skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"There are no grounds to say that BTC should be a superior store of value."

No grounds... what hole did you emerge from? How about! The over 1800 currencies that have completely disappeared over the past several hundred years? hahahah. Or like, MATH.

"it also has no central bank tending its value"

Oh sweet Jesus... are you running fever? I don't think a central bank does what you think it does xD. and you probably work for one.

"which is what gives fiat currencies value in forex markets."

.... Just WOW.

"It sucks at commerce and it sucks at investment."

Instant, no fees, yep it sucks, you're right... Who said anything about investment? Oh you did, so should be look at the S&P500 today? History of the USD?

So if a guy bought at $10, his investment is just terrible huh? No, you're thinking of the ones you buy at $1000 right? Sure, you can cherry pick like that. Got Enron stock then? Or tens of thousands of others?

"I've yet to see a compelling case for BTC"

I wouldn't wager any sort of coin, psychical or virtual that you've looked very hard. But that's ok because you can experience the joys of hyperinflation in the coming years.
The market clears any matching orders in effectively zero time (that is, it runs its matching algorithm to clear the book before it allows any new quotes to enter).

After an order is matched, you can't cancel it except in exceptional circumstances (for example, you mistakenly entered an order very far from the bbo - in that case, with the cooperation of your broker and the counterparty to your trade, you may be able to unwind it).

However before the order is matched you are free to cancel it if you decide you no longer want to trade at that price (for example, you see some change in the fundamentals of the stock that causes you to no longer want to buy, or simply that the price moves in such a way that a buy/sell at your original price no longer looks like good value).
This is an excellent analysis, but I would end it with the statement: "Bitcoin will constantly and provably use more energy until it doesn't." The mining infrastructure has been supported by seniorage, or the printing and distribution of new bitcoins to miners at a very high double-digit inflationary rate. Bitcoin adherents talk about the currency as if it has already entered the "paradise" state of zero money growth. It hasn't, and as it approaches that state and miners stop earning enough to pay for their electricity, the hashrate will either fall precipitously or transaction fees will have to be dramatically increased.
Ah - I've always ignored the existence of a 6501.
If you truly believe in Bitcoin, you believe that a) there is a good chance that in the future USD, JPY, EU, UKP et al. will be worthless relics, ornaments in a history museum that schoolchildren laugh and joke about and b) that the world would be a massively, massively better place if a) were to eventuate.

Your job is to buy as much Bitcoin as you can as cheaply as possible, cross your fingers and try and do whatever you can to make a) happen, while spending at little of your BTC as possible. You hope to profit immensely but you are also excited for how the world as a whole will profit.

If a) doesn't happen, then you basically have to go back to the drawing board for imagining a way for society to progress and you to make some money.
Perhaps I have had a wrong impression since I read on Nim quite a while ago last time and should checkout this article now. Thatnks for pointing this out!
Most of the time? http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/1485/interest-rates/histor...
As a former UK police officer I can assure you that if armed police officers came across someone with a drawn knife at least one firearm would be aimed at them.
One of my officer safety trainers was a qualified close protection officer (i.e. bodygaurd) who ran through one of their scenarios whereby someone with a knife faces off across the diagonal length of a basketball court sized room with someone with a holstered gun. Even trained officers can't reliably get a shot off if that person starts sprinting towards them.

Believe me no-one wants to try and tackle a knife wielding suspect with a baton, at that point you're using defensive tactics and your partner will use their CS/PAVA to try and disable them.

Fortunately, in the UK, the vast majority of people with knives aren't actively homicidal at the point at which the police turn up.

Nightjack was amazing, the Times is in my permanent bad books for their nonsensical justification for outing him. He thoroughly deserved the Orwell prize that he won for his blogging.
It's not like there are any other countries where there isn't a drug war.

Every first world country outlaws addictive drugs for the same ignorant reasons. (not harm-reduction)
Am I alone in being bemused and amused by this:

Version 1.0.1 (Beta stability)

Surely the main point of a 1.0 release is "stability" and to no longer be "beta"?
Here's an interesting proposal - you charge a small amount (e.g. 0.001 of a cent) for every single order placement and rebate the proceeds to all market participants in proportion to how much volume they actually traded.

People who enter many quotes that they never trade on would be punished by this system (human traders and "flickering" high frequency traders alike) whereas people providing genuine liquidity, in the form of long-lasting quotes at a good price that they intend to trade, will benefit.
Ulbricht says he founded Silk Road, but isn't DPR
Did you read that article you posted?

Those stats assumed CPU/GPU and FPGA, not ASIC, miners.

For instance, the 5-to-500-gigahash-per-second rigs would have to be running at over 300k watts of electricity using those statistics. :)

So in reality, the network is much more efficient -- the high-end miners are using more than 100x less electricity (which would still be 3000 watts for high-end rigs per those numbers), and probably closer to 1000x less, than those estimates.
What happens when bitcoin is the adopted world currency and the power goes out in your area for a few days?
Oh look, that already exists... https://btcjam.com https://www.bitbond.com https://bitlendingclub.com and probably a dozen more.

As for no investment in the bitcoin system... just something in the news about that everyday.

And I thought the previous guy with his savings account paying 2% above inflation was funny.
Black Phosphorus, the Wonder Material to Rival Graphene
I guess police departments (if they haven't already) would be stupid enough to deploy them in a trivial situation.

If your dealing with against a threat with a firearm I'm going to assume there are going to be more cops with guns in the majority of the situations. Those are the folks you don't want to set off!

So if you can feel a little bit safer in a little ole MRAP you might not be inclined to start a shooting gallery as quickly.
Nim needs to move it's discussions to a mailing list if the authors want to gain more serious developers onboard.

Polling a poorly implemented web forum speaks leaps and bounds about the kind of attitude you need to have to discuss, develop or debug issues around the Nim toolchain.

This is something that Nim developers can instantly do to boost the attractiveness of the language.

Please, do this.
Reactive Stream Processing with Akka Streams
MakeSchool (YC W12) Is Hiring a Front End Engineer
I agree with most of these points. I should have been clearer in what I meant, RMS is a measure of power and a proxy for perception - according to you, a worse proxy than I thought, so thanks for educating me on that point.

"I don't know if it would actually improve listener experience to do so, though" - except inasmuch as it would remove the incentive to master albums too loud. And if it were the default in all playback devices (digital radio, codecs) it would also remove the incentive in broadcast. The only catch is it relies on the broadcaster not owning the means of playback, which with internet radio they sometimes do. But if it's someone like Spotify they are in a position to prioritize sound quality - are people really going to leave Spotify because it's too quiet when the thing has a volume control you can just turn up if you want? It's not like surfing analog radio channels used to be.
Minting, ATMs, secure transport, CC transactions are all things that can be optimized for lower energy if necessary.

Bitcoin mining will always be a race on who can spend the most energy.
Sorry, you must have missed the part where you actually asserted that theft, the violation of private property, was net healthy for an economy. That's a) impossible b) arrogant and c) heartless. And I'm supposed to be the asshole...
They seem to be comparable to high end thinkpads like the X Carbon models.
That's how it works in the UK I think. Police don't regularly carry firearms and specially trained firearms officers are called in when necessary. I think the problem with this approach in the US is that guns are way more available and way more likely to used in a crime (I don't actually have figures on this but it seems a reasonable assumption).

Edit: Replaced incorrect use of 'weapons' with 'firearms'.
On December 23 a Missouri court ordered a winddown of Butterfly Labs and they began a refund plan.....now here is my theory...I was looking at the blockchain and came across a 5000 btc utxo taken incrementally down to 0....it was sold off continuously. It took me to here.
https://blockchain.info/address/12WRnQR85ZUT7dhmaHBNL5dde2QL...

Activity on that address started back up on 12/23 the day the courts provided control again. Ive tied it to butterfly labs because a OP_RETURN said paycoin.com linked to Josh Zerlan an employee of butterflylabs.

What is scary is another 90000 unspent coins reside here also controlled by butterfly labs.
https://blockchain.info/address/1B9KrM7bjhJ42qJSWr1KJrNTAP1S...

I think youll have butterfly labs forced to continue to sell the remaining 94000 coins in this court mandated wind down in order to provide refunds to those customers....That is a ton of coins to continuously dump...it exceeds 24 hour volume on the largest exchange.
Pedantry Corner: The labour theory of value[0] does not claim anything of the sort. It is not about the amount of labour time actually invested, in reality, in creating a commodity ("concrete labour") but the amount of labour necessary to expend, given the level of technical development in the given society, to create that commodity ("socially necessary labour time", "abstract labour").

Price, of course, is a different thing from value, but that's another matter entirely with a vast literature, pro- and anti-LTV.

The LTV is a reasonably good predictor of the behaviour of markets in commodity goods, with some exceptions (the rent-economy around oil is a good example). My feeling is that with indie games, niche music and so on, there's a problem in that some people will make them for the sheer joy of it, which means wider movement in these small sub-economies do not track things so closely.

[0] Using Marx's version here, not so well read on Smith, Ricardo and so forth.
Australia right now?

inflation 2.3% [1]

my interest rate : 4.02% [2]

[1]: http://www.rba.gov.au
[2]: https://www.ubank.com.au
Is software a real engineering discipline?
When most high frequency traders trade, they are not actively trying to manipulate the market for their own gain (in the cases where they are manipulating the market, they should of course be punished).

Most high frequency traders are trying to make money by providing liquidity, i.e. offering to buy and sell at a better price than the rest of the market. This benefits both the HFT (because they make money) and other market participants (because they can trade at lower spreads).

What these guys were doing was entering orders that they actively didn't want to trade, so that they could push around the price of the stock and repeatedly scalp a small profit. They had no intention of improving the quality of the market (either by narrowing spreads or improving price discovery). In fact they were actively making the market work less well, by impeding the process of price discovery with their "bluff" orders.

The whole point of a market is to be an efficient mechanism for matching buyers and sellers at a fair price. If someone is deliberately trying to distort the fair price, they are undermining the value of the market (and other market participants, not only HFTs, will suffer because their trades will no longer take place at the 'fair' price, but instead at the 'fair' price plus whatever direction the scalpers happen to be pushing it in at the moment).
"2014 was meant to be the year of bitcoin and it flopped as far as the general public was concerned."

"as far as the general public was concerned" :) Yeah, they were too busy watching the big bottom Kim and losing their home.

"(Overstock the poster child which at one point was claiming serious expectations of $15-20m in bitcoin sales ended up with a 5th of the lower end of their claim)."

Did you see how poorly Amazon did? They're a much larger and better store. No coins on Amazon.

"Mining companies are closing left, right, and centre, and bitcoin exchanges are shutting down for more profitable ventures."

As are oil companies. So goes the world. Isn't linear let alone vertical. Two steps forward...

What would those, 'more profitable ventures' be? You of course don't say because those miners aren't good for anything else.

"I don't think Bitcoin is dead or even close to dead but I'm pretty sure we've seen its peak."

If you're pretty sure, you would say why, but you don't. Apparently cirucular logic is big on the HH. That and or Tourette's.
reckless in their choice of bank

There is no way not to be the potential victim of this, because bank customers do not have enough information to determine whether a bank is sound or not. Worse, soundness is dependent on what everyone else is doing; a bank can be fine one day then destroyed due to a bank run. Risk is hard to deaggregate in the mortgage business because house prices all move together.

You're onto something with "profits of risky loans are privatised while the losses are socialised", but bitcoin really isn't a good solution to that.

any benefit is on average far, far outweighed by the costs

A cost-benefit analysis with no numbers! Convincing!
In the military if you want kill (not murder) everyone in a room you use a fragmentation grenade generally. Flashbangs are for when you might want to leave some of the people inside the room alive, either to capture or because they might be civilians.
You are not allowed to do it, full stop.
If you truly believe in Bitcoin, this is just one more insignificant blip on a path, driven by inexorable network effects, that leads to Bitcoin becoming the sole world currency and savings commodity, leaving the fiat currency milieu of 2014 in the dustbin of monetary evolution. A chance to buy at a relative discount and nothing more.
There's no requirement that you use your home address for registrars (or the IRS, for that matter). It's also not terribly expensive to get a PO Box/virtual office address, and if you're concerned about privacy then it sounds like it'd be worth it to you.
Military grade stun grenades don't use thermite. Military stun grenades can barely burn anything(I have tried many many times but that's another story). hearing about people getting getting third degree burns has me wonder what are they building these things with for law enforcement usage.
Thanks for highlighting this, it was an interesting read if a little long. For those without much time probably the most interesting part is "Massaging the Numbers: Pinker’s Non-Proofs of Long-Term Violence Reduction".
The secret to clawing up hierarchy is that you don't claw your way up the hiearchy. That's a path to middle management.

You become a entrepreneur, you network and get hired directly into a position(Cofounder). You get into finance, and enter VC/Private equity firms so you get placed on boards etc

So i don't assume that the top people, are the best skilled.
The time to make these complaints was years ago, possibly on the way up a big boom just to show that you're confident in yourself despite the apparent evidence to the contrary. Now that it's going down doesn't mean it was caused by people realizing it wastes power, doesn't scale or doesn't pay interest. These are age old criticisms that haven't stopped the price from still being 10 times higher than it was when I first heard about bitcoins.
Notenbrood met vruchten zonder gluten en suiker
Show HN: Framework agnostic Node.js validations
Computational costs of traditional banking goes down in theory (in practice, they seem to easily overcompensate for that with increased complexity), but other costs (payroll, physical infrastructure, security thereof, etc.) do not. Unless you're proposing that the future of money is 100% digital, with minimal physical infrastructure. Admittedly, that is not entirely unrealistic, though I doubt things will go quite that far anytime soon.

Your thought experiment misses an important point: the cost of energy. AFAIK that's already dominating hardware costs for miners.

That means: since the cost of bitcoin mining will tend to scale up (or down) linearly with the total value of bitcoin, so will energy usage (barring changes in energy price). It will not keep going up when the bitcoin value has reached a plateau (for whatever reason).
This comment is why sometimes we techie are kinda delusional.

We despise existing solution thinking that we could and should disrupt everything. Tear down everything and build everything from scratch; Our way or the high way attitude.

Bitcoin definitely have some innovations here and regardless of what happen in the future, it's impact will be felt. It was a great experiment, probably the greatest social experiment of the 21st century. The best is that it's self contained and sandboxed. Allowing it too roam freely in unchartered water.

But the financial industry is not as un-innovative as we hope they are. To innovate means you have to experiments, to experiment mean there will be failures. Over the years we seen financial industry fail and fail again. In fact, the incentive to "innovate" is so high, you constantly see the cat and mouse game between the regulators and the industry players, and the revolving doors of the prison cells never really stop.

While the greed and failure of the financial industry has irked us and certainly bred a level of mistrust. Trust in the financial system is at the highest level in human history. You have to understand that they are no stranger to mistrust and throughout human history it is a recurring problem they have to solve over and over again.

The current floating currency and central banks structure which provides deposit insurance among many other things are the result of many iterations over thousands of years. This system run the global economy, it scale is unimaginable large in human scale. There's a lot to appreciates.

Sure there's room for improvements. Many people treats Bitcoin like it must replace the financial system but the problems it facing now is exactly what the financial system had solved. What I'm pretty sure is that Bitcoin's will definitely had an impact on the next iteration of the ever evolving financial system.

The Bitcoin community I have seen fails to recognized the important of trust in finance. Not just trust between computers, but trust between humans. Like the 90's and 00's software industry fails to recognize the important of simplicity and good user experience. The next Steve Jobs of the cryptocurrency is in my believe one who understand these ideas to heart.

There's a lot to celebrate about Bitcoin and what we had done, as I always like take a contrary position. Bitcoin is not a replacement of the existing financial system, it is, or will be if it haven't, part of the system. Thus, the rise and fall of its price is part and parcel. It's kinda exciting to see this great experiment in the running, although I'll dread experiencing it first hand.

As Bruce Lee once said, "In great attempts it is glorious even to fail." I wouldn't consider this a failure but it's definitely glorious.
So if I offer a trade, and then withdraw the trade because I decide I don't like the idea anymore (or 'any other reason')... that's legal. And routine to do on microsecond timescales.

But offering a trade, and then withdrawing the trade manually a few seconds later because I never intended to execute the trade... that's not legal?

What was the original rational for creating this class of thoughtcrime? Why does it criminalize intent, while the action is perfectly routine, and the outcomes are the same either way? There is, after all, the risk of someone actually calling your bluff and buying your sell order, or selling into your buy order, which is cleared instantly... so where's the fraud?.

Doesn't HTF presuppose that we are hard-coding this behavior, this tactic, into the trading algorithms of automated traders?
Computation complexity and power consumption do not necessary correlate with emerging technology. If anything, power consumption could decrease.
Definitely! I signed up only a few days after Reader shutdown, became a paying customer and haven't looked back since. It gets better and better all the time, especially the mobile apps.

Samuel posts on here too.
Unfortunately part 3 of this is (currently) missing.
Google Translate Now Does Real-Time Voice and Sign Translations on Mobile
Here's the most recent minutes (2014-12-19) for the Node.js Advisory Board where they discussed Io.js (while considering their 0.12 release).

https://github.com/joyent/nodejs-advisory-board/blob/master/...
I quite liked the style of writing in this article. It's days like this that I wish news outlets like Bloomberg and IFR has RSS feeds for particular journalists.
Turtle power to the people
Samsung Launches Its First Tizen-Powered Phone, the Z1, in India for $92
This is already done. There is an per-order fee and a per-trade fee. All your proposal would do is shift the balance slightly between these fees.
I have noticed an amazing resurrection of the point and click adventure genre. It is my favorite genre and I could never get enough of it when I was younger (Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, pretty much all the Lucasarts games, Phantasmagoria, etc etc). I was very sad when I noticed a total lack of point and click games between the years 2005-2012ish (more or less, obviously). Now, I see a lot more games like this coming out on Steam, Kickstarter, Indiegogo, etc etc and I am super happy.
Legalizing marijuana alone is a shift, if not a huge one.
Jobscribe
HFT systems were tricked into making bad decisions?

Boo hoo hoo!
Won't anyone please think of the HFT systems?
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This forum post[0] is one of those places where he addresses that problem:

> Right now is, hands down, the worst part of development. There are no fancy graphics to show off, no intricate
gameplay, no surprising AI, no badass music, just
unglamorous system design that interests no one so we can
get all the aforementioned stuff in a manageable form
that doesn't keep becoming a sluggish and unserviceable
mess. […]
The importance of tooling can not be overstated. There
are no tools out there for the kind of game we're working
on, and it comprises 90% of what makes the game, as
nearly all of our content is procedural in one way or
another, and not handmade. If there's currently a lack of
procedural content out there, it's precisely because of
the lack of tooling.

[0] http://nowherians.com/discussion/comment/254/#Comment_254
BlaBlaCar Expands Beyond Europe
I do look upon myself as a technical user but if I'm still not technical enough to figure out how to prevent even less technical users from installing crap on their computers (without hindering their usefulness) then that is a fundamental fault of the OS.

You shouldn't have to be a technical user to avoid crap-ware being on your PC - but I'm glad you agree that Windows isn't the best option for us non-technical people.
The Data Sublime