to say? I am guilty of contributing to terrorism and the purposeful killing of innocent woman and children civilians?

I like how everyone here takes this guys word for everything. It is all a government conspiracy that has put him in there. After all, the US government likes to round up random people around the world and put them in max security detainment as kind of a boredom fighting game right? Go on death row in any detention center in the world and you'll get the same story from about 95% of the inmates there. The government set them up. They are all innocent.

I think that it is always wise to look at everything that your government does with a certain level of suspicion and cynicism, but I also wouldn't bet money on a Gitmo prisoner's "honest" word either.
Been struggling with this also for my whole life. Solutions that work _for me_:

1. Before doing anything, figure out: Is this what I am flowing to do now? Or is it something else ? If I feel like I have to force myself to do something, usually I am doing it against the flow. This is why I hate dayjobs.

2. Go for a swim/run/do yoga/meditate. All of these help me to focus better, when my body is relaxed, so is the mind. Create a routine for yourself, when I relax my body right in the morning, it is usually a good day and I get things done. If I skip any of these, it is harder to sit down and stay in one place.

3. If something feels impossible, do something else. Dance, go out for a walk, practice close combat weapons, something physical.

4. Break the problem into small pieces, write those pieces down. Complete one at a time. Preferably so that each piece has different kinds of things to do, like program, then design, then do some writing. So that it keeps interesting and not just repeating the same thing all day.

Also, when I truly have to force myself to complete something, I have found one good technique to get me into the zone: put on my headphones, turn on some good trance/psytrance, and just dance into the zone for 5-10 minutes, then continue coding in this state of trance. Helps to get in to the flow.
How can you judge? "On the record", even!! Isn't one of the major problems that it's unknown whether these people are even guilty of anything or not? No trial, remember? So how can you suddenly know and decide "for the record" what any one of these prisoners will do if they get out?

Is the man in the article lying then? He says he's innocent. Of course he would. But who are you to decide one or the other?
Author here. You may also want to check out a more recent post I wrote about blogging that focuses on those "side benefits": http://nathanmarz.com/blog/break-into-silicon-valley-with-a-...
And here's the truth about startups: http://goanimate.com/video-maker-tips/the-truth-about-startu...
In Brazil, i payed USD 200
Your experience sounds familiar. Go with the flow. Let go of forcing to do something. Get inspiration. Work when you are inspired. These work for me also the best.

This is also why day jobs are so difficult and unnatural. You are forced to complete tasks that do not always come naturally.
This might be off topic but I feel that it is much easier for a designer to learn coding than for a developer to learn design. Anyone shares this feeling?
For the last 8 years, I've training myself like a Pavlovian dog.

All I need to focus is my headphones and the song programmed with the mood I want.

Many songs have come & disappeared in my playlist of "mind silence" but right now, if you play "Intro - XX" in a loop into my ears then I will sit down and work.

All that helps me is to get started.

It helps that I love my work - after I really get started, my train of thought is rarely derailed.

But despite loving it, I do need to be manipulated into putting in the first 40-50 minutes of time - every day.

And music makes me go with the flow.
Can you expand a bit on how it has gotten worse over the years? How were you better at focusing before? How do you know it has gotten worse?
I can imagine it may be especially frustrating if it is something that has been worsening over time.
Sure, be a developer AND designer, even though you may suck at design.

Some can't design, even if they do they have wasted so much time doing something which someone else can do, especially if you are on a team, or for a simple idea isn't the mantra "outsource outsource outsource"?
> As designers we’ve been put off of ‘work we don’t get paid for’ by clients-from-hell, 99designs & eLance

I'm curious - As a developer without design skills, I've used 99designs several times and was always happy with both the process and the results. Does it have a bad rep among designers? Why?
"Have you tried our website and open heart surgery package, good sir? You get a website professionally designed and developed while we open up your chest and unclog your arteries all done by our resident genius developer/designer/surgeon, Ben Howdle for just $599"
>If the price tanks well you are waiting for Magic the Gathering exchange (yes, Mt.Gox, the main place people do bitcoin conversion started out as a place to trade magic cards), you get screwed.

Repeating this crap is getting as old as the Republican trolls I know calling the President Hussein Obama.
The kWh to maintain a BTC would mean its value would be next to zero. Considering that a select few machines could maintain all the BTC on Earth (hypothetically, if one person owned all of them). A 120W machine consumes 1.1MW in a year, that means that the entire GDP of BTC could be summed up as a very small portion of the running cost of a very small coal power plant.

For BTC to get anywhere you need people earning BTC, spending it on goods (to the degree where you can spend it at a supermarket), etc. In addition you need a flow of new BTC into the market as value is added into the market (a farmer grows a crop and by doing so introduce more currency into the market, AKA Gross Domestic Product).

The 21 million BTC limit is also extremely naive. Inflation is not caused by more money being minted, it's caused by too much money being minted (when compared to the amounts of goods produced within the producing country). Money needs to flow into the market otherwise you wind up with hyper-deflation: humans, being humans, would hoard the currency and the currency would lose its liquidity. Unfortunately someone needs to valuate the value of the goods flowing into the market and decide how much money to mint based on that - a decision needs to be made which unfortunately means a controlling authority is required.

If you could remove the 21 million BTC limit and get a couple of million people to abandon their current currency (dollars, pounds, whatnot) and adopt BTC exclusively, maybe it would work - but valuating physical goods would be tricky, as right now it's valuates on the electricity-producing capacity of a country (which is definitely not its gross value).

BTC has very good motives, unfortunately the way we have set up things (and the way that humans behave) means that it's nothing more than a blue sky dream.
I read/watch less news, but those related to the world. Everyday I care less. I just read tech news, they're happier and much more interesting.
Synnefo + Ganeti = cloud software that works
Polymaths often make lasting contributions to world knowledge. It is narrow-minded to say that you don't want to learn something because of some pre-determined notion that you might not be good at that thing. Of course, saying (or suggesting) that you are proficient in something when you know that you are not is not fair. I am a programmer, but I am also an amateur designer and an accomplished artist. I am also a wannabe mathematician and one day I will write about my own accomplishments if nobody else does ;)
As an American I've come the same conclusion. But it is a cowardly conclusion. We need to take our medicine and correct the wrong-doings of Gitmo. I don't really care if it costs a couple of hundred million dollars, that's chump change compared to the federal budget.

If a guy like Nixon can get a pardon so that the country can move forward, then we can certainly do the same for whatever ahats are culpable for setting up Gitmo in the first place. Pardon the military and politicians responsible for their misguided patriotism and then start treating these unfortunate souls like humans again as one small step towards making the US live up to its lofty ideals again.
Wondering what was the reason for choosing those 16%, 32% and 48% ? Why not other bins?
How can u establish relevance of studying humanities?
takes away many designers source of income
That is patently false. I'm Greek, and I don't know any Greek (except maybe some right-wing fascists) who believes that their country was the best. Mindsets range from "it's shit" to "it might not be great, but it's my country".

Seeing Americans in movies go "best country in the world!" sounds absurd to us, and "you can't do this to me, I'm an American" sounds ludicrous.

The fact that everyone considers their country to be the best really seems to me like an American generalization. I've lived in the UK and I've had friends from a multitude of countries, and not one of them considers their country to be the best, unlike my American friends.
Interesting doesn't necessarily mean fun. Try doing something that's fun just to get yourself going.

Fun could mean coding something in a new programming language or something. It could mean writing a game or doing something mischievous. Something that increases your productivity momentum.

Once you've got yourself going it's easier to take on bigger challenges.
Also worth a read, this piece by Steve Pavlina on Overcoming News Addiction, all the way from 2006:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/09/overcoming-news-add...
My approach:

1. Low music. Better as background music. Random, any radio.

2. Shut down all Twitter apps.

3. HN procrastinator mode-on.

4. Get on doing the stuff no matter what's going outside.
Obvious plagiarism is obvious
Well, it was much better deal (50% off is quite common with jetbrains afaik) and most importantly lasted only 24 hours.

I bought a PyCharm license, just hoping I will use it. So far I've played with it for about 2 hours total. But there's still hope...
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We're talking past each other. I'm saying natural monopolies exist; you're saying they should be done as public enterprises. Those are two related but distinct things.
To head off the comments that are already starting to appear:
Correct, you can't become an expert at most things in a week and probably misrepresentative to advertise yourself as an expert if you aren't.

That's very different from approaching life with a growth mindset.

Maybe the title shouldn't be "Oh, I'm not a ..." but "Oh, I can never be a ...".
Surprisingly simple explanations of tricky cryptographic concepts. Thanks a lot!
This is congruent with my observations as well. In my experience, Europeans do see the whole "God bless America" thing as ridiculously nationalistic, the same way many Americans do (cf Parker and Stone's Team America (is that the name?)).
> In the modern world, natural resources are the limiting factor of production. It takes only a tiny percentage of the population to farm the arable land, mine iron ore, cut down and process the timber, and extract the oil. A somewhat larger percent converts those resources into the necessities of life – bread, vehicles, homes, roads, bridges, clothing, furniture, stocked grocery aisles, appliances, etc. The worker entering the economy has a problem. They must find a source of income so they can access resources and manufactured goods. But there are no unexploited resources and no surplus jobs to be had processing those resources. They need a job, but their labor is surplus and unnecessary.

This is the real problem. Everyone but a tiny percentage of the population is ... well ... not needed at all.
Danish Exceptionalism? Nah.