skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK, let's go with it. Apart from the fact that people are happily paying for the energy bitcoin is using (so if people want something it is not wasted). Let's try to take this idea seriously.

The task is not to have some spreadsheet with transactions that you could have of course on the oldest computers. The task is to provide a global payment system that people trust.

So obviously we're not going to use RPi. We need some solid machine. No problem, best server is cheap for the global payment system.

Well we also need reliability. So at least a few of these machines.

Real reliability, so actually they must be in some separate geographical locations.

At this point there are already some problems with consensus but they can be solved since we control the whole system. Cool.

But what if one location is compromised? We have to care about that, our global payment system must not be destroyed by servers being compromised in any way.

So first, we need some really good software security. Solvable, it can be open source, maybe people who depend on it will review it. Then we need hardware security. Security at these locations must be really good. It's global so we might actually want to be able to protect ourselves from some country's army - that bumps cost of these facilities a bit. Actually, a bit too much. We want to be independent from governments. They have a lot of money, it's really hard to protect physical locations.

Then there's the trust problem. Who runs it? Some organization I assume that have some cut of the cost of the whole operation. I won't even dive into details here. Throughout human history there probably was not a single organization that could be trusted, objective and rational once it gained enough power.

And to make it complete, unrelated to your comment, some people are mentioning proof of stake. Apart from the fact that it doesn't seem to provide any provable security, you have a trust problem again. Proof of stake is based on the assumption that most holders (in terms of money) want bright future for the currency. I wouldn't assume that. I'm happy that it is completely irrelevant for me who is Satoshi and what is she going to do with her coins.

And then, there's initial distribution problem...

I don't really see any more efficient solution to what Bitcoin currently provides. It is of course probable that such solution will appear in the future, but the network effect is huge. It's really first time in history we have such kind of money and Patrick Byrne (overstock CEO) explains it nicely in some of his talks. So even if such technology appears, I think it will get implemented in what is currently called Bitcoin (sidechains seem to be some baby steps of that).

(OK, I got a bit of topic, but these WASD keyboards are such a pleasure to type on.)
Then you need to phrase your rants better, because that interpretation is definitely the most reasonable.
Understanding React and reimplementing it from scratch Part 1: Views
> Implying English RT is targeted at Russians, which it is not.

I did not imply that. English and German RT is propaganda for foreign viewers.

> RT on the other hand would have reporters right in the middle of it, getting teargassed and documenting the different motivations for the various groups involved.

I don't think being teargassed makes good reporting.

> Islamist groups. ... "terror militia IS

These are different groups.

> It's silly because all media is inadvertently lying

Wrong.

> What's the alternative?

Definitely Rt is no alternative. They don't even try to sort through the facts.
The difference is that you can optimize the current banking system for lower power consumption. Bitcoin mining will always be a race on who can waste the most resources/electricity for mining.
While the 1 percent sees earnings grow nearly 1,500 percent over their lifetime...

This reference to "the 1 percent" is somewhat misleading. The evil of what we call "the 1 percent" (which is actually less than 1%) has to do with social connections and crony capitalism. They're talking about the top 1% as ranked by a metric they defined, which is income growth from age 25 to 55 (15.5x is the cutoff). Not the same set of people. You could have someone who earns $20k as a graduate student at 25, and $310k at 55 as a top software engineer... someone who actually worked to get where he is, and therefore the opposite of an asshole 1%er.

The asshole 1%-ers (the socially connected) probably don't all have 15x income growth from 25 to 55, because they start higher. They tend to make $300-500k around 25 and while some of them will be placed into CEO positions or PE firms by 55, there isn't enough room at that level (not even for them) and so a number of them will see (just like everyone else) only mediocre income growth. Upper-class, entitled types have an easy time getting half a million (in private equity and other nonproducing roles) by their late 20s... but many of them never make partner, stay around that level, and end up having lackluster careers compared to what you'd expected, had you met them in their 20s.

At any rate, this data is interesting but doesn't really establish the claim that "Your Lifetime Earnings Are Decided in the First 10 Years of Your Career". I happen to think that the claim is, sadly, true for many people... but these data don't really prove it.
I love HN comments as a quick way to summarize the essence of good (and often long, full of fluff) read :)
Resplendent Deep House Music for Hustlers and Hackers
Well here's one data point. I studied chemistry in undergrad and worked in various labs for about 6 years with a salary that left much to be desired. I've also programmed on the side for a few years during that time and eventually was able to make a switch into software as my full time job and I'm pretty happy with both what I do and my salary.
That's a good one. I don't think these problems are insurmountable, though. With enough thought, edge cases can usually be fixed. Proposal: In the event that a financial loss is suffered by the previous tenant losing the lease, the successor must compensate the previous tenant in full.

With enough of a time buffer between the auction and the transfer this might solve the problem.

A Dutch auction, as mentioned in another comment, is an interesting modification as well.
It should probably be noted that CS 1.3 was released in 2001. So CS has not featured bunny hopping for 14 of it 16 years of life.

Citation, https://joliesjunk.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/the-history-of-c...
You are, of course, entitled to your opinion. But "go is failed" is a little strong, don't you think? Wouldn't it be more accurate, and less ornery, to say that you personally don't like Go?

For my part, I like Go because it offers a great, if nascent, alternative to PHP. That's the gist of it, anyway.
The point about Bitcoin in particular is that it is deliberately consuming vast amounts of computing power.

The mathematics behind the individual transactions and ledger maintenance are relatively simple. Getting computers to do this part requires almost no effort. It's the deliberate 'find a needle in a haystack' part of the protocol (which is there to ratelimit the creation of bitcoins) that wastes all of the energy.

The fact that this needle-finding task is deliberately difficult, wasteful and time-consuming is the horrific part.
In Silicon Valley though they have pool tables and dart boards and a refrigerator full of munchies. Also it doesn't get cold so it is a lot easier to live outside than it is in NYC.

Real companies in SV do pay real money but for the average startup it is the 22 yr old who has no experience that hopes the 19 yr old working for him doesn't realize he is faking it before he makes it. They are not going to get a good marketing director at that price but they can find one who doesn't think he needs health insurance.
Isn't the problem that trees do not permanently bind the CO2? You would have to burry the trees when they die so that the carbon does not get released into the atmosphere again. (I might be wrong though.)
How much CO2 is released to mine an ounce of gold?
Yea. Front page looks nice, but does not explain to me in the terms i understand (technical terms) what it does. Assuming your target audience are developers/CTOs/etc I would re-think what text you have on your homepage. Possibly even get some kind of diagram on the front page.
I think that, to a large degree, it's like any other learning curve. Unless you fight your way out of comfort zones, refuse to let the bozos upstairs define you and pigeonhole you, and change jobs as soon as you're at a dead end, you will plateau after 10 years, most likely... and be obsolete after 10 more. I don't think that it's inexorable, and I think that some (but sadly, not all) of the 45-55 income drop is voluntary (once the kids are through school, they downsize their houses, only have to pay 2 airfares instead of 4-5, and since they need less money, work less).
The good part is that the deception is already baked-in into the final statistics. Basically it tells you "if the woman you're sleeping with is on the pill, you have this much chance of having an unexpected child". So wear a condom and start getting paranoid when she asks that you have sex without one.

disclaimer: I am not a sex expert
The artificial skylight that you won't believe isn't real
Presumably Manuel is busy with Threema.
Did anyone expect all commenters to be hard-facts-only journalists here? I come here for the rumors.

And this is the 3rd time in a few months that I've heard that Googlers generally don't like Go and don't use it. So, that's kind of interesting.

Anyway, I don't think you can call an activity sociopathic if the vast majority of humans take part in it. (Having opinions and spreading rumors didn't start with the Internet either.)
How is it comparing to mining and melting gold into bricks?
That just sounds like your doctor didn't understand the risks or did understand but failed to explain the risks.

http://livescience.com/21866-iud-gynecologists-birth-control...

Modern IUDs do not cause disease; may be protective against disease; and the original faulty models may have been wrongly blamed for disease which was prevalent in the population.
That is right, but does not take into account, that by construction, the system is becoming more efficient over time. The rise in computing power for every Bitcoin is reflecting that more transactions are done per Bitcoin over time. So, more and more efficient hardware is used and thus the relative energy needed per transaction is dropping.
Usually if this happens, it's a good hint that this piece of code could use a good comment. Not always, of course.
How about the difference in rent from one term to the next is paid to the previous tenant? The goal, after all, is not to funnel money to the government, but to not award property rights squatting.
Here's an interesting bug/technique in HL2 called 'Accelerated Back Hopping'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV-AWxqYAgc&t=41m43s

It's used in speedruns, but I believe is fixed these days. Apprently if you're bunnyhopping backwards, the game tries to limit the speed, but since you're going backwards the player ends up accelerating essentially indefinitely.
It's only wasteful if there is a better alternative, which there isn't so it's not. If you don't understand bitcoin it is easy to make the mistake that the electricity is just used to generate bitcoins, however it is also used to secure an international low cost payment network.
Most trees die at a certain age (or due to other factors). By default this leads to the tree falling over and starting to decompose, a process which releases most of the CO2 formerly stored in that tree.

The obvious solution is to plant an entire forest to ensure that new trees grow to replace old trees.
This is one of the reasons that people are working on proof-of-stake, which secures a cryptocurrency without mining. There are some good technical articles on the ethereum blog, eg:

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/05/stake/

https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/01/10/light-clients-proof-sta...
I don't see a world in which Bitcoin would safe even only a single person in the traditional banking world. Bitcoin can neither replace banks nor creditcards. It might replace the ACH.
I used to work in financial IT.

Across the industry it's generally better than corporate IT. A lot better. However, it varies widely by sector.

Companies with trading floors or that interact regularly with traders have the best IT practices in the industry.
Banking conglomerates are kind of messy - they combine IT operations for each business and never change anything and the systems don't cooperate.

I remember one such company's backup procedures. At that point they were made up of 13 separate large (regional/national) banks. They were trying to standardize the backup procedures between all the banks and run them from a centralized system. At the time that I got there, the nightly backup process failed every single day for over a year and a half. I didn't even get a computer or working logins to be able to do any work for nearly a month. Anyway, getting it to work involved getting the people responsible for the backups at each individual bank's IT group to get their system to cooperate. All of them knew that this would be putting them out of a job at the completion of the project, so there was tons of resistance and it usually took a week of calling peoples' bosses to get the work done. This was also in the middle of forced relocations for most of them. Most of the folks responsible for the work quit. It was really ugly.
React (Virtual) DOM Terminology
Ask HN: What is the architecture of HN?
Honest question, I'm not familiar with C#: would putting the Log in the finally clause not have the same behaviour? That is,

bool _operation_X_success = false;
try {
...
_operation_X_success = true;
} finally [
if (!_operation_X_success) {
Log("blah blah");
}
}
I like how in four days we went from "probably determined" ...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9031814

to "are decided."
Oh I totally agree. Unfortunately for many that's far too radical a notion, despite how unnecessary Turing-completeness is for 99.95% of programs written, and how desirable termination is. First you have to convince the Ruby/Python/JS/Elixir crowd of the frivolity of code mutability.
So basically you are saying "Don't be geared towards new users, because I am too lazy to set a bookmark to the pages I need and I want to save clicks..."
Exactly why buying Telsa which is already established would be a no-brainer.
Sadly, proof-of-stake has some fundamental flaws undermining its reliability as a consensus mechanism: https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf
Don't Be Google
Being in an open network is the best predictor of career success
I've never seen those two ideas combined before: the skewness of the male population towards failure, and the resulting misogyny of the "spoilt for choice" men at the other end of the distribution. Very interesting.
Should I create an LLC for 1099 sidework?
Hi all! I recently had a rather large tax bill from my 1099 sidework. It got me thinking. What can I do to strategically lower my overall taxes while putting myself and my family in the best financial situation?

I've talked to a few people about creating an LLC. Everyone says create an LLC so clients cannot touch your personal assets in legal settlement. I've been hesitant to create an LLC because I think it would add unecessary complexity to my life.

* Should I create an LLC?

* Where should I incorporate?

* Should I do a S corp or C corp? I have no idea, my tax lady mentioned something about big C and little C corps.

* How does having an LLC affect my taxes?

* Should I be a W2 employee of the LLC?

Please share any learning resources I might find helpful. Thanks!
> secure an international low cost payment network

That's something which is actually handled fine in fiat, believe it or not.

Nor is Bitcoin "low cost": Even with the price in the dumps recently a Bitcoin transaction still averages about $10 per transaction.

Nor can Bitcoin feasibly handle international commerce, given that it's still capped in theory to 7 transactions per second, and in practice to 2-3 transactions per second, and this total capacity also has to support non-remittance transfers such as the normal exchange hackings (like BTER today) and SatoshiDice (which can take up about half of all Bitcoin protocol capacity on some days).
http://www.coindesk.com/microscope-true-costs-gold-productio...
I understand your point of view - these numbers do not make much sense to me at all - I'd imagine any good engineer would understand his value in the current market and look to maximise his return. But I imagine these people are following the trends they see in other posts, and also hoping that other factors of the job (company, mission, people, coding environment) add weight to their opportunity.

The biggest irk I have with a number of these posts is indeed the equity offering. Whilst I can't comment, or be correct on all the companies, most of them seem quite early stage. I would expect them to offer a larger amount of equity (higher pcg). This to a lot of early stage hires can be a big a motivator. If the company offers a large chunk then it shows a commitment to that person that they value their contribution and see them as critical in the success of the company.
Doesn't proof of stake fundamentally ensure that the "rich get richer"?
Its not low cost if you need to emit tons of CO2 to maintain the network though.

The issue with bitcoin when it comes to cost is that unlike traditional centralized systems, cheaper energy or more efficient computers don't translate to making it cheaper to run the network. What happens is that miners get to afford more hashes per second and the overall hashrate goes up, with the mining difficulty also going up to compensate, making mining even more wasteful.
Our world resembles '1984' and might be even scarier
Yes. This headline is sad. To show that my lifetime earnings are "decided" in the first 10 years of my career, you would have to show a predictive model with an R-squared value of 1. That is not the case. If R-squared were very close to 1, you might say, that lifetime earnings are "highly influenced by" the first 10 years. The article does not even seem to indicate that. Instead, lifetime earnings appear to be "related to" income in the first 10 years. What is sad is that the mistake in the headline is off topic. Determination doesn't appear to be the point of the article. The point of the article appears to be that advantages that are visible in higher incomes at 25 play out, on average, as even larger income differences at 55. The point appears to be not that the system is determined, but that there are unequal advantages, one of which may be more disposable income.
It seems to me that this should be easily addressable with a proof-of-burn system (c.f. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_burn). This simulates the property of burning energy to have a chance of generating coins by instead burning coins to have a chance of generating coins (I don't think it's a pyramid scheme: rather, it'd incentivise burners to contribute to the network, just as miners are incentivised).

Anyway, it's a very neat idea, and it'd make all this much more energy-efficient while still costing burners quite a lot (and hence making it expensive to try to attack the network).
Apple Is World's Second Most Innovative Company
But that doesn't take into account that Bitcoin price increases (since we're assuming for the sake of argument that the price will actually reach insane heights again) cause mining hashrate to go up, which causes network difficulty to go up, which is by definition less efficient.

In essence, Bitcoin's harm to the ecosystem is almost directly proportional to Bitcoin price.
You can meet the other party in person (e.g. https://localbitcoins.com/). That should reduce the amount of trust needed to a minimum.
> there are mounds of evidence that it isn't possible.

The paper you referenced from early 2014 isn't really considered very relevant anymore, though I agree the proponents of "weak subjectivity" (the solution to the problem listed in your paper) haven't made a strong case yet to defend their position.

> I'm sure once Ethereum fails there will be a new next big thing and people will get sucked into another broken system

It's kind of hard to have an argument of this subject with you, given that you seem to be complaining about PoS when ethereum 1.0 will be a 100% PoW system, so I don't quite understand what your specific complaint is.

I think the near future is pretty clear though: The cryptocurrency community is going to probably bitterly divided on the question of PoW vs PoS and two primary currencies will arise around each approach (whatever they end up being.) The PoW guys will keep complaining that the PoS systems "aren't secure enough" and the PoS guys will happily use them anyway.

Of course, it's possible that the above scenario happens but that the PoS currencies crash and burn for technical reasons- Clearly I'm a PoS fan and don't think that'll happen.
If you take an area without forest and plant a forest on it then when the tree dies a new one grows in its place. A mature forest is roughly carbon neutral but reflorestation is taking a bunch of carbon from the atmosphere and converting it to tree trunks.
I did a blind test when I was in my 20s, and while on a couple of tracks I could actually tell the difference between 320kbps and the original, I did have to concentrate. And I couldn't really have said that one was necessarily better than the other; the effect was as if one type of noise-y sound was being replaced with a subtly different type of sound with the same noise-y quality. Different, but overall the same.

Listening to the diff of one of those tracks today was interesting! All I can hear is the drums... and where the sound I'm thinking of plays, it sounds like rather quiet interference! But the drums as I recall sounded absolutely identical. Interesting that the ears can detect one thing but not the other.

(I didn't bother to re-run the full comparison, as I'm no longer in my 20s. One good (?) thing about getting old is that your hearing deteriorates, and issues such as this become moot. You can also afford the disk space to just compress everything at 320kbps. Then you don't have to worry about it, and it fits OK on your phone too.)
WebSockets are message based.
that was fantastic, the contents of the talk were really interesting but the presentation itself is among the best I've seen so far.
Land reform and allowing people to own their land is seen as one of the primary ways of helping the extremely poor bring themselves out of poverty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hernando_de_Soto_Polar#Main_th...
A philosophy is neither right nor wrong. It's a philosophy, one that you choose to subscribe to, or not.
Great to hear! Thanks :)
>if you are tired of opponents of proof of stake pointing you to this article by Andrew Poelstra, feel free to link them here in response

https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/01/28/p-epsilon-attack/

Achievement unlocked!
Thanks! Just noticed the change. This is awesome.
Slice and Carve: The Next Wave in Computer-Aided Creativity
At least in theory, the poor get richer at the same rate, so it's more like inflation. Practical problems make it not that easy, but it's not a fundamental flaw of the idea.
Your post is timely. We're based in the UK and constantly being approached for investment and I just can't seem to bring myself to jump on that ride.

While £20k MRR won't allow us to pay for 5 - 10 people here in the UK, £50k MRR will and at any point I can make the call to sell the company.

By the way we're in a similar space, I run http://www.staffsquared.com (HR software).

We also see our competitors dropping their prices, but my take is the same as yours, we tell our customers that we won't compete on price as our app is simply better than the competition :)
I found a flaw in the Apple Store page and they fixed it without saying “Thanks”