Hacker News Reader

current_callon GNU Toolchain Update – GDB now supports Rust

Only if your time is valuable.

current_callon The Perils of Writing a Provocative Email at Yale

What a waste.

Yup.

current_callon Coinbase Co-founder: Ethereum Is the Forefront of Digital Currency

What does "establishing" mean? There are lots of block chains.

current_callon Coinbase Co-founder: Ethereum Is the Forefront of Digital Currency

Is Ethereum not on its own blockchain?

current_callon Coinbase Co-founder: Ethereum Is the Forefront of Digital Currency

Fear of being left behind. Uncertainty about the future of Bitcoin. Doubt in the community.

current_callon Coinbase Co-founder: Ethereum Is the Forefront of Digital Currency

I don't disagree with his viewpoint; his arguments are irrelevant. A good way to understand the purpose of a piece of writing is to summarize the purpose of each passage into a single sentence.

Here is my attempt; feel free to skip it.

Bitcoin apps aren't innovative.

The Bitcoin scripting language is restrictive. Ethereum has been successful.

Nothing. (It may or may not be so.)

The restrictiveness of Bitcoin's scripting language is a legacy issue, and the scripting language is very important.

Bitcoin is amazing to some, but not all.

Bitcoin hasn't innovated for seven years, but Ethereum is innovating right now.

Ethereum is the future of digital currency.

Bitcoin's scripting language is restrictive and hard to use.

Ethereum is easy for developers to use.

Ethereum looks more familiar.

Ethereum can do things bitcoin can't.

Ethereum has everything in the same protocol, which is better than layers.

Ethereum has better developer resources.

Bitcoin applications aren't innovative.

Ethereum has lots of new innovative applications and more to come.

A digital currency is only as good as its applications. The creator of Ethereum is a good leader and a nice person.

The leader of Bitcoin left and the remaining people don't work together.

Bitcoin developers and figureheads are mean and petty.

Bitcoin isn't growing and that's bad.

The Ethereum developers are innovative.

Bitcoin isn't changing quickly and that's bad.

Ethereum is faster and provides money to more miners.

Nothing (It may or may not be so.)

Ethereum hasn't had any large schisms or internal conflict.

Ethereum allows you to do more than you currently can in Bitcoin.

There are security risks, but it isn't Ethereum's fault.

Proof of stake is awesome.

Nothing. (It may or may not be so.)

In summary, Ethereium may replace Bitcoin because it is innovating faster, has a nicer community, and has a better developer community. (This is the thesis!)

I am neutral

Digital currencies are rapidly changing.

Technology is great.

And now we've located the thesis! What is very real, though, is the possibility that Ethereum blows past Bitcoin entirely. There is nothing that Bitcoin can do which Ethereum can’t. While Ethereum is less battle tested, it is moving faster, has better leadership, and has more developer mindshare. First mover advantage is challenging to overcome, but at current pace, it’s conceivable.

In summary, Bitcoin is restrictive, inferior, stagnant, and has a community that is fragmented, lacking innovative developers, filled with mean people, and has no leader. That's the message this blog post deliberately sends. However, none of these arguments are valid. Being restrictive is not a bad thing in itself. Being simple isn't a bad thing. Being stable isn't a bad thing. Calling a community fragmented does not make it so. Developers don't matter; digital currency is valuable because it's a way of storing and exchanging value, not because of related software. How much someone in the community cusses doesn't mater. That Gavin is gone doesn't matter. Calling a community leaderless does not make it so. The people who have bitcoin matter, because the point of a digital currency is to store and exchange value.

current_callon Coinbase Co-founder: Ethereum Is the Forefront of Digital Currency

Associative arrays aren't about phone books. They're about providing key value storage. You can use an associative array to record phone numbers, but you could also use it for any key value pairing.

Why the same hash table for two different things? Why the same block chain for two different things?

current_callon Coinbase Co-founder: Ethereum Is the Forefront of Digital Currency

Okay. Why would I want a currency in my programming language? This obviously isn't the same as having a library for using a currency.

current_callon Coinbase Co-founder: Ethereum Is the Forefront of Digital Currency

I can't take Bitcoin seriously because its community, at the same time, holds strong anarcho-capitalist ideals, and supports various companies which are trying to monopolise various forms of Bitcoin transaction.

The community isn't one person.

current_callon Programming with a Differentiable Forth Interpreter

The slope of a function at some point provides information about a local maximum. A positive slope means a peak is to the left and a negative slope means a peak is to the right. If you want to find the input that maximizes or minimizes the output of your function, you can use the slope to guide you. Calculate the slope, change the input accordingly, and repeat. This is gradient descent in one dimension. If your function takes multiple arguments, then instead of a single slope you use a vector of slopes with respect to each argument. This vector of slope(s) is your gradient.

current_callon Programming with a Differentiable Forth Interpreter

You might enjoy this paper if you haven't already read it. http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5401

Jump to the experiments section to get an overview of what it can do.

current_callon Coinbase Co-founder: Ethereum Is the Forefront of Digital Currency

Bitcoin cannot survive a majority attack.

Proof of work is a different kind of majority though.

current_callon Coinbase Co-founder: Ethereum Is the Forefront of Digital Currency

Contracts don't exist within currencies; contracts exist on top of currencies. Sticking a turing complete language into the currency doesn't remove the problem of third party management; it forces the currency to absorb some of the complexity. Is there any reason why this can't just be layered over an existing crypto currency instead of needing to be built in?

current_callon Coinbase Co-founder: Ethereum Is the Forefront of Digital Currency

This article is FUD, but then so is this post. People on both sides have huge incentives. And don't be deluded into thinking there aren't sides. The wealth at stake and the ability to dodge banks makes it impossible to be deeply invested in this and not have an agenda.

Here are the paragraphs where I thought the FUD was most obvious. Worth looking over.

Developer mindshare is the most important thing to have in digital currency. The only reason these networks (Bitcoin, Ethereum) and their tokens (bitcoin, ether) have value is because there is a future expectation that people will want to acquire those tokens to use the network. And developers create the applications which drive that demand. Without a reason to use the network, both the network and its currency are worth nothing.

In contrast, Bitcoin has had a leadership vacuum since Gavin Andresen stepped aside after other core developers did not get on board with his (in my opinion rational and convincing) arguments to increase the block size. “Core developers” as they now stand are also relatively fragmented.

Beyond a leadership vacuum, Bitcoin’s “leadership” is less clear and toxic. Greg Maxwell, technical leader of Blockstream which employs a solid chunk of core developers, recently referred to other core developers who were working with miners on a block size compromise as “well meaning dipss.” A second discussion board needed to form on reddit, /r/btc, because of censorship on the original /r/bitcoin. The content on the Bitcoin discussion boards feels like squabbling while Ethereum’s is talking about relevant issues and new ideas. In summary, Ethereum leadership (and as a result its community) is moving forward while things need to get worse before they can get better in Bitcoin.*

What is very real, though, is the possibility that Ethereum blows past Bitcoin entirely. There is nothing that Bitcoin can do which Ethereum can’t. While Ethereum is less battle tested, it is moving faster, has better leadership, and has more developer mindshare. Developers → apps → users → network success. First mover advantage is challenging to overcome, but at current pace, it’s conceivable.

Also, I still don't understand why I'd want a programming language in my currency.

current_callon Hacker news unofficial desktop app

None, given that it essentially runs in a browser anyway (Electron).

Oh, there goes that dream.

current_callon Hacker news unofficial desktop app

A browser is like a buggy mini-operating system that hogs resources, tries to replace native applications like PDF readers, word processors, and email clients, and uses JavaScript as its system language. Client applications circumvent the hell of modern web browsers. The benefit is not needing to use a web browser.

current_callon Andrej Karpathy forced to take down Stanford CS231n videos

Isn't that six reasons?

current_callon Peeple: Yelp for people

Usually when I look at restaurant ratings, I see lots of perfect scores and lots of terrible scores, but very little in between.

This could be very entertaining.

current_callon New Campaign to Help Surveillance Agents Quit NSA or GCHQ

I don't see how hard that is to understand, that some folks might hold a different worldview about surveillance than you do, and that in fact they are not idiots.

Their worldview isn't just different; it's bad. It's different and bad.

current_callon Data first, not code first

Input -> Process -> Output

Somewhere a Haskell programmer is nodding.

current_callon Computer Scientists Find Bias in Algorithms

The basis of the argument is that if decisions correlate with race, than the cause of the decision is race. This is of course wrong. Correlation does not imply causation and the algorithms cannot even have a concept of race or sex unless that data is deliberately and explicitly placed into the data set.

A realistic complaint would be that these algorithms dehumanize people and create a weird algorithm based bureaucracy that mimics The Trial.

Maybe someone is trying to conflate the two arguments so they can dismiss the second one by pretending it's the first?

current_callon Show HN: A Lisp compiler and environment in Go

Wouldn't it be easier to just work in the reverse direction?

https://github.com/zkat/chanl

current_callon Too often, the government uses its information machinery to try to persuade

Several years before, in 1997, the GAO caught the State Department paying a consultant to write op-ed pieces in support of the Clinton administration’s policy on Central America.

This is terrible. What will all the Washington Post journalists do for work if some sleazy internet spam company gets all the juicy government contracts?

current_callon Ranges and Intervals in Swift

I really want to like Swift.

Why? What does it offer?

current_callon The Internet of Pointless Things

Ads? Forbes gave me a redirect to an Ayn Rand quote.

current_callon Encryption might be the reason why we haven't heard from aliens

If it doesn't work the first time, try it again?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10246610

current_callon Richard Dawkins questions Ahmed Mohamed's 'motives' and sparks backlash

Maybe it was just a propaganda stunt to discourage domestic terrorism and push the learn to code movement? Maybe this kid doesn't even exist.

current_callon How Hack the North wasn’t the bomb

It is their event to run, and they have final say in the kind of discourse they accept from the attendees.

Where have I heard this before?

It is his website, and he can do whatever he wants.

The issue isn't whether MLH has the right to kick other people out, it's that they're bad people for exercising that right.

current_callon Edward Snowden: we may never spot space aliens thanks to encryption

It's cute, but a whole article for this?

current_callon Growing a Programmer

Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute