codingmyway

I should add that the profit motive isn't unique to the right, the left just gain viewers through either comedy and satire or mainstream consumerism, which is more acceptable but still doesn't necessarily incentivize the truth, especially if that truth clashes with a sponsor/advertiser.

The BBC definitely has a political bias and I certainly wouldn't rely on it and swallow their coverage, or more often lack of coverage, like my parents would anymore than I would RT but not being puppets of advertisers gives a different view that the US lacks given that NPR is almost a token service that is kept subdued and out of the view of those who don't specifically go to it and is seen as boring instead of hard hitting journalism.

I like free speech advocates on both sides. YouTube has Dave Rubin, Steven Crowder, Sam Seeder and others and the types of guests they have provide a larger view of things. I wish there were more with a less US centric view but the libertarian scene seems much stronger in the US, maybe as a reaction to all the crap.

I heard there is a bit of a tech scene in Pai. There wasn't a few years ago when I was there but that is somewhere I could imagine working remotely from.

I'm contemplating this right now. I work in London because the extra money over working elsewhere in the UK more than pays the rent and I know people here now. I if lived further out and commuted then the cost of transport would almost wipe out the rental saving and I'd have two hours+ commute everyday instead of a healthier cycle through the park.

I could get a remote job for half the money and that would be worth it for a change of scenery living somewhere cheap despite the tanking pound. Personally I think I'd be more productive living in Asia working London hours, so 3 in the afternoon until 11pm, as this suits me more especially somewhere where there is little to do in the evening. It just suits my body clock.

I know this because I did it for a while despite the financial crisis ruining it at exactly the wrong time, happening two weeks after I left the country for two years. Now I need a financial crisis to stand a chance of buying a house I figure going back to that life is my better option for now.

Why not produce useful software needed by wider society as part of the course? Whether it's open source which will give them the github credentials or something like CodeForAmerica that fixes needed public works.

The problem is the dog eat dog narrow mindedness of seeing everything as a competition and not learning anything about collaboration and serving others. Something a lot of CS grads would benefit massively from, I know I would have.

This is a particularly american problem. It's not Alex Jones or Breitbart or Hannity or Limbaugh it's the fact that profits come before truth and making money by appealing to human nature through click bait, fear mongering, exaggeration, conspiracy theories is the only thing that matters.

The internet killed the profitability of real journalism and free press and might take down democracy with it.

I see two reasons for this:

1) Bitcoin transaction fees increasing and ETH being the main alternative available on Coinbase, even though ETH is not meant to be a currency, more like AWS credits, and its supply isn't fixed so isn't a good store of value.

2) Everyone was holding onto their BTC in case the ETF decision lead to a surge of new money into bitcon. Now that is off the table they are seeking bigger returns in alts.

Also new money is being pulling in by Dash hyping their version to those who missed out on the bitcoin bull and since Dash is nothing special now people have the idea that any other alt could be next.

It varies. Personally if I am renting I want to minimize that outgoing when saving for a nicer place to buy. I came close but quantitative easing killed that for me but the intention was there and now I'm back renting a cheap a place that suits my circumstances.

The rents mostly go to the banks, who create the loans out of nothing and win either way. Your rent might go to a landlord but to compete in the bidding on the building he must lend as much as anyone else from a bank.

That ability to mortgage land should be shared among society if anything is to get better. The question is how the 'state' handles any foreclosure in a politically acceptable way when home owners would use their voting power to cajole their way out of giving anything up when they get greedy and over extend. Right now the state offloads this to the banks as the bad guy debt collectors, giving them the benefits of foreclosed assets.

Yeah, and then stamping a never ending copyright on it.

Agreed. This is the late 90's web stage of let's try using the block chain for everything, even though it is vastly inefficient. The hype will die for a while as fees get too expensive then might come back later once the infrastructure of higher layers is there to support things.

Business expecting to piggy back on a free block chain deserve to go under.

Asics can't be redirected to different alt coins that have a different proof of work. They will run to recoup the costs. That is why bitcoin will be more secure even if prices and transactions drop from a move to an alt.

Miners are playing a game of chicken to milk the fees while hoping users don't swerve to another chain.

Getting all the selfish incentives of stakeholders and attackers to enable and secure something like Bitcoin is the example. Whether it works out in the end or not is an open question. The current blockage could a be a failure of the game theory to predict the short term tactics of miners at the expense of the long term.

I didn't write the and test code myself so you can label that as appealing to authority all you like but I have looked into it and understand the benefits of moving the witness to a subtree of the merkle root so that it can be dropped when it is no longer needed as well as the other changes that are included in the update that allow further soft fork changes enough to see the benefits. I don't just accept someone saying it is good or bad.

Can you explain why such an obvious refactor that is backward and forward compatible isn't a clear benefit?

No it isn't sufficient and won't instantly increase the transaction throughput but the the arguments against it that I've heard are weak and almost all political and could also be argued as appeal to a different authority.

There are two visions of what people see as scaling and are pushing for, on-chain and off-chain. Segwit helps both so being against it can only be politically motivated.

This political argument that it's all just a plot by Blockstream is what is causing the division where the technical benefits of segwit are clear to anybody who knows what they are talking about.

As soon as it became about people and BS conspiracies instead of technical rational solutions it was only going to end up in slagging match.

Without a blocksize limit then block space has unlimited supply so the price will be zero. Miners will get LOWER fees so if they think lightning is their enemy and Unlimited is their friend then they don't understand economics.

Those who want the security of on chain transactions will still pay the fees and those who accept the very slight risk of having to watch for channels being dropped for the benefit of lower fees will choose lightning transactions. There's no conflict and is the only way to get the store of value security and low transaction fees with high volume.

The standoff is the miners milking fees for as long as possible. They don't want larger blocks or segwit. This will be broken by having a less efficient lightning without segwit.

That is part of it. I think some miners are against any increase because it will lower fees. Without a blocksize limit fees tend to zero, which is fine while there is the block reward but they still want to milk the congestion fees. To say they are pro segwit or pro unlimited is bluffing. They are pro status quo and congestion and high fees.

The idea that lightning will lead to a hub, in the case of Unlimited believers they think this will be Blockstream and therefore think that the core developers who work for Blockstream are blocking a blocksize increase for nefarious reasons when they are doing it to avoid a hard fork and to maintain the incentives of miners while enabling cheap off chain transactions.

That idea that a natural hub monopoly will form is ill thought out as explained here: https://youtu.be/fst1IK_mrng?list=WL&t=6072

Propaganda has always been around, along with sensationalism by MSM as anybody who's ever read about themselves in a paper can tell you. What is new is Clickbait news, which has different motivations and different effects. After seeing the virality of memes clickbait is now being used as propaganda to blur the truth by burying it and that is what I'd call fake news.

There are plenty of things that affect happiness and therefore productivity if you follow their assertion.

The stress of trying to pay rent in tech cities being one I can think of. Would be interesting to see if developers in more easy going places are more or perhaps less productive.

I also think UI will be one of the first areas to be partially automated, or web based at least, partly because there is so much public data to consume and it all fits common patterns which is just what AI is good at.

The actual businesses though are all different so there is no stack of data that can describe how to architect those systems.

When social context matters so much I wonder how they measure things like this. Just the act of getting to know a therapist will reduce anxiety and in the situation you'll be comfortable so there is little value measuring improvements under those circumstances.

As soon as you step out into the real world again fears resurface.

I'd say there's a market for trained therapists who will also coach people through real world stressful situations rather than just talking about them.

Given the expense of doing that it would have to be in a group and the incentives right so you can trust coaches not to exploit the vulnerable. Solve that and you could have a nice franchise.

I've made the most in % terms on the small amounts I bought just to play with the technology rather than any investment plan. First on Etherium then on Stratis, being mainly a .Net dev.

On that basis for HN types your curiosity might be a good guide. Buy what seems most interesting to you.

Isn't it about the increase in debt? Taking on debt creates money. In the 70's Nixon let loose on the constraints to increased government debt, creating government driven inflation. Workers then had more power to demand higher wages and had low personal debt so could take on a lot more, creating consumer inflation.

Now everyone enters adulthood up to their eyesballs in debt already so they can't take more on. The only way to create more debt to maintain the game is to inflate asset prices so more debt is created for the same assets.

Marginally, yes he's loaded but Facebook didn't destroy thousands of smaller mom and pop businesses and concentrate whole sectors of the economy like Amazon, or hundreds of newspapers and advertising agencies like Google.

Facebook is totally too powerful and far too greedy but I wouldn't blame it for inequality.

Not so sure about this line:

"bitcoin is closing the year on a high note, surviving its (expected) mining changes with grace"

Adoption of technical improvements like segwit has become more of a political game than ever with less technical people shouting louder, so much that it's become a joke with parodies like Bitcoin Ultimate.

The occupy movement should have occupied all vacant buildings, a lot of which were effectively owned by banks, and demanded the return of squatters rights.

Next time, get it right

Since learning it I've thought that REST is really aimed at humans. It's all well being able to navigate state but unless it knows what to do with a given state beforehand it's not much use to a machine, other than perhaps to gather data, in which case that data won't mean anything unless an intelligence interprets it.

Since written code will only ever do a defined set of operations most web Apis are fine being written in RPC style.

The only time I've advocated a RESTful approach is when there was a lot of public data being exposed and human developers may well have explored the data.

When an AI can navigate an interpret data that it hasn't seen before then things will get interesting

Exactly, Trump supporters are going to be really disappointed

I hear so many educated Trump supporters projecting their own largely sensible wishes and plans onto him since he has no coherent plan and essentially promised nothing, except to build a wall.

Not sure he's going to achieve that much.

I hear so many more educated Trump supporters projecting their own largely sensible wishes and plans onto him since he has no coherent plan and essentially promised nothing, except to build a wall.

Not sure he's going to achieve that much.

Those wanting a unlimited block size increase are mostly less technical and don't understand the difference between expanding and scaling.

If it slows nodes down exponentially as the chain gets too big then that isn't scalable.