skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Remember when S. Hawking, E. Musk, and others warned to be cautious about the future of AI? I think the contrast defined here between the AI: HFT (High frequency trading algorithms) and 'Monkeys' (the alleged fraudsters, bashing buttons in a quick and manipulative fashion) shows already that we don't like to judge AI the same as we do with humans; while the manipulative effect of both techniques is hard to judge and compare, the argument made is mainly of another order: intent.

On the highest level both AI/HFT and Monkey do this for their own earnings. Society decides that profits out of investment are well earned because they serve some important mechanisms that allow companies to operate. HFT used this as an important argument: they add volatility to the market thus allowing more realistic prices. But the same argument can also be made by the Monkeys.

On a lower level we now start to distinguish: the Monkey techniques are manipulative and were used out of malicious intent. Some AI/HFT techniques may be manipulative but intent disguised: if the technique or decision to "manipulate" was devised by AI, who is to blame?
I'm not sure how this contradicts what I said, isn't FDIC an insurance company set up to act when your bank disappear with your money you had there ?

What if your bank is not a member of FDIC ?

It's sort of what the European Union has with those bail ins, deposits are guaranteed up to 100k but this comes from inside the bank, first from shareholders and creditors then larger accounts. Makes sense that the public should not have to pay for the failure of a private banking entity.
Draw Me Charlie Hebdo
https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate

the hash rate doesn't grow on trees.

why the hell would you doubt it would be worse? it does 7 transactions per second.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/12/03/fascinati...

here's on estimate: Bitcoin Mining Uses $15 Million's Worth Of Electricity Every Day
A store of value must be such over any given timeframe. If the balance in your savings account is worth $100 today, $50 in three months, $150 in six months, and $75 in a year, then it is a terrible store of value -- regardless of whether it's worth $200 two years from now.

Similarly, talking about imagined futures is not a convincing way to defend a currency as a store of value. If you have to posit that your money will still be there iff A, B, and C are true, then you're not going to park your money in that particular stall.
I wonder how many people were like me, in that they thought the Counterstrike version of a flashbang was representative of the real thing?

I never really considered how they worked until now.
Project Ara (Modular Phone) Live Stream
The oil price fell closer to 50% than 80% in 2014: WTI went from $110 to $53.
Unlike the baking systems "digital currency" which can be confiscated from its owner or it owner prevented from using it in certain situations (see Wikileaks) bitcoin give you complete control over your own hard earned money and the causes you choose to support.

It may not be much of a currency at the moment since banks are attempting hard to prevent its use but the freedom it gives you outweighs the risk of it being stolen if you are not careful.

Bitcoin would hurt Visa and Master Card very badly if it were adopted since it obsoletes their entire business practice.

It would also be potentially beneficial for the user since if you could purchase things with bitcoin at your local store the owner wouldn't have to pay the bank or Visa a small fee to make a transaction. That saving could be passed along to you as a reduction in price.

Now if there were any decently run services out there that could secure the average users wallets the market would pick up very fast. The biggest problem bitcoin has at the moment is all the hackers stealing the bitcoins and giving it a bad reputation in the news.
Why does his state of mind matter? I mean it matters for criminal matters, but why for civil?

Either he actually was willing to make good on his offer or he wasn't. His reasons are irrelevant.

"hope that they never get filled" is not a reason to make this a crime. If he actually refused to fill them, then sure. But hoping?
No, you hold an IOU from the bank, which is not really the same.
United and American Airlines Customer Accounts Hacked – Free Trips Booked
Hopefully a useful example, would love some comment.

I've been building https://rwt.to and https://movingjoburg.co.za with storage backed by MongoDB. Both are transit apps/websites in South Africa, could be more useful, except that we spend most of our time collecting and capturing data.

At the time I was very inexperienced (I guess I'm a bit better now?), but these are the reasons why I chose MongoDB.

1. Geospatial query support out of the box (this is during 2.0-2.2). It's now great with GeoJSON, I store routes and stations as GeoJSON, and querying them is very easy. Compare with PostgreSQL + PostGIS.

2. Some bus services have weird schedule structures, and I needed to be able to generate those schedules, I store schedules as a giant JSON file, and I can query that file to find when the next bus/train is. It's now possible with JSONB in PostgreSQL, but trying to fit that into a relational model wasn't worth the pain at the time, especially when there's always edge cases that I have to cater for at times.

3. To create a pricing engine on rwt.to, I needed a very flexible schema, because I have to cater for many cases (are there bus/train transfers, discounts, and quite different rules for those transfers and discounts). MongoDB gave me the ability to vary my schema in the instances where I needed to store different types of data. I'd rather contend with that than have a table with 100 columns to do the same. To head off on a tangent, in GTFS this data (fares) is computed and stored in the table, but I calculate fares at query-time because there's sometimes a lot of rules to consider, making calculating them and caching them like GTFS unpleasant.

4. Other reasons was because it was pleasant to work with MongoDB + Mongoose.js. This is very important as I'm the sole developer, and due to my line of work, I don't get all the time I need to work on both projects.
For my core transit data, I won't reach >20GB even when I manage to collect all the data for South Africa, so I won't have to contend with the 'big data' issues that other users would face.

PS: Out of interest, if anyone would like to try rwt.to to see how it works, here are some example links:
- https://rwt.to/*mrwF8w0u
- https://rwt.to/*mrCLEZaE
- https://rwt.to/*mrOkEDKH
I'd like something like Foldcoin where your proof-of-work is actually doing something beside keeping my home warm inefficiently.
A great game developed by a lone programmer I seldom see mentioned is "Haven & Hearth". It's developed by a (faux) company called "Seatribe", which actually consists of two people, but only one of them (Fredrik Tolf AKA loftar) does the programming while Björn Johannessen is responsible for the game assets.

It's pretty cool actually and they'll be releasing a 3D version of it at some point[1]. It's basically a survival MMO with permadeath, and hence a lot of cool stuff has emerged, like world wars and geopolitics, complete with player-run and protected trade hubs and so on. In the game there's no official carebear zones though, but if you kill another player you leave a scent that can be tracked, allowing rangers to exact justice. You also leave scents for vandalizing stuff or stealing things within staked "claims".

No game experience can beat the rush of adrenaline one gets when fighting for one's life in H&H, where you might irrevocably lose a character you've been building for a month or more, and where you get to take away that same thing from the person attacking you. It's amazing.

[1] = http://www.havenandhearth.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3797...
Yes, bitcoin mining would be worse. Provably worse.

As computers get better, traditional applications, like databases, perform better and you can either serve more customers, use cheaper (and often more efficient hardware), or do nothing and use your outdated hardware.

With bitcoin, your enemy is not the performance of the raw work you are doing (you can hash better), but the fact that everyone else also has these increases. Because of that, the limiting factor is not performance, but cost, and so over time the average cost of the bitcoin network will not go down like the cost of centralized systems do.

Let's do a thought experiment: Let's imagine that instantly all computers get 100 times faster but it costs 10 times the energy to run these faster machines (not actually that unrealistic) and the cost becomes 10 times cheaper.

Traditional centralized banks can simply use a 10th of their existing hardware to have no energy-cost increase but a 10 times increase in customers they can serve. Sure, it's a bureaucracy, so it'll roll out slowly, but they're saving money too so maybe a little faster.

Bitcoin, everyone will simply buy 10 times as much hardware since it's cheaper and they want to get a bigger bit of the pie (mining reward) before everyone else manages to buy all their hardware. You now have an equilibrium in terms of equipment cost reached again, but suddenly the hash-rate is 1000 times more and the energy consumption is 100 times more.

The above might sound a little too theoretical, but if you look at the increase in hash rate and estimates for power usage of cpus, then gpus, and then asics, you'll see that in general power consumption for bitcoin constantly increases.

You're arguing that the existing cost of banks / the existing system is high because it's legacy. Your argument doesn't say "and it's constantly, and provably, going to waste more energy as hardware gets more cost-efficient". Even if you want to claim that banks are currently less efficient (which I doubt they are), I hope the above convinces you that bitcoin over time will constantly use more energy thus resulting in an obviously more wasteful result, while banks and other centralized systems can take advantage of improvements and thus become more cost and power efficient over time.
yeah so that's why transferwise exists
2.5B is the price Microsoft paid for Minecraft.

There is approximately 1.3 Trillion Dollars in paper/coin form, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York: http://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed01.html, and that's just USD.

So yeah, anecdotal.
A small change to a large body of work does not give you copyright over the work itself. no matter how original your change is. At most only over the change itself.

Stallman's statement 'The FSF is not involved in this dispute' (about the appropriation of BSD under GPL) might be interpreted as a statement of ignorance (I don't know what is going on) or as a disclaimer of involvement (I know what is going on, but the FSF is not involved). I find both interpretations to be straining the bounds of credibility and certainly Stallman knew after Theo wrote to him.

But this is not the important issue that the thread is focused on - which are the relations between BSD and GPL. Stallman defends the appropriation of BSD code under GPL (at great length) based on a faulty interpretation of law and that interpretation needs to be put right.

The analogy of any of this to 9/11 or slavery seems rather silly.
You're not allowed to place an order you have no intention of honoring. Basically it comes down to a question of his intent rather than his actions.
I'd say it was a good strategy in light of overwhelming evidence he is connected to the site.

He's still going to prison just maybe not for the rest of his life.
It is worth nothing in that case. Why bitcoin not dogecoin or anything else? There is no special intrinsic value in bitcoin over the others, so there is still an infinite amount that can be made.
People are still upset about 1933, I see. It's an interesting case as both a huge widespread human rights violation (leaning very heavily on the concept of "public interest") while being part of a set of measures which greatly improved the productive (rather than hoarding) side of the economy.
> I have yet to see a real use case for Mongo unless you are building a Facebook clone. Can someone suggest when it is actually useful over a properly tuned relational database?

Seamless auto-sharding, supported as a first-class use case. Particularly in a cloud environment where you can have your system automatically spin up more hosts as load increases (and take them down as load drops) with zero human intervention, which is really nice.

There are plenty of alternatives in that space nowadays (more than when mongo first came out), and reasonable people can disagree over whether to use mongo rather than e.g. cassandra, riak, or shonky third-party clustering addons for mysql/postgresql, but I've yet to see an affordable relational database with out-of-the-box auto-sharding support that comes anywhere close to what mongo offers.

(Also, first-class support for async-io clients. This is about client libraries rather than the server itself, and purely an artefact of when mongo was released, but if you're calling e.g. PostgreSQL from the JVM, most of the libraries are oriented towards blocking JDBC which is "good enough" (there are valiant efforts like https://github.com/mauricio/postgresql-async but you can't use them with established higher-level libraries). Whereas every mongo library offers a callback- or future-based API, and the higher-level libraries are built around this)
12 hours until Avernum 2 hits steam.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/337850/?snr=1_7_7_151_150_...

A remake of a remake; all games made by one man.

The second era of the bedroom coder is far from over and you can still make money from it without resorting to cheap, nasty, free2play tactics.
The things that make deflation bad for traditional currencies don't necessarily apply to bitcoin. There are good arguments on both sides and no consensus like you seem to imply. This debate has been done to death so I'll defer to https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deflationary_spiral.
I finished the book recently, it was quite a long read. I can tell that the author definitely covered a wide variety of possible explanations to the reduction of violence. Was it exhaustive or not, I can't tell.

The most surprising and unsettling for me was the vivid depiction of the levels of violence as they existed in the society (or societies) even relatively recently. I kind of take it for granted that I am fairly physically secure in my everyday life, my chances to die in a war are vanishingly small, and chances to be robbed not that much higher. Makes me grateful that I was not born just a few hundred years ago, and of course that I live in the more developed part of the world.
I'm doing so quite deliberately. Wasn't it obvious?

One of the ostensible goals of a white supremicist group is to protect the interests of white people. I feel perfectly justified valuing the interests of, say, my race, over some other race.

As a moral matter, I don't see why my white supremicist group is somehow less legitimate than your state.

(Note that I don't actually hold the views I espouse above, I'm just writing in parallel language. Most of the people I care about are not of the same race or nationality as me, so both nationalism and racism are quite silly for me.)
I am available to travel to client site for up to 30% of the time. The rest I will be located in Romania.
Bitcoin is not ready for for pure bitcoin dealings, Coinbase is on the right track for now we need services that are basically abstractions over another currency.

Pure bitcoins dealing will start getting adopted by the average folk first once the availability and ease of use problem is solved.
Interactive Apple Watch Demo
This isn't better. It encourages savers to be reckless in their choice of bank, and thus banks to be reckless in their lending policies, because the profits of risky loans are privatised while the losses are socialised. The ultimate loser is everybody, because the cycle of bank bailouts can only be sustained by printing money, devaluing everyone's savings and damaging the economy by degrading economic signals. You might think you reap a benefit by being able to trust the security of your deposits, but trust me, any benefit is on average far, far outweighed by the costs.
Not really. Maybe some products have an attribute that others don't. Maybe you want to query by that attribute. The query won't turn up products without that attribute. Maybe that's ok. Like if you wanted to find all shoes with black laces you can just query for that. Tractors don't even have laces and so they don't come up in the results.

In a sql db, every single thing needs to fit into a flat schema with nesting done by relations. Additionally, it's very rigid. Maybe you just don't want to set up a laces table, and 4000 other tables for every little attribute of every product. Of course this is not how you would do it in real life, there are better ways. Mongo is one of those ways.

Saying that Mongo is good for nothing is just as dumb as saying that Mongo is good for everything. In 2015, the Mongo backlash is just as tired as the Mongo hype.
I agree with all your points. My point was that Bitcoin would still offer benefits over other currencies even if it didn't completely replace the traditional banking system.
Four ways to improve the performance of multi-threaded applications
> until the distribution centers are pillaged by regional warlords

The security robots should deal with warlords quickly.
I'm not saying people should be putting money into Bitcoin now because they should assume A, B, and C will be true.

What I'm saying is that there's no reason to assume that you won't see Bitcoin's value stabilize e.g. ten years from now, and Bitcoin become a useful store of value from that point forward.

Or, to put it another way, just because the Bitcoin that exists today is a bad store of value, doesn't mean that "Bitcoin is a bad store of value" is an immutable fact about Bitcoin. It could just be a fact about today.
Nicotine, apparently: http://examinedexistence.com/nicotine-as-a-smart-drug/

NB:

1. I have not tried this

2. Obviously don't take as part of a cigarette
I am delighted to see competitions are still being arranged with BWAPI. A few years ago I was meaning to participate in the AIIDE competition but didn't manage to cut out enough spare time to finish then. Looks like there's still new chances.
Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature has been pretty thoroughly debunked here:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/reality-denial-apologetics-for-...
Does this mean fp-complete has gained traction and is growing as a company? Or is this based on funding?

Either way, this sounds like an excellent opportunity for Haskell programmers.

Will you be hiring engineers with professional experience or also programmers fresh out of college?
Why should such comparison be unreasonable? The fact that a compiler internally produces C/Assembly/Brainfuck/whatever code to produce the final binary should be relevant only for computer science theorists, not for the majority of the users out there (like me).

Also, I find one of your statements quite contradictory: by saying that Rust's compiler "is written in itself", you seem to imply that Nim is not. But this is not true: Nim's compiler is almost 100% pure Nim.

(Last but not least: to me it seems not true that Nim "only compiles to C", as it provides multiple backends. See here: http://nim-lang.org/backends.html .)
I don't think you see many things. Like just how widely Bitcoin has already become. Just yesterday I read about 10,000 Spanish atms being converted to bitcoin.

"No interest rate"

Why would there be? There's no risk. There isn't a government of Bitcoinlandia with a debt and deficit(s) it needs to finance.

Whatever currency you're holding now isn't paying you a real rate of interest. Your stupidity is clearly of the American variety so those US dollars you buy your gmo foodstuffs with has lost 96-98% of it's value the past 41/42 years. Why do you think a Coke no longer cost nickel?

When you deposit money in a bank, you're loaning them your money. It's no longer yours and when they run into trouble with their trillions in deriatives, guess whose on the hook for it? Why you, unsecured creditor. http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/11/warning-bank-de...

"and you have to secure it yourself?"

Yeah and that ass you were born with, eventually you'll have to wipe it yourself because mom won't be around forever.

Clearly it isn't for you.

"Bitcoin is the electronic version of "let's buy a lot of gold and stash it somewhere"."

Do you have any idea how well one would have done the past decade had they 'stashed' some gold?

It's hard to believe people like you actually exist. I'm looking for some sarcasm but all am seeing is a statist shill.

Your taking some sort of perverse thrill in other people losing money speaks to your low character.
Man in a ‘vegetative state’ for 12 years, wakes to tell incredible story
Gold's value in industrial uses is a fraction of its market value, just like the value of a dollar bill for industrial uses (wallpapering, rendering to make paper, burning for heat etc etc) is a fraction of its market value too. Ultimately all currencies are overvalued because they represent the stored savings energy of all deferred purchases. One commodity must fulfil this function (allowing people to defer the completion of trades) and that commodity must be valued above its "inherent" value.
You incur two sets of transaction fees and bid/offer spreads, so it's quite a pricey way of doing a transaction. And you lose any prospect of getting your money back in the event of a dispute.
HA! You got him. A gold star for you sir.
Thanks, I didn't know that. What's the benefit of using PostgreSQL though if the functionality is the same?
Pardon my ignorance, but why is it possible to change your mind afterward and cancel the order? Why does the market not clear orders irrevocably (executing automatically) as soon as they are matched? Why this "sending" disengaged from actual market actions?
A trucker trying to hack the haulage industry
Well the money laundering from Silk Road and Silk Road 2 etc (eg $70k on a Tesla) was probably much of it.
Want Your BLUE iTunes Icon Back? #Yosemite UX Fix
> Bitcoin would hurt Visa and Master Card very badly if it were adopted since it obsoletes their entire business practice.

How do I do a chargeback on a purchase paid for via Bitcoin?
My savings account currently runs about 2% above inflation.
In Chrome I get comic sans and in IE I get a cursive font. Is that the joke?
Creating a distributed Redis system using Docker
When you're using libraries, you're actually making your own custom framework.

Because a framework is basically a set of libraries that work together to help you get to a certain goal.

If there's already a framework that helps you get to a certain goal, it can save you a lot of work to use that existing framework instead of making your own. It can also save you a lot of security issues.

But if your requirements don't really connect to the things existing frameworks provide, you'll have to build your own custom framework by collecting all the libraries you need and making them work together the way you want. Maybe you can make a framework out of it so the next person that has the same requirements as you doesn't have to go through this process again.
Could you present your counterarguments without resorting to childish insults ? It really detracts from your argument.
...witness the bitterness of a fanatic struggling when his deity is humiliated, lashing out with helpless rage.