skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The WASP elite was, relative to most elites that human history has graced our species with, a very decent one. (Was there racism and corruption? Of course. But they aspired to decency, a trait not seen in the current elite, and not seen in most elites. I'm not calling them good in absolute terms, but in relative terms.)

So, in the middle of the 20th century, they did an unusually decent (and unusual) thing. They accepted their own decline. For one example, they invented the SAT, whose initial result was to increase the number of Jewish students admitted to Ivy League universities by about an order of magnitude. (Then there was a racist backlash, which is where we get all that extracurricular bullshit in US college admissions. Elites are not monolithic.) Why'd they accept their own decline? I think they were self-aware enough (again, as a group) to recognize that there was no choice. Without letting FDR save capitalism via the New Deal, the U.S. would have fallen into economic collapse and political chaos, and not been able to fight the two-front (cultural, and then actual) wars against fascism and communism. The stakes were existential. When facing a choice between the risk of obliteration (but also the assurance that, if there was a country left, they'd rule it) and gentle decline (to merely quite rich, but not a ruling class) they took the right path. Very few elites do. Most let their countries burn.

What happened next is not a meritocratic invasion. The global elite (which is much more anti-democratic) stepped in. That's been bad for all of us. The WASPs care enough about the country not to destroy it. The global elite is not tied to any one nation, and doesn't care.

Upper-middle-class "meritocrats" are not the ruling class, and the people in charge have more in common with Russian oligarchs and Arab oil sheikhs than with either (a) the somewhat callous but stately and pro-democratic (or at least republican, with no reference to the political party/megachurch) WASPs or (b) the well-educated technology adepts who top out in the upper-middle-class. In the US, the current elite tend to look like WASPs because, in fact, many are ethnically WASPs, but their ideology comes from a dirtier source: a global elite whose values come mostly from places where political corruption is just another perk of being rich, where democracy is ridiculed, and where the poor are held in open contempt (and exploited, and often shut down violently) by the rich.
Touché. But you understand what I'm getting at.
Even if you take the dictionary definition there is still a lot of room for interpretation. Who defines what equality exactly includes? And please don't post the definition of equality now ;-)
I can't change the pastebin now.
The core of the proof-of-work concept is that the work is easier to verify than to do the work again. If a way can be found to do that with arbitrary computation, it would be a very big deal.
Call it what you will, but health insurance that doesn't cover preventive care and pre-existing conditions would be all but useless to me, personally, due to expensive ($15,000/month, give or take) preventive treatment necessary to properly treat severe hemophilia.

With that said, hard cases make bad law, and the argument against immediate coverage of pre-existing conditions — healthy people will rationally choose to remain un- or underinsured, then seek more comprehensive coverage when diagnosed with something that requires expensive treatment — is reasonable.

It's also a decent argument for universal health care at a reasonable minimum standard.
Preventing double-spends is useful work.
The fascinating thing about this idea is that you'd get an actual commodity money. Solving useful problems like protein folding is something people pay for, it has intrinsic value. This would be utterly unlikely Bitcoin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_money
Overstock to become biggest retailer to accept Bitcoin currency
Question: If BTC were to disappear overnight, could all these machines be retooled to do something else? Or are they so specifically made that their only possible purpose is coin mining?
You can't "run away" from a job in the US. You can leave whenever you want.
I have a very similar product in development, but security concerns have made me cautious to release it so early. I notice you are not even using a self-signed SSL cert on your site. Can you describe any existing security measures and plans for security? With the recent Bitcoin 'disappearances' I think this issue is paramount.

Also, how do you plan to mitigate exchange pricing and support, considering Coinbase seems overloaded with orders. Or are you dealing strictly in Bitcoin for now?
It is clear that you chose "defect" in the real world.. over time. It is in fact theoretically impossible to escape this consequence as time approaches infinity. Think about it, you are constantly leaving traces of you "defecting" and not leaving traces of not defecting. Eventually this catches up. This is also an example of the principle of karma, aka cause and effect. You can't escape fundamental effects of causes forever.
Wrong. The less energy mining equipment consume, the more money they make. It's the hashing rate versus the cost of power.
Not possible- Having the calculation perform some alternate activity would destroy the utility of the calculation for protecting bitcoins.

The best you could do is create a cryptocurrency that requires similar hardware to the hardware used for other tasks, so that this hardware is commoditized. This would help other fields indirectly.
This site (http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/) seems to do a 'flops' type conversion from the hashrate on the bitcoin network.

Currently at 108239.28 Petaflops which is 5400x the performance of the IBM Sequoia. This is approximately the quoted amount of 4500. While I don't agree with the idea that a hashrate can be converted into flops because its more bitwise opts others are drawing similar calculations to UCSD.

Also a bit more of a discussion on this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7675.20
Yep, their only purpose is bitcoin mining.
A communist is someone who supports the rights and equality of the poor. It makes me sad to think that there are still bitter people who hate the poor so much that they oppose communism.
Year of smart glasses?

It's a half assed product, introduced years before it's any good for use, and it's main real utility is that of a smaller Go Pro-style live action camera.

Plus, it didn't even make any dent in the market.

It's not like Google search in 1996 or the iPhone in 2007, products that immediately changed whole markets.

So, no, 2014 would not be the year of "smart glasses".

With the display technology used and the battery life they have, those things are useless, except for showing off.

Except for the "eye level live action camera" part, you can do the same things with your smartphone, better and faster.
In addition to the points already mentioned by others, it has a really elegant syntax which mirrors Haskell while maintaining accessibility.
PDF typeset with LaTeX edition: http://www.fisica.net/mecanicaclassica/struture_and_interpre...
He fucks you over and that is eventually a non-cooperation in an even bigger iterated prisoner's dilemma game.

Unless you willingly let him fuck you in the ass again, then his psychopathic strategy will no longer work on you, and you will at least not cooperate, and possibly retaliate resulting in a net loss. In fact, this is extremely likely because it's in your incentive now to disincentivize him from further fucking you because you want to send the proper signal.
Some of them are violent but some are not. It's not too hard to find people who would not use violence an sell wee for example.
Yes, because that's just what your country needs, right?

(Whatever it is)
Actually not really if you set up an index on C:\ it is quite fast, which is basically the main difference. But there is not one by default so you need to add it.
wow.
such blog.
much words.
No, no they don't. Power is a cost for miners, so it eats into profits. They want to increase hashing rate and minimize power consumption.
Now that several exchanges have implemented DOGE/BTC, I've been joking that I should build a HFT bot in Rust.

I probably won't, but the idea is amusing.
Mining does some useful work: it keeps the network secure. So it's not entirely useless. I agree that the proof-of-work could be built on a more useful algorithm rather then simply finding hashes smaller than a certain value.

Remember though that the proof-of-work calculation needs to be hard to generate and also easy to verify. If protein folding isn't easy to verify, it won't work as the basis of a decentralized consensus network such as Bitcoin.
Not true. Since using more electricity costs more money, bitcoin miners have an incentive to use less electricity. Their incentives are to maximize hashes/s/watt.
But your assertion seems to be that new technologies should be above criticism by virtue of the inevitable march of technology itself, part of which is driven by consumerism and hype, and not any process which necessarily judges technology on its own merit. It hasn't yet been proven that smart glasses are going to be as transformative as gunpowder, or as revolutionary as the internet, or what have you. Maybe they will be, maybe not. Yes, an attempt by Google and other companies to push the new paradigm onto consumers will inevitably be made, but that's not necessarily the same as those technologies being an evolutionary leap forward.

Some of the criticism is probably knee-jerk discomfort and something new and nostalgia for the simplicity of the past, sure, but pessimism when properly applied is just part of the process of trying to look past the cloud of marketing spin and fannish enthusiasm surrounding an emerging technology and discern its actual relevance.
Almost finished Vol I of Feynman Lectures On Physics. So far, Im picking up on the same enthusiasm and joy. A real pleasure to read.

Euclid's Elements too for geometry is fantastic. (I think reading "from the horses mouth" is necessary but not sufficient. With guys like Newton especially, since there are no translation barriers (for us English speakers), and they are quite relatable.)

I have noticed that excursions? in history of a topic; its people, places, culture, enhance the quality of the book. Feynman goes on historical asides, as does say, Apostol (in his calculus texts), and it has been a while but I believe SICP does too. I think the teaching of something should be coupled with its history.

In this same vein, I'm too am interested in a book covering evolution and biology, but I have not found one, or heard of one, so if anybody knows I would greatly appreciate it. Two good bio books I have read are The Selfish Gene, and The Machinery Of Life (Goodsell), but they're more auxiliary.
I'm a bit confused by this statement:

"Cannot say the same thing for middleware technologies, such as BizTalk or NServiceBus. Databases? Out of question."

I'm curious about his view that middleware is not here to stay. Surely the multiple vendor cloud trend that enterprises are following (Google + salesforce + Microsoft + oracle) - because no one vendor does everything - means middleware is going to be more prevalent in the future.

Thoughts?
I use PHPStorm and encountered a wrap problem where if I had a space somewhere it dropped to a new line.

file > settings > general > (uncheck "wrap when typing reaches margin")
Setting up SSL even for small sites can be a HUGE PITA. Adding a Custom Cert to CloudFlare will cost you 200 a month[1].

It shouldn't be hard and you should have to pay such a premium for something that should just work by default. I helped create a Front-end PaaS a little while back[2] that believed in that philosophy, we worked hard to lower the barrier of entry for most things, including SSL.

The reality is understanding SSL, Encryption and everything involved is still overwhelming for most people. This article helps but we need more services to stop gouging people for doing or trying to do the right thing.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/plans
[2] https://blog.harp.io/posts/harp-platform-now-public
Thanks for the numbers, but a SHA-256 hash takes a lot more than one "flop".
No incident or action happens in a void. A lot of the plans were previously tooling around, but the realization I am putting my wife's life in such significant danger through aggressive driving was made very real by the death of my co-worker and his wife.

The amount of required introspection on a weekly basis to re-value or evaluate the various components into question is exhaustive. As an adult I am forced to make long term choices, like mortgages, marriages, the like.

I would not get far if I was mentally re-evaluating the status of my marriage every week. Or the investments I have considered 'long-term', but these things are all instrumental in making the kinds of radical changes that were/are required to move on from here.
Given that energy efficiency is mostly a function of the underlying silicon, miners don't have much control over it (especially once everyone has converged on 28 nm).
Thanks. We've been segregating authenticated vs non-authenticated traffic to different domains for a few years now (we had the same realization as moot), but I was unaware about this specific exploit related to TLS compression.

That said, it seems on nginx TLS compression was not enabled by default, so we are ok (for this known vulnerability).
the title alone reeks of future foot in mouth
You are pretending that miners somehow do not double their income when they double the number of mining rigs they operate. A bitcoin miner makes more money by devoting more electrical power to Bitcoin, regardless of the hashes-per-second-per-watt ratio.
Electronic Manufactures are Using Copyright to Keep Repair Manuals Secret
Lions Released to Deal with Hamptons Deer Problems
Primecoin is designed to search for prime numbers, which is at least somewhat useful.

Ripple Labs is giving away Ripple (XRP) for donating your computing power to solving scientific problems at https://www.computingforgood.org/.
Because he was the best available candidate by far.

Yes, ACA has problems. We would have been better with a system modeled after that of Britain or Germany or Japan (or pretty much any other first world country...). Republicans, however, made sure that nothing like that could come about, leaving the only choices ACA or nothing. Going with ACA gives us something that can at least be tweaked up to first world standards.

The other candidates and their party platforms were also terrible on science, terrible on the environment, and clueless on economics.

Finally, many of us figured that if we elected him again, maybe Republicans would get it through their heads that the first time was not a fluke, and we elected him because we actually WANTED the things he had campaigned on the first time, and stop basing their ENTIRE strategy around "do the opposite of whatever Obama says".
They can be used to power another decentralized consensus system. Currency is only one application being used on the bitcoin network. If bitcoin dies for whatever reason (political or technical) the hashing power could still be used to secure and build another decentralized consensus network that could have many other functions other than being a currency: such as ways to send stocks, bonds, smart property and so on... in an entirely decentralized manner.
Do you think that is a sensible equivalence?

A Radeon 7990 gets around 1.2 gigahash/second and 8.2 teraflops.

The ASICS are of course skewed towards hashes from there, and I guess the supercomputer could be more skewed towards floating point than the GPU, but a large factor seems more likely than a fraction.
TLS depends on a central certificate authority to vouch for the identity of the site you're visiting. If you don't have a centralized authority, a web-of-trust model is the best you can do.
The Short Stack Advantage
I was able to get basic SSL working with basically no effort just by Googling around for 'SSL nginx'; the Mozilla article doesn't tell you to choose a ciphersuite, it tells you 'use this one unless you know what you're doing'. And then if you scroll down it gives you some configuration directives you can just copy-paste into your browser config file.

I'm not even an ops guy and I was able to get it working for my (granted, fairly simple) site without any pain.
big fan of greenshot here. They've added good features over time. Now it captures transparent rounded corners and you can add shadows, ripping effects. I still with their text feature was stronger but it's certainly does the job. You can also share to a dozen different sources.
Hey Doublerebel!
There is no actual implementation of a Bitcoin wallet on our site - nor will there be. It's a static website that offers images and assets for printing.

The idea is that people want to gift Bitcoin to others -- there are many means for doing that -- and we don't want to supplant those options with a new wallet service.
> /s/watt

Well that's one way of writing /joule, I suppose.
Interestingly, a friend of mine who is a professional videographer and who tried Google Glass told me he could think of a few uses for it in his field, but he couldn't come up with any reason why he would use one as a general purpose device.
The discussion seems to be here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6944118 (reuters.com) (274 comments)

Here are a few of the other submissions of this story:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6948070 (theguardian.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6947405 (tomsguide.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6946039 (reddit.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6945486 (cnet.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6945017 (reuters.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6944861 (arstechnica.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6944518 (theverge.com)
Startup Weekend Damascus
Basically, the author is saying that the absurdity of Dogecoin made him realize that most currency is intrinsically worthless, with the only reason that it has value being a state power or arbitrary group of people (as in the case of cryptocurrency) has assigned it one... also known as fiat.

A very old and evident observation.

Not exactly enlightening, but there you go.
The reward for mining is currently 25 BTC/block, plus transaction fees. That's pretty high at today's conversion rates, but it will be cut in half continually over time. If miners spend more money in power and cooling than the reward, they're losing money. Even with deflation, the amount of money they can spend on power will go down.
There are fundamental reasons why this can't work, such as the need for proof of work to be progress free, to build off previous work, and security vulnerabilities which arise if proofs if work are not intrinsically worthless.
Show HN: goPop: An iPhone case that electronically manages your cards
Secret To High-temperature Superconductivity May Be In Universal Ripple
Keep up with the newest developer services.
To be clear, _I_ already knew this. I'm saying that I think that it might lead _other_ people to reflect upon the nature of money.
Does "Dogecoin was began" make sense?
Yes, Glass may fail, but it seems obvious to me that the perpetual shrinking of technology is an unstoppable trend that was set in motion decades ago. It turns out that computers, and phones, and recording devices, and the internet are all really useful technologies, and people like having access to them wherever they go with as little hassle as possible. As time approaches infinity, the likelihood of our brains becoming hosts to powerful artificial computers approaches 100%.

It's going to happen. It already is happening. And it's been happening. Trying to stop it is impossible, and merely complaining about it gets us nowhere. I have no problem with a bit of pessimism, but if it's going to be so pervasive, I'd at least like it to be constructive or useful in some way. Less "omg this is happening" and more "this is happening, how can we adapt?"
I really wish your comment said "There would be no feasible way to implement such a system because <X>, and it probably wouldn't be desirable because <Y>." I said "maybe this would be good" in hopes that others would have interesting ideas about whether or not it would be.
Please, for the love of doge, put the meme phrases in the correct order.
In terms of DRM the bootloader is not locked. The 'locking' is only a security toggle.
Why is this, when forces working with the German government itself can apparently swoop in unannounced? How is there any advantage to living in Germany? I'm genuinely interested in understanding.
Might be a regionalism, or I might just suck at writing. I wondered that upon a re-read, but decided to leave it because I couldn't tell.
there was a spike in dogecoin prices last week, making it the 9th most valuable cryptocurrency: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/bitcoin-alternative-dogecoin-soars-...

though it's dropped back to 14th since.

with the viral aspect of it, I can see dogecoin actually gaining some traction. It would be funny if it unseats the likes of namecoin, primecoin or other serious cryptocurrencies.
It's probably already been done. The values of two cryptocoins track their exchange rate very closely, and vica versa. I can only assume arbitrage bots are already operating.
This is true, but the reward is currently far larger than the electrical consumption, so mining is currently mostly a contest to bring more hardware online.

(kicking CPUs and GPUs out of the contest probably did a lot to lower power consumption, but I wonder if the growth of the network has overshadowed that)
Which part is amusing? I already operate a HFT bot written in Go.
You are making a terrible apples vs. oranges comparison.

A bitcoin hash is about 1900 32-bit integer operations [1]. This is comparable to 1900 32-bit floating point operations, not one(!). Because most CPU/GPU, when they can execute N integer ops per cycle, can also execute N floating ops per cycle.

So the ratio clearly is in the ~1000 order of magnitude.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Why_a_GPU_mines_faster_than_a_CPU...
To get the right answer, you have to ask the right question.

I don't think you're asking people if they will 'pay for such widget'. You are asking 'would they pay for this service'. The service being a reviews service on their website.

Don't people already pay for this service on their website? Isn't this similar to uservoice?
(This is pretty much exactly what this library does--that code is almost identical to lines 89 through 101 in flingfd_send()--so not quite "alternatively" ;P. It also implements receiving the file descriptor, as well as opening the socket, and has some error checking; but the code is only one file with fewer than ten functions wrapping around unix domain sockets.)
No, it's not possible.

To lead a country one has to be elected - hence his public position must reflect core beliefs of the majority of the electorate.
Increasing hashing only increases the proportion you get from subsidy + fees. It's a zero-sum game. If the other guy increases his hashing rate, you will lose out. Eventually, at some point, energy cost dominates.