nomailing

Yes, that is how I understand it. But I am also still learning about it. It was interesting to see the margin calls during the 40% price drop of the crypto market two weeks ago. Basically, before the drop some people had enough collateral above the 175% threshold, but during the drop these positions entered the margin call area and the orderbook of the decentralized exchange was automatically filled with USD buy orders, so that they were forced to close their position.

If someone is interested in 1:1 USD crypto assets, I recommend looking into the mechanics of smart-assets such as bitUSD [1] on the Bitshares DEX. These are backed by at least 175% of equivalent value of Bitshares. Thereby these smart-assets achieve a stable 1:1 USD value in a decentralized way [2]. If the value of the collateral of a short position falls below 175%, the position is margin called automatically by the blockchain. Another advantage is that you can trade them within the blockchain without any central party [3]. In my opinion this decentralized bitUSD is much better in comparison to Tether, which is intransparent and centralized. In recent months trading volume really picked up esspecially in bitCNY/BTS, but also for bitUSD/BTS. I would be happy to hear other opinions about these decentralized alternatives.

Disclaimer: I own some bitUSD, bitCNY, BTS, but I am not involved in other ways with the project.

[1] https://wallet.bitshares.org/#/asset/USD

[2] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitusd/

[3] https://wallet.bitshares.org/#/market/BTS_USD

> Censorship is horrible, but do you have proof that Blockstream supports it?

Here is some very strong evidence for it: http://telegra.ph/Inside-the-Dragons-Den-Bitcoin-Cores-Troll...

Obviously, people could always say that there is no proof, because "supporting" is such a vague term. It is hard to come up with a mathematical proof. But I would say, it is already a proof that they participate mostly in /r/bitcoin and not in /r/btc. Reddit depends on participation. Therefore with their participation in censored forums in contrast to uncensored forums they at least indirectly support the censorship.

What I remember from my neuromorphic engineering course (or analog VLSI course) is that we designed the silicon layout (with n and p doping regions) in a way that the transistors are operating in the subthreshold regime in the IV characteristics. If I remember correctly the IV characteristic is linear in the subthreshold region? In contast in normal digital chips only the super-threshold region is used (voltage above a certain saturation threshold switches the transistor completely on). Using the subthreshold region it is possible to implement spiking neuons with only very few transistors. It works completely different than digital circuits. The connections between the transistors don't transmit just 0's and 1's. Instead all wires transmit analogue signals where the exact voltage matters. This makes these chips extremely energy and space efficient. These chips can also work much faster even in comparison to biological neurons (obviously using some assumptions and simplifications, such as neglecting certain special kinds of ion channels found in real neurons).

Interesting. The concept seems to be very similar to this one: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.01578

For me it is not just about being comfortable in writing the same language for aerver and client. It has also a technical aspect to it:

I can directly run my application code, which is a single page application in js, also on the server. I have complex datamodels in my js application. It would be very much work if I need to use some of these datamodel functions on the server if I wouldn't use js there.

Why not buy one of the cheap aftermarket Chinese Android head units? When I was looking to buy a car I specifically looked for double DIN compatibility so that I can later easily install my own head unit. I would not want to support a car manufacturer who is abandoning the DIN standard for aftermarket head units. I want this central piece in the car to be upgradable. A car without double DIN is like a computer case without any slot to put an HDD.

There are very nice units with native Android experience. They usually have either a 7" or 10" screen. There are also some discussions of the various chinese units on xda forums in case someone is here interested...

I tried VSCode shortly but switched back to Webstorm mostly because I couldn't find comparable refactoring/renaming options in VSCode. Also js debugging options were not as feature rich as in Webstorm.

That is why there are metrics like inter rater reliability and significance tests and confidence intervals, which seem to be all missing in paper...

In addition to that, there might be an effect due to the media hype around investments of Warren Buffet. People see in the news that Buffet invested in companyXYZ so they think that must be a smart idea and also invest in the same company and therefore driving the price higher...

> My basic intuition is that consciousness arises as a byproduct of any sufficiently interconnected (i.e. Complex) network which processes input from the outside world.

I think you are underestimating the importance of the motor/action system for the development of consciousness. Many neuroscientists and robotic researchers think that the sensory-motor-environment-sensory loop plays an important role for consciousness. This loop allows you to unsupervised learn all sorts of laws of physics and allows you to think that your body actually is you and not just an extension of your mind and therefore also allows the development of the concept of self awareness. Some researchers might call this sensory-motor-contingencies or embodiment. I think when talking about consciousness there it is very important to take into account this loop and not only the sensory perception and building a neural representation of the world...

Doesn't the graph on that site show that electric trucks would be a huge win for lower noise in the city? I would be interested in the standard deviations of these line plots, because I would guess that the engine noise varies much more depending on the acceleration of the truck. I am not that much annoyed by a truck driving with constant speed, but much more annoyed by a truck which is heavily accelerating. And maybe 9 out of 10 trucks passing by are just driving with constant speed but the 10th will be the one which is annoying because it is accelerating.

Thank you for the answer. That makes very much sense.

Just a side note: As far as I know a single layer autoencoder and PCA are only equivalent if all units have no activation function (linear activation function), which is usually not the case.

Could you please elaborate on this. I would really like to know if autoencoders are still useful for classification if I have only labels for a small part of my training data. Is unsupervised pretraining still useful or was it completely replaced by other techniques as the article somehow seems to suggest?

Don't you think nginx is better for serving static files? I first served directly croon node with express and did a test with chrome with a simulated modem connection speed. A simultaneous fast client was blocked because the number of connection nodejs/express was exhausted by the slow modem connection getting a lot of js files...

I think I also read many other blogs suggesting serving static files with nginx in front of nodejs. Are you sure that this does not make sense?

Yes. Also, if several nations have colonies on Mars, I would assume that they would all claim independence roughly at the same time and soon after would form some kind of pan-martian government.

It just makes more sense to increase collaborations between colonies if you are so far away from earth. If there would be a US colony on Mars and a Chinese colony on Mars, these people would probably have more interactions with each other than with any person or nation on earth. There are huge advantages of exchange of goods between colonies, so that not every colony has to produce every special item or mine every kind of resource.

Thank you for the link. For other people interested in a comparison, there is a very nice graph on wikipedia which compares the solar cell efficiency of many different technologies and how they improved over recent years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency

And touchpad designers too. I have a Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga and the Touchpad is unusable. It has this mechanic click where the full touchpad lowers down, and while it is doing this the mouse moves slightly. Therefore it is hard to click precisely on something if during the click the mouse is moving. They probably never tested this before deciding to put this into a thinkpad or they tested it and nobody cared to hear what the testers said...

I am wondering if this centralized infrastructure for financial news is actually a good idea. This could always happen again and again. All the employees in these news companies could get a mass of insider information which they could sell.

Isn't maybe an alternative decentralized news publishing service a better idea? Couldn't the CEO of a company publish their financial news only on their own website at the given publication date? Why is it necessary for these news to be stored in some central news database days before their publishing date? And I mean these as honest questions because I have really no idea what the advantage would be?

And another related question: wouldn't it make sense with today's Internet infrastructure to reduce the interval between earnings reports. Maybe it could even be something like a continous automatic publishing of these company finances. Always when some financials change it could directly be published. That way all investors would at all times have the same information as the insiders, so everyone would be on the same level. Of course some extraordinary news like mergers or acquisitions might still give some people insider information who prepare the deal, but at least the quarterly earnings could not be insider information.

Dear Patrick, are there any plans to incorporate SEPA payments and/or SEPA Direct Debit into Stripe? Europe is a huge market. Many people here don't even have credit cards. I think you would gain a lot of traction in Europe if you would incorporate this...

Good to hear that the pirate party member Martin Delius is the head of the parliamentary committee leading the investigation. I'm wondering if we would be that informed if a member of another political party would be in charge, because one of the main programmatic points of the pirate party is transparency.

Would it make sense to harvest asteroids for water and bring it to the moon?

I am thinking about just one spaceship which could go back and forth between some asteroid and a moon orbit. It shoots the water down to the moon, so that it does not even have to touch-down and take-off again. How much energy would be needed for such a mission? Probably it would be a very complex mission to get right, but once it is established you might have water for free on the moon.

> How do you have a spinning part and a non-spinning part? Because you're going to want your solar cells pointed at the sun.

Isn't that completely wrong? The full station could just be spinning as a rigid-body, while always the same side (with solar cells) can be oriented towards the sun. It is no problem if the solar cells are rotating around an axis, if that axis would be perpendicular to the solar panel and pointing towards the sun, right?

So I am doubtful that he did a lot of research into this. But I am really not an expert, so please correct me if I am wrong...

You are mixing up two persons: Jean-Claude Juncker is starting his term as the European Comission president. Jean-Claude Trichet was president of the ECB.

One more reason to implement the append-only log using blockchain technology. Seems like a good fit. I don't think privacy laws can be applied to a blockchain, but probably that is still unclear. For example, if I post my email address in a Bitcoin transaction, can I then force every user to delete their blockchain?

Maybe it would be possible if you can circumvent the human sensory organs and directly feed the signal to higher brain areas. The delays in sensory modalities are anyway very diverse and not at all synchronously processed in real-time. Even within the same modality the signal is disintegrated in the brain. For example an image from the retina is processed with completely different delays in the ventral and dorsal stream. The ventral stream has latencies of several 100 ms [1]. It is still an open question in neuroscience how these different latencies are combined in higher areas in a way that they are perceived as synchronous.

So even if you are in a conversation with people directly in front of you, you do not actually have a real-time system. It takes roughly 400 ms until the image of a face of a person standing in front of you is processed in the ventral stream and is actually detected. On the other hand there is the auditory modality which is much more sensitive to latencies. But in the end the brain gives you the illusion that anything you perceive is actually real-time, although it is not. So if your brain decides to give a motor signal to actually press a piano key, then only many 100 ms later the actual sound will arrive. The perceptible latency of hearing a sound is actually only because the brain itself takes into account the delays in itself.

So in the end it comes down to trick the brain into believing something is real-time. This is for example done in multiplayer ego-shooters where the motions of other players are actually interpolated into the future and later on corrected if the other player actually changed their last motion command.

[1] Barragan-Jason G, Besson G, Ceccaldi M and Barbeau EJ (2013) Fast and famous: looking for the fastest speed at which a face can be recognized. Front. Psychol. 4:100. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00100

exactly. given that, if you want to be the next Bill Gates or Larry & Sergey or Mark Zuckerberg then you should focus on spotting some new but already existing invention and crate a competitor that is just slightly better then the original.

I would recommend reading http://blog.ethereum.org/2014/01/15/slasher-a-punitive-proof...

No. That is not a problem. Please read about the Slasher proof of stake algorithm. It is very easy to punish the creator of many possible blocks. People always use this nonesense phrase that "with proof of stake nothing is at stake". That is no problem. If the protocol allows that your mining profit is taken away and given to the next honest stakeholder then why do you say that it is a problem that nothing is at stake.

5$ is expensive. Don't you know that there are other countries in the world and that the Internet is not only used by the US. There are also other age groups. If a 10 year old boy has a hobby website 5$ might be a price which is unacceptable.

what would you say if I as a billionaire tell you that cars for less than 50 000 $ are not needed because all Ferraris are not expensive. So please don't use your subjective experience as an argument against cheap security solutions. They have a point to exist. Nobody should have the right to set the lower limit of how much you have to pay to secure your website. Commericial CAs cannot guarantee the security of your favorite site as we all learned from the heartbleed bug. So there is nit argument to favor them and block community solutions.