HN user
I'm pretty sure you lost weight by reducing number of calories.
For example, consuming 2000kcal of refined sugar and 2000kcal of beans will result in different calories absorbed given that 2000kcal of beans requires much more energy to digest than sugar liquid.
Some metabolic disorders skew the absorption.
I do not believe 2000kcal of beans is in any way damaging, yet it's mostly carbs, water and protein with a bunch of nice micronutrients.
Eating diverse food that has a high volume to calories ratio will keep anyone satiated.
Bitcoin Core developers still didn't implement a SegWit wallet. I guess Coinbase can't be sure that their SegWit implementation is going to be used correctly.
It's interesting how the focus is on almonds, grapes, tangerines, lemon etc.
Much scarier than the polluted almond, is the amount of these pollutants that get into the grass, grains and other things the livestock industry in California uses. A big chunk of water is used by the livestock industry (what to feed the poor cow if not the polluted cheap water, who cares about the welfare of a cow), not the lemon guys.
Bioaccumulation of some of these compounds is a much larger risk than eating a fist of almonds. There could be 100 times more of the pollutants in a fist of beef, given that the cow chews through literal tons of grass and grains before slaughter.
Yet one should worry about that tiny drop of lemon juice on your steak.
https://github.com/Microsoft/LightGBM
LightGBM also has GPU support for learning decision trees.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.08439
The original paper.
The references in the paper paint a much clearer picture of where exactly the idea behind reinforcement learning with optimal, suboptimal, random oracles comes from. There are also mathematical proofs that these setups work.
I was quite shocked to not see [6, 16] references in any of the recent MCTS papers.
These references prove why the stuff works and show how well it works. But the whole field of imitation learning seems invisible to the deep RL papers. Don't have the faintest idea why.
The algorithm described is the ultimate generalized algorithm. If you have the expert policy the algorithm is learning completely supervised, if expert policy is suboptimal but the score (loss) is fully calculable the learned policy will outperform the reference policy, if expert policy is completely random the algorithm behaves as reinforcement learning.
What the paper at the top adds is the ability to improve the expert policy with the learned one simultaneously in unison and the math covered previously guarantees improvement.
Yet our /glutinous/ gluttonous diets, irrational heating-cooling patterns waste magnitudes more energy.
Let people be wasters, nothing wrong with that. If Bitcoin experiment succeeds it's going to be better than the Internet. I hear no one complaining that Internet servers waste magnitudes more energy than Bitcoin, serving porn, FB, flash games and all other wasters of life.
Yep, I've tried to do arbitrage on one exchange during dumps (there's quite a lovely way to realize there will be a massive dump done on the exchange) and most of my trades couldn't even execute because the trading engine can't meet the demand.
When you look at the price history (and open orders history) between some pairs on one exchange you'll find that during these spikes there was no arbitrage being done at all.
One example is seeing the price on ETH-BTC pair being constant despite BTC dropping 10-20%, and then combing back in 5-10 minutes.
It's nice to do that to banks that didn't set their trading prices to avoid arbitrage (did it couple of times myself).
For cryptocoins it's nearly impossible. Because in most cases there's no idea when the actual transfer will be executed (if arbitraging between exchanges).
that would make Bitcoin accessible for everyday transactions for millions/billions of people, are not even being attempted
I'm not sure if that's correct. There's absolutely no way bitcoin can support that many transactions with just sane blocksize increase.
As I've said in my other comments, bitcoin is a research facility, not a product, so it's somewhat understandable people are going with their own research directions.
People currently have huge expectations out of an immature technology. It's equivalent to expecting the Internet of the 80s to support MMORPGs with thousands of players, the protocols just weren't mature enough.
It isn't even trying to solve it through the most straightforward way: raising the block size limit.
Okay. The blocksize is raised and now people find new uses when the thing scales better. Streaming money is one such use case. Now you raise the blocksize to a level that needs to support streaming money, now it's so big that your ASICs cannot validate all the incoming blocks, blockchain grows faster than validation.
How to fix the problem now?
Blocksize is a temporary solution to a current popularity issue. Let's just let the hype die a little bit, so there's time to find a proper solution.
If Internet issues were solved by meddling with topology or adding more cable we'd get no where near the current efficient protocols.
Bitcoin is not just software.
Research behind implementing Schnorr signatures, lightning network, confidential transactions, efficient confidential transactions (bulletproofs), is bleeding edge research in cryptography mixed with whole bunch of other fundamentals.
Nodejs required practically no academic research while bitcoin needs it heavily today still.
https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1159.pdf
For example, you have papers like above being published in the context of bitcoin. 60 pages of untrivial math, and that's just one idea of how to scale bitcoin.
This is false.
What is false? Are you saying it is governed as a product? Incremental scaling improvements are research fun projects that are not being forced on developers (that are the users of bitcoin protocol). No one forced SegWit, I'm pretty sure Schnorr signatures will not be a hard fork too.
Any kind of rational organization making a good product would get out of an extreme situation as this one is with a hard fork.
Microsoft, probably the best example of how to do backwards compatibility, decided to force Win8 on everyone because, obviously, managing old software was an issue. Just like managing transactions with uncompressed keys is, yet there's still plenty of them being added to the chain today.
Bitcoin is obviously a vehicle for intellectual stimulation first, Bitcoin as a product is out of the view. I mean, you have core developers optimizing validation code on CPU (who needs that thing to be 4x faster now, anyway?) and doing heavy refactoring for segwit, braintickling over schnorr for months, coming up with ways to do confidential transactions, doing bulletproofs to reduce the size of confidential transactions, doing prototypes of that research etc.
There's obviously no long-term scaling solution in sight, this is all still very early research.
Bitcoin is an early stage technology that still hasn't solved its scaling problem.
Bitcoin is also not governed as a product, so incremental scaling improvements are left for the user to use, and not to forced by protocol.
Bitcoin is currently not usable as currency, and is of course, not store of wealth - thing is not a liquid asset at all.
Proposed scaling solutions were scientific research years ago, and research is still being done. The implementation obviously takes years to finetune and the scaling solution might not work as well as research predicted.
All other coins are early stage tech and research too.
People were enjoying the tech when it was less popular and seemed like magic, now when big numbers come into play it is obvious things where blown out of proportion way too early.
Yet still, bridges, roads, piping cost more to build than ever before.
There are limits to growth. The infrastructure bubble is cracking.
No one was there to think through the long term investment in infrastructure.
The prices have skyrocketed due to regulation and now the government can't pay for all that regulated work.
Similar thing will happen in EU. Pipes are failing all across the western world.
There's a good book called Primetime Propaganda, showing how exactly ABC, CBS and NBC were doing that, and are still doing it.
https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1159.pdf
The above is a proper paper on how to do math for a DAG based protocol.
Serguei Popov, the research mathematician behind IOTA DAG based protocol, claims that it is impossible to make proofs behind the tech. [1]
[1] https://medium.com/@johndom/iota-and-spectre-64ee12d9b1a8
Dynamic IP. My IP is so heavily reused that there's hundreds of downloads, porn, tv shows, movies etc.
Well, assuming that bitcoin can be tracked and deanonymized, it would. Although, all cryptocoins are a step back. There's no way they could support transactions-per-second necessary.
As much as I like cards, I also prefer paying for stuff with cash.
In Portugal it is illegal to buy an expensive computer, or high-end computer monitor, or a high-end TV with cash. Similar thing in France.
Imagine yourself throwing a dinner party in a restaurant with 10 guests and they eat and drink so much that it comes to a point where it's illegal to pay that dinner with cash. Ridiculous.
All cryptocurrencies are a bubble.
Technology is still not there yet. There's no scaling solution anywhere in sight.
These valuations are for a product that does not exist.
If scaling miraculously comes then the price might hold, otherwise the transaction fees will grow up to a point that most small investors won't be able to make that 2nd layer entry transaction and will be stuck on the expensive 1st layer.
The price will then crash.
Facebook is the ultimate individualism app.
Before, you had media that was consumed simultaneously by all members of the family or together with your friends. There were some, not that time consuming media sources targeting a certain age group.
Facebook targets all age groups and compartmentalizes everyone perfectly into their own echo chambers.
People consume stuff together less, compared to times when they consumed television or similar media.
Even families don't spend time together watching their favorite comedy shows or similar as much as they used to. Shows are all compartmentalized.
That's what targeted advertisement and machine learning do. Tweak for the best click through rate.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but there might be some effects of people consuming information mostly alone without any external input, other than their echo chamber. I've definitely felt this affect me.
http://zafar.cc/2017/7/19/hungarian-algorithm/
Article above describes a very short implementation of the most efficient form of the algorithm (40 lines of code).
None of these technologies are dominant enough. Not a single one is a usable product.
All cannot support a large number of transactions, not even those that do not have proof of work. There's research-level problems being solved (like bulletproofs for compact private transaction - hides amounts). After research is done there's engineering. Then testing until it is ready to use.
People really don't realize how early this is.
Lightning network, a proposed solution for Bitcoin scaling problem, was announced 2 years ago, and they identified many issues with it since then. There's talks of layer number 3 etc.
This is way too early and there's no winner. Bunch of cryptocurrencies are riding on the research-wave behind Bitcoin.
Whey is waste in the dairy industry, yet it's sold profitably as a dietary supplement and used all over the processed food market.
Unfit oranges, apples etc. are waste to the fruit producers, but juices love it.
Cow shit is a complete waste but is used as a fertilizer. Although, a bunch of cow shit is also thrown into rivers.
Wasted food is ground into powder and given to animals.
I guess food might be an exception. I don't know if there exists something similar for oil, chemicals etc.
You need to read on industrial history if this is not obvious to you.
I'm asking questions to learn something from the discussion. Currently, my opinion is that regulations are necessary, but perhaps they aren't, and I would like to hear why.
Think of it as an algorithmic problem - local optimization seldom leads to a global optimum. Hence, sometimes global tweaks can benefit an entire system.
To me, this sounds as if the power of the government needs to be huge and centralized? Because obviously local agents cannot come up with globally optimal solution (if the problem is not structured in a way they can).
For example, the huge use of insecticides and pesticides enables the industry of cheap meat and dairy. Regularizing insecticides and pesticides will most definitely increase the costs for the producers and the price of the product will increase. On the other hand, there are enormous subsidies in farming and will these subsidies now increase to keep the prices low?
These regulations, at least that's how it looks to me, are directly impacting the tax payer, not the industry players.
EDIT: I'm out of discussion. Getting to many downvotes for no particular reason.
Not sure what a capitalist incentive is, but we have plenty of ways to potentially regulate this. Are you asking about technical feasibility of finding the actors responsible for it?
I was thinking, in the framework of capitalism, what would the incentive be, other than regulation, to not pollute? Why does it not work, is the incentive missing?
For example, there are companies like Clean Harbors that earn billions from recycling toxic waste, oil etc. Are they earning money because regulations need to be met, or is there a profit to be made?
If latter, how come no one is trying to make profit by capturing pesticides/insecticides?
Would deregularization make these billion dollar waste collection companies bankrupt?
How would there be a capitalist incentive not to do these things? Do we really need regulations? Why do these things happen? Why do people think it is acceptable to pollute?
I don't get it. Aren't Republicans for less regulation?
I read the article. When I was making "would say" statements I was merely copying the expression parent used.
Facts are that black people commit more crimes. These are not fake crimes, these are real crimes. This obviously makes it very probable that they'll have issues with the cops, including shootings.
It's very simple, groups that commit more crimes, do get shot more often than others by cops.
Yes, there are instances of obvious cop racism and bad judgement but these are instances, not an epidemic.