skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The bug here is interesting. There are three separate pieces of new code which was added. First, is code which implements a new ordering rule. The second is consensus code which actually requires the new ordering to be in place in order to consider a block valid. The third is a flag in the header.

The consensus rule was pre-programmed to automatically activate after 995 of the last 1000 blocks (in theory 99.5% of the network) included a flag in the block indicating that they would auto-activate the new consensus rule. So think of it like green and red lights. If there is no set of 1000 blocks where at least 995 of them are green, then the old ordering is still valid.

Important to note that the new ordering is a stricter subset of the old, so new ordering is perfectly fine under the old rules, just old ordering is not acceptable under the new rules. This is called a SOFT fork. As soon as there are any 1000 blocks where 995 are green, then every block from that point onward MUST be properly ordered. (BTW, if you change rules such that something new you are doing would be invalid under the old code, like say, increasing the block size limit, it is called a HARD fork. Hard forks are considered much more disruptive to the network, soft forks are supposed to be easier to orchestrate)

By "showing green" the miners were supposed to be advertising that they would enforce the rule once the cutoff point was met. The problem is enough miners showed green, the cutoff was hit, but then when an "incorrectly" ordered block came up sometime after the threshold was met, too many miners still accepted the block as VALID and so now we have a significant (majority?) hashpower running on blocks which are "supposed" to be invalid.

Of course consensus is, by definition, whatever the majority is doing. So now it's a battle of dev's trying to cajole enough hashpower into enforcing the rule, or somehow backing off the change. With every new block mined on each head, there's more money at stake for which way the decision ultimately falls. For Bitcoin to survive, "There Can Be Only One".

It will be interesting to see how exactly this came about. Were there bugs in the trigger code which was supposed to activate the new consensus rule? Did ignoramus miners simply turn on the flag without actually priming the new consensus code for activation? Did miners mistakenly think they just needed to show "green" and then their blocks would be valid, but then they published a "green" block with the older ordering?
1) Elaborate.

2) Who do you think is doing the heavy lifting at Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, any other social network?
It's hard to make humorous shows without exposing some group to ridicule. While males are of course an acceptable target, but then the show looks too "PC". So in order to show that we're totally cool and not PC, a safe target is needed.
Ask HN: Any exiting ideas for a new project (Big Data, Mobile, etc)
Hi everyone, I'm a CS masters degree student and I'm looking to work on an exiting new project for my final project exam.

I want to start working on a project that it will solve a real problem & can be used in real life - because I found that I'm more motivated when I'm working on projects that can be used by real users and not just work on a school project.

I'm looking to work on projects that involve Big Data & mobile - so if you have some ideas you want to share I would love to hear them.

Thanks - and let the brainstorm begin! :)
A requirement to stick #version 1.0 at the top of code files so we know which version they were intended to be compiled with, such that in future we can introduce breaking changes into version 2.0 and still have support for compiling legacy 1.0 applications.

Seriously, nearly all data storage formats we use today have some kind of version number in them - why are we treating code as dumb text rather than interesting data?
She went into more detail in the NYT:

> But Ms. Pao says that the most virulent detractors on the site are a vocal minority, and that the vast majority of Reddit users are uninterested in what unfolded over the past 48 hours.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/04/technology/reddit-moderato...

I think MOST Reddit users would disagree with how things have been handled and she does indeed seem out of touch with the user base. I don't see this turning around and instead see it as an opportunity for up and coming players to steal the user base (just like Reddit did to Digg).
I would add that there are basically three different types of Buddhism and that the interpretation of 'emptiness' varies a bit. Here's a good start on understanding (or perhaps un-understanding) emptiness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)
Seems to be not support for Safari.
Code is open source?
Really nice idea indeed !
> "I'm not buying the argument that a regular person in the most powerful economy on the planet is having a harder time than the ones in the tiny countries ... because of a 1% drag"

... that's OK, since I never made that argument.

What I'm arguing is simply that statistics that don't correct for population/immigration trends aren't going to give you a complete picture. You're not comparing directly comparable situations.

> "Americans have forgone universal health care, a strong social safety net, free or cheap higher education, all in the pursuit of a better economy and higher personal incomes."

Americans have foregone those things, opting for crappier, more expensive, and less universal variants of those things, mostly in the name of refusing to compromise while actually compromising in entirely moronic ways. There is no sense in which the government has done a good job of crafting programs to be efficient and therefore to improve the economy or personal incomes. (Personally, I'm a fan of the "basic income" as the foundation for a strong safety net, as well as more efficient systems of education overall. It's in one sense more extreme and in another sense less extreme than what's common in Europe. But we'll never get it because everyone would rather play political football and end up with compromise solutions that are the worst of both worlds.)

[EDIT: going out of town for a week. You may have the last word if you so desire.]
Playing too much Minecraft is considered an addiction because it has a real cost to the addict playing the game. Please note that "playing too much" is to the point that it is causing the child to do poorly in school or have other negative effects.
I think the low probability explanation is more plausible than the commons explanation.

Scientific funding for non-classified projects -- which constitutes most funding -- is partially a contribution to the commons. The development of human capital on the home front is a unique benefit to the funding country, but the results get disseminated and -- in principle -- there's nothing stopping a company in another country from commercializing first.

Also, I agree the politics of asteroids are really inractable. Lots of people think of asteroids as a plot device for egg-head sci-fi fans rather than an actual existential threat.

(FTR, I think that, in general, we should be doing a better job as a species at buying insurance policies to protect ourselves against extinction-level events.)
Tracy Jordan's entire character is not being a Black stereotype, and making fun of the discrepancy between his character and the stereotype. Jian Yang is an Asian stereotype.
FB is an example of a system where all content is there due to users, but it's profitable. On the other hand, at least from what I could see, FB never really promoted any kind of special culture or community ethos.

based on that, at least two good ways to make a community-based site profitable would be to use it as a platform for this party profit - allow others to embed profitable apps/games/... and take a percentage of their income, and sell ads based on people's interests.
I'm too much of a fairweather reddit user to really have that much of an informed opinion on it really, I only I ever frequent the main programming subreddits, a few local ones and /r/games. My frontpage feed doesn't subscribe to any of the main subreddits either.

As far as I'm concerned this whole "revolt" seems like it's on some other planet
I was working in YCbCr and I found it noticable. Compare the bottom-right tile in https://github.com/victorvde/jpeg2png/commit/64bf10789092ccf... with swipe. It's worst with green around the top of the left black line, but there's green and red fringing everywhere. And this is a normal use case.
You're doing it wrong (unless your are not a tech startup but a partnership such as a lawfirm).

The money coming in belongs to the company, not to any individual, therefore you cannot share it the way you describe. There are two main mechanisms that you can use to share profits among individuals:

1) stock in the company: as shareholders and co-founders, you must have split the equity somehow (check http://foundrs.com for a calculator to figure that out).

2) the company can offer commissions to employees, as part of their compensation

Something in your description doesn't make sense: either you are the sole owner of the corporation, and those two other people don't own any shares. You are wondering how to bring them on-board. Or they are already shareholders, and you already had the discussion about how to split the equity.
Show HN: Present any .md file as a full-screen slide deck
Last time I looked you could only use autoprune if you completely disabled the wallet functionality, so it was useless to anyone that wanted to use Bitcoin Core as a wallet (and it probably couldn't act as a backend to any of the lightweight wallets either). I think it's basically only of use to miners in its current state.
> If you apply the same force as you would to a cup handle it order to pick up the cup, to a single atom of the surface of the cup, couldn't that remove the atom?

No, because the forces holding the atoms of the cup together are much stronger than the forces holding the cup to the floor. That's the underlying physical reason why it makes sense to consider the cup as an "object".
That doesn't make it any less of a hustle and probably why rent-to-own places still get customers. So yeah if you have to have the most expensive phones but can't afford them you will do this.

The thing is they are pretty much forcing everyone into these plans by almost doubling the old plan prices. Plus the old family plans are no longer cheaper if you don't have a smartphone and don't use data--you pay the same price for all phones.
I can't seem to find the search button. Also, can someone define what "side effects" are, please. I am studying Scheme now and I don't understand the relevance of "side effects" to Scheme or anything else.
I suspect Pao is right. Most people who use reddit won't care about this. It's very easy to get in a Silicon Valley bubble thinking this stuff matters.

EDIT: Downvoting me as a way of saying "I disagree" is immature.
Or perhaps an author fully understands their own work the same way a programmer knows how users will use their programs.
In the mid-nineties, I discovered "Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge" by chance in a discount bookshop. At the time I was a teenager in working class rural England. I was working menial jobs while teaching myself to code and I was pretty depressed and alienated from my surroundings. This book was almost a lifeline to the place I wanted to be, the kinds of things I wanted life to be about. It was a real inspiration and encouragement to me in those years.

I had no internet then, so I just read the Mondo 2000 book again and again, along with the Hacker Crackdown, and Howard Rhinegold's book on VR. That was the tech culture I wanted to be a part of.
These are valid blocks under the old consensus rule. AFAIK, there is no mining of fully invalid blocks going on here.
I want to say cool. But what's the technical value in this?

Firefox is in the middle of plummeting, they caved-in social networks mobs and pretty much showed that hardline political correctness trumps your own spiritual foundations.

And this in turn feels like a twisted joke.

Thanks for jamming your political views to your board, and therefore your product, and your users.

It's hard to quantify the people you angered Mozilla. But you're spiritually lost.
I think profit must be driven out from communication channels if we would like to have a non-dividing, truly open community. There are proofs that profit oriented social sites do not serve the community and yields to a highly divided society[1]. Corporate interest is against community values, since there is only one dimension to take care of, increasing the profit. The Reddit situation shows this, there is much damage done already, and we are going to see a lot more.

[1] http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarizatio...
On the most populated planet, for that matter.
It's looking to me that the Wikipedia business model is the correct one for a community site like Reddit. What are the chances of a Reddit clone surviving on donations?
FB is actively changing how you see the world through it by removing the content you do not like to see. This is how it yields to more divided society.

http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarizatio...
Most of the U.S. may be rural by land area, but the overwhelming majority of the population in the U.S. is urban. 80.7% are urban as of the 2010 Census.
I think a lot of people miss that it was in in part literally a joke. It seems a lot people look at that "R.U. a cyberpunk" bit and think that it was meant to be serious. Hell, it was all right there in the editor-in-chief's name.

But of course it was also more than just a joke. Have you read "The Guy I Almost Was," mentioned in another comment here? I asked R.U. Sirius about that when I interviewed him in 2002 [1] and he said:

"I say that all the time in public interviews, 'We made it all up.' Which in a sense is true — some of it we made up and some of it we didn’t. Mondo 2000 clearly wasn’t journalism in the conventional sense. It was mostly composed of interviews, very subjective, really dedicated to people speaking in their own voice. It was very playful and very surrealistic. I never really wanted to do journalism — I do now because I have to to make a living. And we do it at Thresher, I guess because it’s become a habit now. To say we made it all up is kind of flippant, but we weren’t concerned with responsibility or credibility. We were more concerned with creating a sense of excitement and energy and a sense of belonging to the next wave of culture. And we were concerned with making people laugh."
We are thinking of solutions for these. Comments might be a solution
it seems all of it would change over time. Seems like alot of the effort going forward would be theirs. selling etc. maybe you set up a vesting schedule based on who accomplishes what. Initial customers etc.
Take a look at the OCaml bytecode interpreter: case bodies are all very small there, so the instruction dispatch time really counts. I got this 2x times difference when comparing this bytecode interpreter built with and without computed goto, but I don't remember any other details at the moment. In my own bytecode interpreters the difference was up to 4x, again, because each bytecode instruction implementation was tiny and trivial (like, move something from one register to another, or perform an arithmetic operation).

> Even the inner loop of an interpreter usually calls routines

These are too high level interpreters for the too dynamic languages, they're beyond any hope in terms of performance, by design. I'm talking about some simpler and better designed things (like OCaml, for example).
We're fixing that.
> Please be civil, I'm not going to "fuck off"

Sorry, I didn't mean you specifically (unless you're an economist, I guess). You're right though, I've changed the wording.

> Your logic would only apply if the government was initially providing free healthcare, and then moved to a regime where healthcare was provided by employers, which is not what happened.

The government shifted the responsibility for insurance from individuals to corporations. Fact: if a company does not provide insurance, then they pay a tax. Fact: SCOTUS called this requirement a tax.

> The problem with your reasoning is that it deals with everything except economic fundamentals, i.e. total consumption per person.

The problem with your argument is that you assume that taxes attached to empoyment are somehow different from other taxes, and ignore the fact that businesses have benefited from decreased taxes for decades and yet wages have stagnated. (Edit: Concretely, if I impose a new flat tax on corporate profits, does that count as "compensation"? No, it doesn't. The issue of how it effects compensation is separate. Just because a tax is attached to employment doesn't make that tax part of compensation.)

Again, the issue is dead simple: do increased corporate taxes explain income stagnation? Given that corporate taxes have in fact decreased over the time period we are talking about, the causation you're proposed is literally vacuous ("vacuous" here is a technical description of the problem with your argument, not an insult).

In general, think of taxes attached to income "use taxes" on the country's human capital, rather than "mandatory employee compensation". Because historically we have never included taxes as part of "compensation", and starting that practice now is uninformative unless we take into account the global perspective on corporate taxes.
Most likely the lurkers don't care, but if a majority of mods or content producers care it could be a serious issue.

Content producers are a tiny minority of the site and mods are a tiny minority of that.
Well, Reddit Gold is already basically donations. Have they released earnings information?
In any situation like this, the most vocal will be a minority of all users. But that is not a good way to measure the sentiment of the entire user base.

In addition, those that are most vocal are some of the most important users on Reddit. They make the community what it is. If you loose them, then rest will leave soon after.
True. But there is a large overlap between those that do care and those that create content, vote, comment, and are mods.

Thus, you are alienating exactly the class of users that you don't want to.
> Note how the article shows them apologizing for how the transition was handled, not the firing, which there are still no clear details on.

Is it really in anyones best interest to know? Firing of staff is a personal matter between two private entities.
I am a heavy reddit user and think Moderators acted immature.

Remember just like mods have an issue with administrators, Many subreddit users have issues with moderators :). I am surprised this didn't come up.
"Making a profit" may not be a realistic goal. I'm a huge fan of Goodreads.com and I totally understand why Amazon bought it. A small section of the population reads several books a year, but they represent 80% of all book sales. Creating a community where book readers go to find more books is a huge benefit to Amazon.

Pao's mistake (and one she continues to make) is forgetting that without contributors there is no reddit. I was around to see the center of gravity shift from Slashdot to Digg to Reddit. The one thing I'm certain of: it is overdue for another shift.
Now it's time for them to apologize for hiring former digg admins that brag about nuking users.

https://archive.is/cCxX3

They are quite literally TRYING to build reddit v4

https://www.reddit.com/r/Upvoted/comments/352e9y/introducing...
I have a strong suspicion that in the same way new CEOs and managers like to do 'spring cleaning' of their staffs that reddit might like for the mods with the old-reddit mentality to leave so they can be replaced with new mods more in line with the "safe spaces and monetezation" goals of the site.
Pao is right, if only because the majority of reddit users don't have an account. These people are simply annoyed by all the non and meta content. But who expects a tick to care about the health of deer?
I think it's a question of "important" users. If enough content mods and creators leave, will there be enough to fill the role immediately?

If not - i imagine it will be pretty visible to people on the fence, which will only snowball more. Just as with Digg, this can happen quite fast, and i think a snowball is the only true way this would happen.

With that said, i think the most important part of the equation will be another "player". If voat.co (or others) are not able to handle the immediate traffic, then i think it's much less likely to succeed. Reddit had a lot of troubles handling Diggs load, but they managed overall. Voat has been taken down multiple times due to Reddit's against-user actions - so it doesn't seem likely that Voat will be able to handle the traffic when Reddit users need/want it most.

Personally i'm hoping someone can find a way to distribute this whole social content idea - but in a UX friendly, web based way. I don't think Voat, or anyone else, will be able to handle taking in the Reddit userbase without falling into the same pitfalls as Digg and Reddit. Something decentralized seems like the only solution.
It might be true that "most" Reddit users are uninterested in this drama and will use the site anyway. The problem is, I suspect, that the core users who create, run, and curate good subreddit content are the ones that matter, and once those users leave it's a simply a matter of time until the good content snowballs away to the next site.
> Note how the article shows them apologizing for how the transition was handled, not the firing, which there are still no clear details on.

It's standard practice for a company to not disclose why someone was fired, and this is often to the benefit of the former employee. Why do you think you're entitled to know the private details of Victoria's employment?
So you actually use it to open apps? you open apps by searching?
It would be completely foolish to deny that some games have addictive qualities to them - look at how developers such as Blizzard hire psychologists to make their games more appealing. That short work-reward cycle feels fulfilling, and drives many people to keep on playing despite it being harmful.

> Non-gamers are bombarded by messages from the larger media-culture.

>So parents hear constantly that games are harmful, that gamers are all potential crazed gunmen, isolated shut ins and so on.

No they don't. Has the author noticed it's not 2007 anymore? To find substantial video-game addiction stories, you now have to go find them. They are not a part of mainstream culture, especially the crazed gunman stories.

>This is why we have televisions, magazines and newspapers – they are technological devices to sell us advertising.

Lots of media companies own video game studios.

To be sure, video-game addiction is a minor problem compared to drugs, alcohol, and sex addiction. But sticking your head in the sand is not going to win you any allies, nor does a persecution complex. Instead, stick to the positive benefits that video games have, and DO NOT overstate them, like marijuana activists convinced the drug is a cure-all.

The world has moved on. We(gamers) won. It's time to stop pretending we're a persecuted minority.
She's right that, as a lurker, I don't really care. But it seems like all of the moderators and content contributors do, and if they leave, what does it matter what the lurkers think?
> Oh well, it was great while it lasted.

Also an eight-year user; couldn't agree more.
Hunting “the blob” causing California drought