Running Bitcoin uses a small city's worth of electricity - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/the-ridiculous-amount-of-energy-it-takes-to-run-bitcoin <comment><USER2> I'll repost the same comment I made previously on an Etherium thread. I think We're really under appreciating the pandora's box we've opened. Energy is one of the most important items for societal progress. And the fact we've now designed an industry to get rich quick for throwing it away is a societal burden we'll never get rid of.

> Almost all of society functions on energy, some of the largest breakthroughs > in society have been on sudden abundance of cheap energy and the machines, > vehicles products they can create.

Entire economies can be crippled by rising costs in energy (oil shocks of the 70s) and boom by sudden drops in cost of energy.

So we've created an "industry" where you are essentially paid by comverting energy to waste. Paid to perform extremely intense difficult (ie wasteful) operations to back a useful technology (digital currency).

Assuming it catches on, energy will never be cheap, there will always be a higher floor now due to options for "mining". As we get better at it and it becomes less wasteful, the digital system will simply raise the reward so people are incentivised to once again waste it.

Ignore the short term for the moment, and which ever currency you're backing. We've created a long term societal motivation/reward to harvest every joule produce by the sun and use it to calculate hashes. I'm not talking about the next decade obviously, but we have incentivised that behavior.

If there is anything technologists should understand is that whatever your beautiful perfect technology is, it will instead be used based on whatever has been incentivised.

Regardless of the technology it powers, this is a terrible societal incentive - and one that will be around a lot longer than people are considering.

<comment><USER3> If Bitcoin reaches a 2 trillion market cap, it will require less than 1% additional world energy output.

Is less than 1% additional energy usage worth a 2 trillion cap? Well, I'm sure people can find a way to argue that it's not, but the point is that bitcoin isn't this enormous threat to energy usage that people try to argue it is.

<comment><USER4> _If Bitcoin reaches a 2 trillion market cap, it will require less than 1% additional world energy output._

The key question raised in the parent comment, which your own riposte artfully dodges, is once again - _who stands to benefit_ from this N% increase in global energy usage?

<comment><USER5> Not the poster but, I assume the beneficiaries are the users of the bitcoin network by the added security from the increases hash-rate/ energy consumption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The most striking statistic was that bitcoin is 5000 times more energy intensive than a VISA transaction.

Maybe my naive interpretation of what VISA actually does is showing here, but I don't see how it's a valid comparison. Bitcoin doesn't simply replace credit card transactions, it replaces an entire banking system. Who confirms VISA transactions? How can you send and receive transactions through VISA? What about all the facilities that are supporting that transaction?

I think it's easier to trace the cost of a bitcoin transaction, which bears the entire cost succinctly, compared to an institution like VISA, which has its tentacles in a ton of energy costing faculties.

<comment><USER7> Bitcoin isn't a payment processor. It can't handle the tiniest fraction of Visa's transaction volume natively.

Of course you can work around this by having third party payment processors that sit between customers and the raw blockchain. But because Visa already does much of that, you need to include the cost of those as well, in order to get an apples-to-apples comparison.

<comment><USER3> _It can 't handle the tiniest fraction of Visa's transaction volume natively._

Not actually true. See the Lightning proposal.

<comment><USER8> 1\. It's not Bitcoin, it's a sidechain utilizing Bitcoin

2\. It's not certain it can work in a decentralized way

<comment><USER9> > 1\. It's not Bitcoin, it's a sidechain utilizing Bitcoin

I think you're mixing lightning up with something else; lightning is not a sidechain[0]. In lightning, at every step participants create standard Bitcoin transactions that can be finalized and settled at any time by just publicly broadcasting them on the Bitcoin network. The participants hold off on broadcasting the transactions until they're done with the payment channel so that they save on transaction fees (and avoid bloating the blockchain). They're immune to counterparty risk like normal transactions are, and it doesn't rely on any central or trusted authorities.

[0] [https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/greg-maxwell- lightning-...](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/greg-maxwell-lightning- network-better-than-sidechains-for-scaling-bitcoin-1461077424/)

<comment><USER8> Maybe sidechain isn't the best term but I don't know a better one.

You're saying it yourself, it creates standard Bitcoin transactions (not lightning transactions). They hold off on broadcasting them, but that may mean if they both go offline they loose their state. It's using Bitcoin as a settlement layer but it's still not interchangeable with Bitcoin.

It still has not been shown that LN can even work in a decentralized fashion.

It uses Bitcoin and it may even become the default way to transact and be better in any way. But it doesn't matter, Lightning is not, and will never be, Bitcoin.

How can this distinction not be clear?

<comment><USER9> >You're saying it yourself, it creates standard Bitcoin transactions (not lightning transactions). They hold off on broadcasting them, but that may mean if they both go offline they loose their state.

Yeah, the guarantees aren't exactly the same. Personally I expect that the risks will be for the most part smoothed over by things like lightning software that automatically syncs the state of payment channels between all of your devices for redundancy.

>It's using Bitcoin as a settlement layer but it's still not interchangeable with Bitcoin.

When a payment channel is settled by any of the participants, it's normal Bitcoin that comes out.

>It uses Bitcoin and it may even become the default way to transact and be better in any way. But it doesn't matter, Lightning is not, and will never be, Bitcoin.

I really think that's splitting hairs. If it becomes the standard way to send Bitcoin around, such that nearly everyone talking about making or receiving payments in Bitcoin is using Lightning, and if it does end up working very well in practice with many transactions per second, then I think it's more than fair to argue against statements like "Bitcoin can't scale up to VISA volume". Are you insisting on always explicitly referring to them as a combination ("Bitcoin/Lightning")? Kind of reminds me of the losing battle fought by some to correct all references to Linux as "GNU/Linux"...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hate wasteful software. A city's worth of energy and a max throughout of 7 transactions per second[1]. When everybody's done trying to get rich quick we can talk about improvements.

1\. [https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/53620/what-is- th...](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/53620/what-is-the-maximum- transaction-throughput-of-the-bitcoin-network)

<comment><USER11> The mistake is thinking that the energy used from mining is a direct result from the number of transactions being processed.

The reality is that the two are not coupled together. Larger block sizes are obviously possible as demonstrated by bitcoin cash (and by anyone with common sense who hasn't been taken in the censorship on /r/bitcoin). More transaction throughput doesn't affect how much hash power is needed, therefore the main limiting factor is mostly just how many transactions are actually being made.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of Bitcoin's biggest obstacles to widespread adoption is the utility problem -- how can Bitcoin transition to being a transactional currency.

The problem is a dual one; on the one hand, if you can denominate your supply chain in Bitcoin, then that removes much volatility, because you no longer care about the cost of Bitcoin. But that requires that all of the components of your supply chain are also denominated in Bitcoin. And on the other hand, what is the "appropriate" value for Bitcoin? Is it too expensive right now, or alarmingly cheap? This relates to volatility as well; the uncertainty in how to price the asset is real.

The power/Bitcoin correspondence is a way to take a crack at both of these problems. The price of Bitcoin and the price of energy are fundamentally related, once capital costs of Bitcoin mining equipment is removed from the equation. An energy provider can safely denominate their provided energy in Bitcoin because they know that they can use any unpurchased capacity to mine Bitcoin directly.

Once we start to see Bitcoin appearing on commodity exchanges, which should be soonish, I think it's likely that power companies (which are already notoriously active in the securities market) will find that they can hedge against price fluctuations with Bitcoin futures; basically leveraging that correspondence. We might be a long way off from them directly billing in Bitcoin, but it would not surprise me to see correlations between energy futures and Bitcoin futures once there's a more liquid market for the latter.

</comment><comment><USER13> Thinking of the bitcoin network "wasting" money as a "feature" (rather than incidentally) to process transactions is not quite the right way to think about it. From a bird's-eye-view the current baking/financial system of transactions (banks+visa+federal reserve, mints, FINCEN, etc.) all are part of what makes it difficult to cheat with money like USD. Rather than use this huge network of organizations to make it difficult to cheat, bitcoin uses proof-of-work. Replacing all those big, expensive organizations is, well, _expensive_! I believe bitcoin (or technologies like it) have the potential to be more efficient at this than the current system; bitcoin just makes more explicit the cost of making it expensive to cheat.

</comment><comment><USER14> Isn't an Energy-Free-Bitcoin or Cryptocurrency having your lunch and eating it too? If you are going to have a cryptocurrency that consumes little energy (or energy consumption doesn't scale with transactional value), how do you secure the network?

<comment><USER15> It depends on whether you consider distributed consensus to be fundamental to cyber coins or not.

For instance, a cyber coin could publish a hash of their block chain in the New York Times everyday. A sound implementation would secure the chain up to that point.

<comment><USER9> But who is it that picks the hash to publish into the NYT? You're putting that picker in control of the whole network; it's not decentralized at all.

If you're going to have a trusted authority involved, then having a globally- synchronized blockchain is unnecessary. Users could just check with the trusted authority about whether a transaction is valid (not a double-spend), or even just have the trusted authority maintain balances for them.

<comment><USER15> They would publish a hash of a public ledger.

The central authority would still choose what ended up in the ledger but they would not be able to rewrite history because of the publicized hashes locking it into place.

I meant to sketch out a centralized way of finalizing a public ledger, so yeah, it isn't decentralized.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How much energy does it take to run the US Mint and the US banking industry?

<comment><USER17> Energy used to run the mint is incidental, so lower energy usage can be an attainable target if it's prioritized. The energy wasted from Bitcoin, on the other hand, is a feature and cannot be reduced without reducing Bitcoin's core functionality.

<comment><USER18> But in Bitcoin's case it's the same, even the article mentions that "doing today's calculations would "consume way more power than is generated on the entire planet" if it were done using the CPUs available when Bitcoin launched in 2009.". Energy used when mining Bitcoin could also be considered incidental, the goal is to calculate hashes.

<comment><USER19> No it wouldn't because increasing energy efficiency of the bitcoin miners just means that the difficulty will rise until you're back to the same power consumption. The power consumption depends on the block reward and transaction fees.

>Energy used when mining Bitcoin could also be considered incidental, the goal is to calculate hashes.

The goal isn't to calculate hashes. That is the incidental part. The goal is to have a randomly chosen node create one block every X seconds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Anyone finds it silly/irresponsible to trade non-renewable resources for virtual ones?

<comment><USER11> Wouldn't rendering 3D movies fall under that category?

<comment><USER20> You don't make billion movies. You probably make billion transactions though; when these are energy-demanding, you are burning precious resources for very little value. If all of humanity switched to bitcoin, imagine we spent 50% of energy production to run mining and blockchain verification. It's a nice proof of concept, we need something different though to survive.

<comment><USER11> That's not how bitcoin works. The mining power being spent now is not tied to the number of transactions. The price is what is dictating all the mining that is currently being done. More transaction throughput requires almost nothing more from the miners than they are doing now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is known and well understood. Bitcoin's implementation consumes lots of energy.

There have been however lots of developments in the blockchain space, especially as it refers to different proof systems and algorithms. The alt- coins in general, though mostly badly viewed due to the often poor and sleazy behaviours, are a playing ground for exactly this kind of problem.

I won't give specific names because I'm not an advocate for any one in particular, but there are several other coins and implementations that try to do away with the energy consumption and improve scaling. Some have even gotten to the point of eliminating mining and transaction fees altogether (yup, zero fees: transfer value anywhere in the world, instantly, and pay absolutely nothing for doing so).

A quick google search should point you in the right direction if it sounds interesting.

<comment><USER8> > Some have even gotten to the point of eliminating mining and transaction > fees altogether

But it's not clear if they even work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Putting the "trust" back in "trustless" using drm'd hardware, is antithetical to bitcoin's design.

</comment><comment><USER23> Energy of a small city is still not big enough to protect from a government takeover. Also what matters more is the cost of the mining equipment (which is more than 1.5 years of electricity if the equipment is refreshed every 1.5 years).

Anyways if Intel can make North Korea trust its hardware, I might take a look at their project.

</comment><comment><USER24> The alternatives proposed in the article are also known as Proof of Luck and Proof of Time. Both require a trusted execution environment, which is what Intel's SGX enabled processors provide.

Perhaps Intel can find new blockchain applications for their technology, but it is unlikely to be adopted by a digital currency.

</comment><comment><USER25> Could Bitcoin just halve the difficulty and half the reward for mining a block at the same time? Wouldn't that effectively double the throughput of the system? I'm guessing there's some negative consequences to this I don't understand.

<comment><USER26> Then we'd get blocks twice as quickly, but the transaction capacity of each block is not related to the difficulty or reward, it's an artificial constraint. You could, say, have blocks 8x as large and increase capcity 8x without affecting the difficulty directly. (Some argue there are other ramifications to this, of course.)

<comment><USER25> Right, so speeding up blocks is roughly equivalent to increasing the block size, which is what the whole BCH vs. BTC split was over, correct? So I guess the arguments against it would be the same? And if I understand correctly the core argument is that it would make it harder for anyone to verify the entire block chain. Is there any real argument against it beyond that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> « _But estimates by independent researchers suggest it's around 500 megawatts_ »

My work is starting to pay off. This author appears to have used estimates coming from my research: 470-540 MW as of 26 February 2017.¹ Sometimes people stumble upon and blindly trust the flawed estimate published by digiconomist of ~2000 MW.²

¹[http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity- consumption/](http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/)

²[http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in- beci/](http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/)

<comment><USER28> I absolutely love your blog and have used it many times to show that Bitcoin is much less wasteful than people think it is, mostly due to obsolete miners no longer being used.

The data and graphs are very well presented.

<comment><USER27> Thank you! I did put a lot of effort into it, eg. my energy estimate research represents 30-40 hours of work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> All of the comments in here that are saying something like,

 _> "well at Bitcoin's current throughput it consumes X, and $large_financial_institution does Y, Bitcoin's equivalent energy usage would be Z" _

have a fundamental misunderstanding of Bitcoin's mining. The current difficulty to a produce a block is the same, regardless of the transaction throughput of the system. The Merkle root of the block's transactions goes into the block header, and that is hashed over and over. Empty blocks or huge blocks would require approximately the same energy in mining effort.

</comment><comment><USER30> At the same time there was an article here some time ago showing that bitcoin uses as much energy in a year as a coal mine uses in a day. Everything is relative.

</comment><comment><USER31> The objections in the comments around this are somewhat funny. There is more than a small city's worth of electricity in whole system waste alone. It is like complaining that you didn't eat all of your bell pepper, when behind you is a whole dumpster full of individually wrapped bell pepper sandwiches being thrown away because a pending sell-by-date or a marketing material change.

</comment><comment><USER32> Dear author: Compare Bitcoin mining vs. the entire infrastructure that powers Visa and you'll be so ashamed of yourself for writing this.

<comment><USER33> if bitcoin were used anywhere near visa was, it would be mining + the infrastructure. How else would you spend them at walmart? They'd need a POS for example.

<comment><USER32> I'm not saying POW is perfect. I'm just pointing out how idiotic it is to just make this type of statement.

Also, Bitcoin is not trying to beat Visa. BitTorrent disrupted the entire entertainment industry without being as fast as regular download.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> do people understand electronic payment transactions?

most payment specifications were written when every single byte in a message was important. A lot was done to keep message (and data storage) size as small as possible because that was just common sense.

you may think that there are a lot of coin transactions but that's just peanuts compared to the vast vast amount of normal payment transactions.

</comment><comment><USER35> Isn't that what really backs that currency ? The more you spend value to make it, the more valuable it becomes. Just look at the relative values of BTC and other altcoins that require less energy to mine. IMO there's nothing to worry about it, it's just the natural order of things, you cannot find gold in every house backyard.

<comment><USER36> No, you have the causality backwards: the high value of BTC is what incentivizes large investments of electricity and servers. The value of a currency depends only on supply and demand. BTC has the highest demand among cryptocurrencies mainly due to network effects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> You could say it's much worst to dig gold out of the ground. (even accounting for the percentage for industrial use)

<comment><USER38> But at least gold isn't designed to make you waste as much energy as you can to secure its value. Instead, Bitcoin (and every other proof of work cryptocurrency) is based exactly on this principle.

<comment><USER39> Precisely. Bitcoin is, by design, a Red Queen's race -- miners are incentivised to spend more energy on mining, but the total reward available to miners is fixed.

 _" Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."_

 _" A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I used to worry about this. Now I realise that my worry came from a scarcity mindset.

There is no reason at all to believe that electricity production will always be difficult or expensive. These problems will be solved.

</comment><comment><USER41> Not sure if I like where this is going. [https://software.intel.com/en- us/sgx](https://software.intel.com/en-us/sgx) sounds like drm for code.

</comment><comment><USER42> My best hope is that there will be some kind of OPEC cartel that agrees to limit production. The members could have unused reserves of mining hardware that ramps up when somebody violates the agreement.

<comment><USER43> > "My best hope is that there will be some kind of OPEC cartel that agrees to > limit production."

Those limits were baked into the design from the start. In the current design there are only 21 million Bitcoins that can be mined, and we're approximately 80% of the way to that target.

[http://www.bitcoinblockhalf.com/](http://www.bitcoinblockhalf.com/)

Also, Bitcoin is designed to be harder to come by as time goes on. The number of new coins issued diminishes over time. See the Supply Growth section here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin)

"12.5 bitcoins per block (approximately every ten minutes) until mid 2020, and then afterwards 6.25 bitcoins per block for 4 years until next halving. This halving continues until 2110–40, when 21 million bitcoins will have been issued."

There will come a time when Bitcoin mining is no longer profitable. If the scaling problems with the transactions are solved in time, we may see more people trading in Satoshis (fractions of a Bitcoin). The scaling problems are pretty hard to solve though, it's probably going to take a hard fork to make Bitcoin a true alternative to traditional government-backed currencies.

<comment><USER42> I am aware of this, what I meant was a limit on hashrate

<comment><USER43> Hashrate is also limited by design:

[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty#What_network_hash_rate...](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty#What_network_hash_rate_results_in_a_given_difficulty.3F)

<comment><USER42> Each miner has an incentive to outcompete other miners. A mining cartel can agree to keep difficulty and hashrate low. It is also comparable to a truce in a military conflict.

<comment><USER43> > "A mining cartel can agree to keep difficulty and hashrate low."

Won't work. If a mining cartel agrees to keep difficulty and hashrate low, they're just making it easier for those outside the cartel to mine more Bitcoin.

<comment><USER42> With unused mining hardware reserves they could smash outsiders by ramping up the hashrate.

Cartels usually don't last forever, but they can last for a while. In the case of bitcoin, it could reduce total energy consumption.

<comment><USER43> In one comment you're suggesting a cartel should keep the hashing rate low, in another comment you're suggesting the same cartel should increase the hashing rate to keep out the competition. What are you really proposing? Keeping it low until any form of competition shows up? That competition is always likely to be a factor for as long as Bitcoin mining is popular.

<comment><USER42> > Keeping it low until any form of competition shows up?

Exactly. This is similar to how price dumping works: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_\(pricing_policy\))

<comment><USER43> You're not listening. I'm suggesting it'll never work for Bitcoin as the available competition is ever present. A cartel gains nothing by mining at a slower rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Running USD uses a small planet's worth of hydrocarbons

</comment><comment><USER45> I think this will solve itself over time. As the block reward gets smaller, miners will afford less and less wasted electricity.

<comment><USER46> Unless bitcoin doubles in price every 4 years, the frequency of reward halvings. Then cost of electricity used in mining will remain constant.

<comment><USER45> I don't think it's going to double forever. Transaction fees will eventually outpace the actual block reward and level things out, but even with that it's going to be a much smaller amount per block.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Yeah...

Weird thought... (I do not know if thi already exists, as I dont care about crytocurrency - only because I dont have the cycles, currently)

What if there was a crytocoin that was just a centrally mined 'thing' \- and the value of the coin was what others were willing to bid on the next coin vs volume of those willing....

Isnt that literally how gold currently works?

So rather than consume billions of watts on bitcoin - just make digital gold?

<comment><USER48> No need to bid.

Just give X amount of coins to every person and newborn for free.

<comment><USER49> Whuffie?

<comment><USER48> More like Universal Basic Income

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Compared to the environmental damage and pollution caused by the mulitary, it will surely be much smaller. Also motor racing is another huge waster of resources, with no real benefit to the population.

</comment><comment><USER51> My novice armchair estimate is that something like ZCash is broadly much less efficient than Bitcoin. Of course, no measure can go beyond a loose estimate.

<comment><USER9> I don't think it makes any sense to try to compare the efficiency of different proof of work systems.

Now you could compare the work that goes into synchronizing the blockchain between all nodes, but I'd expect that has a near-negligible environmental impact compared to all of the miners. (Individual Zcash transactions are a bigger file size than individual Bitcoin transactions if I remember right.)

<comment><USER51> OK I'm confused. Thank you though!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> That is exactly the point of proof of work. Criticizing Bitcoin for this, is like criticizing DNA Evidence for being hard to fake.

</comment><comment><USER53> There are real costs to bitcoin, the electricity being burnt in China is killing hundreds of people.

</comment><comment><USER54> Burstcoin!

</comment><comment><USER55> So...way, way, way less energy than mining for gold?

Isn't the energy consumption the whole point?

<comment><USER2> Mining for gold has become orders of magnitude more efficient over time. Bit coin will become orders of magnitude less efficient by design...

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> is not bitcoin consuming energy's is people's greed, china or whatever can ban mining same of US can ban industrial mining, bitcoin won't be affected a bit, I would be happy to be able to mine it on my laptop.

</comment><comment><USER34> bitcoin is the This Is Fine dog pouring petrol around the room saying "I wish I started pouring earlier"

</comment><comment><USER57> They hate us for our freedoms

</comment><comment><USER34> burn the world to make a buck

</comment><comment><USER58> Pyramid schemes are expensive, no shit.

</comment><comment><USER59> /s

<comment><USER60> We can tackle problems in parallel. Cultural issues are not a blocking problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I'm guessing many of the miners are located in regions like Washington State or Quebec with low cost relatively-green hydroelectric power and the power use doesn't correspond to the environmental impact of an average small city (except obviously one located where the miners are).

<comment><USER62> Most of the miners are in China, which runs a lot of coal and gas

<comment><USER11> Actually lots of mining is done in China using cheap electricity that comes from a glut of hydro-electric power created by government infrastructure spending.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> But that electricity is cheaply available. We could stop bitcoin's use of electricity overnight, if electricity began to cost more than the expected return on investment. And this will inevitably happen anyway, since bitcoins only get harder to mine over time. This is a temporary problem.

Honestly it seems more like "bitcoin is a way to launder stolen electricity" rather than "oh noes, if people keep mining, eventually they'll have a huge impact on global energy consumption"

</comment><comment><USER64> I'm not sure I understand the issue. I'm betting that the amount of energy used to power online games for Play Station Online is orders of magnitude worse than for bitcoin with arguably less benifit to society. What am I missing?

<comment><USER65> Exactly, this is a non-issue at best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> How much power is drawn by the "ever-expanding" racks of servers powering other stores of value? How many servers are running in the banking and financial industries just to enable non pseudonymous transactions of value?

This article is sensationalist nonsense. I would argue it is a positive point that a globally tradeable cryptocurrency with billions in market cap only requires the energy of a "small city."

<comment><USER67> > a globally tradeable cryptocurrency with billions in market cap only > requires the energy of a "small city."

It only sounds good because we haven't really considered the scale here, so let's scale that up a bit.

What if even 1% of non cash financial transactions in the US were handled with BTC? For 2015, that would have worked out to about $1.8T.

How big would BTC need to be to handle that? Well, it looks like last year it's estimated to have done a little over $100B, so it'd have to scale somewhere around 15-20x to even cover 1% of _one country 's_ transactions...

[1] [https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/other/2016-p...](https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/other/2016-payments- study-20161222.pdf)

[2][https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction- volume?...](https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction- volume?timespan=1year)

<comment><USER66> You may have a point, except you haven't mentioned how many city's worth of power non-btc transactions currently require, not to mention the additional inneficiency of hundreds of thousands of staff which could possibly be reduced in number because of the distributed ledger.

I really don't think things are as clear cut as the article implies, but I dont have numbers for the amount of energy consumed by modern electronic value transaction and storage.

Edit: also, "city's worth" as a measure of electricity, as in the article, is a terrible choice because it immediately biases the reader and does not convey much useful information. My GPU maxes at 300W; the article provides no way of conversion. Never mind that a small city may be a suburb using one hundredth of the power used by a small city center full of servers and a handful of skyscrapers.

<comment><USER67> > you haven't mentioned how many city's worth of power non-btc transactions > currently require

No, I didn't but the article did, and it's cited elsewhere on HN - Visa for example uses 1/7000th of the energy per transaction...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Exceptional Software finds success in errors - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2012/09/21/exceptional-software-finds-success-in-errors/

<comment><USER2> Disclaimer. I run product at Airbrake and Exceptional.

We've passed a few great milestones recently; such as hitting over 500k downloads of our gem and 100k users, we've continued to bring more notifiers in-house. <https://github.com/airbrake/>

We are half way through a overhaul of the UI and will be speeding up the web- app and greatly improving the notification system.

Thanks to all of our awesome users <http://blog.airbrake.io/category/awesome- airbrakers/> . For people who don't have an exception tracking, I recommend reading up on StickerMules story. <http://blog.airbrake.io/awesome- airbrakers/sticker-mule/> after installing Airbrake and fixing bugs they increased their conversion by nearly 3%.

Feedback and comments are always welcome to firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER3> I had no idea they were run by the same people.

<comment><USER4> they acquired them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If only they didn't frequently lose our exception data, this would be great news!

Honestly, their only job is to _store stack traces._ In about 20% of occurrences over the last 6 months, we've been told that our data "has been lost and is not recoverable." Thus we know that an exception has occurred, but we're lost as to why.

It's such a simple app that we've considered rolling our own. We believe we can achieve better than 80% uptime.

<comment><USER2> Hi @calinet6. Sorry to hear that you've been having issues with your account. Please send a mail to email@example.com or email@example.com (depending on your product) and we'll be happy to look into this issue for you.

<comment><USER5> I have, and I've been told the bug has been fixed and I should not see the issue again. I've been told this twice now (1 month apart). I think hearing "the issue is resolved" is about as finished as the issue can be, I guess I can only hope it doesn't come up a third time.

So, your uptime average is slowly creeping up again. Otherwise we're relatively happy with the service—it's just that there isn't much "otherwise" besides simply viewing the stack trace. Honestly there's not much to it.

Congrats on your achievement and all, but it's difficult for me to get excited about an app that any competent programmer could probably whip up in a day or two.

<comment><USER6> "an app that any competent programmer could probably whip up in a day or two"

You must tread very, very carefully when using those words. Being programmers does not magically admit us to a complete understanding of every detail of a piece of software. If you've ever delivered a product, you should know that what the user sees is only a fraction of the whole—even if the user happens to be a competent programmer. And if you consider yourself such a programmer, why not try replicating their software from scratch, if it will really only take a day or two?

<comment><USER5> I completely agree, obviously there are many complications and other concerns that could make it a much more difficult task.

I envision most of the difficulty that exceptional.io has encountered has been related to scalability. If I wanted a small, simple, self-hosted application with this functionality, it will probably be simpler. I'm not guaranteeing this, but I'm making a good estimate based on my experience creating similar web apps and utilities throughout my career—this ain't no blind shot in the dark guess.

You're right, being programmers does not make us magically able to understand details of software. But being _good_ software engineers _does_ involve a lot of exactly that skill. They are separate and distinct skills, but most great programmers I know are also great software engineers, and also great estimaters of project complexity. In my experience, I am as well (in fact I am generally better at estimating project architecture, complexity and time than I am at programming itself). This is where my response comes from—not simply being a programmer. Apologies for the confusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And yet their JS error handing is still terrible.

<comment><USER2> We're mid-way through a re-write of our JS notifier ( <https://github.com/airbrake/airbrake-js> ) . We still use stacktrace.js; and are going to do some backend server improvements such as a JSON API, and the ability to async send errors without any other blocking. If you have a specific issue please open up a ticket on the repro. <https://github.com/airbrake/airbrake-js/issues>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ditto on the bad uptime and data retention. I've also had issues with support taking a week to respond.

In addition, exceptional does not support looking at the data in interesting ways (i.e. exceptions from this machine, exceptions for this customers, how many customers are affected by a problem, etc). I have to configure applications to send exceptions to difference projects which is a huge pain when you need to change something.

Their 404s idea is useful, but inflexible, as sometimes I do care about getting notified about RecordNotFound, etc.

Thanks for the ratchet.io, whoopsapp.com, and sentry suggestions.

</comment><comment><USER9> We've had nothing but problems with exceptional. We've experienced multi-day outages, that only got resolved by calling the company. Our operations staff won't even use the product anymore (insufficient data is retained to permit the sort of forensics they need to do), so we send email exception notifications in addition to exceptional.

From speaking to other companies in our position, it sounds like there are no good solutions on the market currently. We unfortunately plan on building our own solution in-house.

<comment><USER2> Hi Andrew93101. I'll be happy to also review your account. Exceptional.io currently stores the last 30 occurrences; if you require more we're rolling our a higher storage plan. You can reach me at firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> For those into stats / infographics, we've created one. [http://blog.exceptional.io/site-news/exceptional- infographic...](http://blog.exceptional.io/site-news/exceptional-infographic/)

Some fun facts; half our customers are outside the US. We processed 145 million unique errors in the month of July.

</comment><comment><USER4> 100K customers != 100K users

I wonder how many people create multiple free accounts for each of their websites, so it might be like 5K PAYING customers right?</comment>


The secret to this interactive hologram tech is water vapor - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2014/10/07/interactive-holograms-leia-display-system/ <comment><USER2> Not an actual hologram.</comment>


The Myth of the Flat Earth (1997) - <AUTHOR> http://www.asa3.org/ASA/topics/history/1997Russell.html <comment><USER2> This reminded me of an interview with Umberto Eco: [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/28/arts/international/umberto...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/28/arts/international/umberto- eco-a-master-of-fiction-considers-historys-lies.html?_r=0)

I am not a historian, but I've read a lot on history. My personal thesis is that, because of the social changes required for the transition from old economic systems (feudalism) into our current world, the old order had to be belittled.

In the old order, most people had a place in the world (the land, the guild, the church, etc.). In the new order, you worked 16 hour shifts just so you could eat and you had no guarantees. You need a big ideological blow to your head to not want to go back to the old order. Hence the medieval bashing.

Again, this is just a little thesis of mine. One day I'll find the time to read enough to give it some weight (or just disprove it).

<comment><USER3> 'In the old order, most people had a place in the world (the land, the guild, the church, etc.). In the new order, you worked 16 hour shifts just so you could eat and you had no guarantees'

I think you are romancing the old order.

Most likely the same kind of people (being most people) worked (or struggled along) for '16 hours a day' (for example on land not owned by themselves). Just so they could eat and probably without guarantees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "incessant attacks on Christianity ... sneers at Christianity ... slandering Christians ... vitriolic sneers at Christianity ... strong antireligious prejudices"

Sheesh. His main point is a reasonable one, but this sort of righteous fury against the infidels is off-putting.

Good rule of effective rhetoric: make it seem you're being totally fair to the other guy. Then the neutrals might listen to you, rather than instantly pattern-matching you as an obvious partisan.

</comment><comment><USER5> This whole thing is a straw man. I don't think I have ever heard an opponent of religion suggest that medieval Christians were stupid for believing in a flat Earth. It is also no news to anyone interested in the issues that belief in a flat earth is a myth (although the research on the perpetrators is new to me).

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not a straw man because he's not creating a villain to argue against it. He's explaining the origins of a very common historical myth still taught in schools. Whether or not those origins were originally perpetrated using straw man arguments is irrelevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> OK, fine, but spherical earth is six thousand years old, right?</comment>


The Dow Is - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedowis.com

<comment><USER2> So how is this supposed to work with the hundreds of such super-simple sites? Am I supposed to bookmark each and everyone of them?

This type of information belongs on a mobile device or something that aggregates them together, but as an independent website, there are too many such simple websites for me to bookmark them and find later effectively.

The web is no longer an effective application distribution channel, because when you 'choose' an app, it does not remember you 'chose' it. It simply disappears within my 2000 or more bookmarks.

The system is broken, things are not simple.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Dow+Jones&btnG=...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Dow+Jones&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=)

</comment><comment><USER4> Rarely have I seen such bad news in such a small font.

</comment><comment><USER5> that site is:

DUMB</comment>


IBM Supercomputer Takes on Human Champions on 'Jeopardy' - <AUTHOR> http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/12/14/ibm-supercomputer-takes-on-jeopardy-stars/

<comment><USER2> Link to detailed backgrounder from the NY Times on "What Is IBM's Watson" ([http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20Computer-t.html...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20Computer-t.html?hp)), with lively HN discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1436625>.

The linked piece above discusses in depth the fascinating history of how Watson came about and how it manages to mimic human intelligence, with interesting asides about such issues as how the machine occasionally messes up in response to certain questions and the skill level of human play that it takes to beat it. A very informative discussion of the AI issues.

</comment><comment><USER3> Same story, different source, no comments:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2003637> \- nytimes.com</comment>


The Strange and Sudden Disappearance of a Coding Bootcamp Founder - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/salvador-rodriguez/devschool-coding-bootcamps.html <comment><USER2> Interesting story, but one really stuck out to me was that people were paying thousands in tuition to go to a bootcamp that was apparently run via Slack (which is how the founder managed to disappear so suddenly, as he lived in Mexico). That's a crazy sign to me of how high the demand is; I had only known of bootcamps that had actual physical classrooms and meetings.

</comment><comment><USER3> Apparently the founder actually could code somewhat but otherwise what a bizarre tale.

How do you convince yourself to spend that much money online?

"The online school says it will apply half of whatever any Devschool student paid in tuition toward Thinkful's web development bootcamp."

With all due respect Thinkful that is not very appealing either: [https://www.thinkful.com/pricing/](https://www.thinkful.com/pricing/)</comment>


Say hello to the future of ProtonMail Introducing Version 4.0 beta - <AUTHOR> https://protonmail.com/blog/v4-beta-announcement/ <comment><USER2> I really love Protonmail. If only their Android app would be available on F-Droid.

A happy "visionary" subscriber.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm excited for the new products that this version will enable them to ship.

At the same time, interesting that they completely rewrote an angular app with react. I wonder if that was truly necessary and if their engineering effort could have been spent on more important things than constantly rewriting their frontend apps using different libraries.

<comment><USER4> The article states that their interface was from 2010 and in Angular 1, which is ancient by now for JS frameworks and there is no upgrade path to newer versions. It would have to be a rewrite either way.

9 years is a curios definition of "constantly rewriting".

<comment><USER3> I see, I didn't know that their frontend was that old. I also didn't know the difference between angular 1 and other angular. It was not fair to say "constantly rewriting".

I wonder in how many years they, or other users of React, will be required to rewrite all over again.</comment></comment></comment>


TypeRacer Tournament Saturday – commentary by world-class competitive typists - <AUTHOR> https://blog.typeracer.com/2019/01/31/typeracer-tournament-this-saturday-the-clicking-championship-1/ <comment><USER2> My wrists hurt just hovering over the link. I guess if there's cup stacking, there can be speed typing. I definitely won't win. :D</comment>


My first jQuery plugin: Electric Slide, a slideshow for text and code - <AUTHOR> http://www.flyingmachinestudios.com/electric-slide/examples/introduction/introduction.html

<comment><AUTHOR> For the past few months I've been very interested in figuring out how to communicate programming ideas well. My friend Pat put together a great way to show what happens to some Ruby code as it's evaluated, and I put together this plugin to make it easier to do what he did.

In the introduction, which I've linked to, I've tried to explain what the plugin does, how it's useful, and the basics of how to use it. I'd love any feedback on the code or on my attempt to explain it. Thanks!</comment>


Show HN: Email collection form for indie makers and MVPs - <AUTHOR> https://tuemilio.com/ <comment><USER2> When processing end-user PII data (I see email address combined with IP address) you need a privacy policy. When registering the website owner doesn't seem to have to agree to a terms-of-service governing the processing, so who owns the data isn't specified.

The API seems to return HTML documents on error, e.g. curl [https://tuemilio.com/api/v1/lists"](https://tuemilio.com/api/v1/lists") when not authenticated.

The API has X-RateLimit-Limit headers. Those aren't explained in the documentation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.</comment></comment>


Caterina Fake shares some Hunch data - <AUTHOR> http://www.caterina.net/archive/001171.html <comment><USER2> Recommender systems are hard to do even within domains with well understood semantics. Applying them broadly across all human decisions seems to be a bit of stretch. Makes for very amusing anecdotes though.

<comment><USER3> Starting with a simple system + lots of traffic is a good start. They can reiterate until it works.

From my understanding network effects have a positive influence on expert systems.</comment></comment>


Negative 0.5% Interest Rate: Why People Are Paying to Save - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/upshot/negative-interest-rates-are-spreading-across-the-world-heres-what-you-need-to-know.html <comment><AUTHOR> "Consider this: Many commercial transactions now take place with some short- term credit attached — for example, a company that gets a 60-day grace period to pay bills from its suppliers. Would that flip, and suddenly suppliers would prohibit upfront payment and insist that their customers wait 60 days to pay?"</comment>


New release of Memory Pool System Garbage Collector - <AUTHOR> http://mailman.ravenbrook.com/pipermail/mps-discussion/2012-September/000118.html

<comment><USER2> This line from the readme made me giggle a litte:

> The MPS has been in development since 1994 and deployed in successful > commercial products since 1997. Bugs are almost unknown.

Then half way down the page is a list of known bugs.

<comment><USER3> I should probably clarify that little bit of hyperbole. We do track known issues (of course), but bugs in production are extremely rare -- about one per year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> @rptb1:

MPS appears to have been designed in a single core era, and it would be great if you would address any architectural changes that were made to address the current prevailing multi-core platforms.

/tia

[edit: removed ref to the azul q]

<comment><USER5> MPS is thread safe, but doesn't do concurrent collection. Not really that different than most GC's besides the JVM's.

<comment><USER3> This is a really interesting topic and I could fill your screens with a wall of text. It's true that the MPS currently does not collect concurrently, however the only thing that makes it not-concurrent is a critical point in the Shield abstraction where the MPS seeks to gain privileged access to memory (usually in order to scan it for GC). The critical point is where ShieldExpose in shield.c has to call ShieldSuspend to preserve the shield invariants. This is the _only_ point in the MPS that prevents concurrency, and the rest of the MPS is designed to support it.

The restriction could be removed if either:

      * the MPS could use a different set of protections to the mutator program

      * the mutator program uses a software barrier

The first one is tricky, and the second one just hasn't come up in any implementation we've been asked to make yet. Given a VM, it could happen, and the MPS would be concurrent.

So, I believe there's nothing fundamentally non-concurrent about the MPS design. It's kind of waiting to happen.

[I've put this in a comment in the code. Thanks for making me write it down :)]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there any documentation that says what this does/how it works? The documentation on the web site seems to be for people already familiar with the code.

e.g. how does it compare with the Boehm collector?

<comment><USER7> Looks like it's a precise GC, not a conservative GC like Boehm. That means that your language has to provide a list of roots manually, while Boehm discovers them automatically. The downside is that Boehm can misidentify pointers (and it also has to jump through extra hoops to achieve incremental and generational collection, while in MPS it should be more straightforward).

<comment><USER3> It's both a precise and conservative GC, depending on what you declare to it, and which pool classes you use. In commercial deployment and in Open Dylan it's a mostly-copying GC (i.e. a mixture of both) see [http://www.memorymanagement.org/glossary/m.html#mostly- copyi...](http://www.memorymanagement.org/glossary/m.html#mostly- copying.garbage.collection)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This includes an example Scheme interpreter, so it's finally possible to see MPS in action.

<comment><AUTHOR> OpenDylan (<http://opendylan.org>) has been using MPS since MPS was first created. (Both were created at the now defunct Harlequin.) We've been working on reviving OpenDylan over the last year as well and this MPS update is a big boon for us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks like a viral license that would prevent this being used in any closed- source applications: <http://www.ravenbrook.com/project/mps/master/license.txt>

<comment><AUTHOR> This seems pretty clear to me:

        If the licensing terms aren't suitable for you (for
        example, you're developing a closed-source commercial
        product or a compiler run-time system) you can easily
        license the MPS under different terms from Ravenbrook.
        Please write to us <email@example.com> for
        more information.

(And you can see from the exception that we got for OpenDylan that such things are possible.)

<comment><USER9> Do those terms cost money ?

I was excited to use MPS in the runtime of an open-source compiler, but if users of the compiler had to pay in order to use it for closed-source apps then that would be a big turn-off.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps you could write to mps-questions and we can have a chat about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Alright, now that I found this, my last excuse for not writing my own CL implementation is gone.

</comment><comment><USER11> how does MPS-GC compare to low pause, no global pause GC systems like GPGC from Azul?

<comment><USER3> I can't give you figures right now, but the reason we have commercial clients for the MPS is that we have extremely low pause times. Side-by-side comparisons are expensive to arrange. I'm working on that :)

<comment><USER11> One of the largest problems with the sun-jvm GC implementations is they have global pause times to rewrite pointers. This is (in part) because there is no read barrier, and thus all threads must be paused to be 'fixed' after object moves.

Additionally with CMS, there is global heap fragmentation and recompaction which can take literally minutes on a large (8gb+) heap or slow machine.

Setting aside exact figures, can you comment on the above challenges and issues?

<comment><USER3> Sure. The MPS approach that's deployed commercially is to use an unfashionable hardware read barrier to amortize the cost of the pointer rewrite, allowing the heap to be compacted incrementally. There's nothing that takes minutes or even seconds -- the cost is spread through the entire execution. In some sense, all this can take "minutes" of real time, but not at the cost of stopping the program doing stuff. The MPS design has always been to spread the cost evenly, not push it into a cataclysmic event in the future.

That said, we have an abstract framework that could be made to work in other ways, depending on requirements. It wouldn't be much work to hook in a write- barrier-only pool class, etc. etc. and have it co-operate. However, most of the development effort so far has gone on the read barrier approach.

As to how this effects overall run-time, well, that's where we'd have to arrange a side-by-side comparison, and make sure it included one of those compactions :P

<comment><USER11> I am not really sure the current state of things, but to "get real" I feel any GC needs to be able to handle:

\- multicore/multithreaded \- heap sizes of 20-200GB and larger ideally

Think about it this way... We have the same goal, of diminishing the use of manually allocated ram to the smallest possible place. Think of the GC vs malloc as compilers vs assembly language. Assembly has it's place, but it's no longer because compilers cannot generate efficient object code in a vast number of circumstances. Lets do the same for GC!

<comment><USER3> I think we'd need a more careful definition of "handle" there!

And we're definitely not proselytizing garbage collection here. The MPS is a framework for both manual and automatic memory management (and co-operation between the two). One of our main high performance commercial applications is all about the manual management, and for very good reasons.

But nobody should be rejecting GC out of hand, that's for sure.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Insurance for single-member LLC - <AUTHOR> Hi All
I have a single-member LLC through which I do software R&D work.  A new contract requires that I hold "Commercial General Liability" and "Professional Liability" insurance.  Was wondering if anyone on here had any particular recommendations/experience about particular insurance providers.
There are a bunch and they seem indistinguishable to my untrained eye.
Related and more general question: how do you go about finding good professional services? (eg accountant, lawyer, ...)  Presumably most common answer is "social network" but I'm a little lacking in that dep't at the moment.
Thanks u <comment><USER2> Many of the well known insurance companies are pretty good, I would recommend just looking at your local big highest rated insurance companies.

[https://www.consumeraffairs.com/insurance/business- insurance...](https://www.consumeraffairs.com/insurance/business-insurance/) [http://www.reviews.com/business-insurance/](http://www.reviews.com/business- insurance/)

Though I would recommend getting few local small business owners word of mouth recommendations that you use regularly above all else. Now for your finding good professional services, I literally go around and see who is doing pretty good (clean and modern physical location, good track record on review sites if they are online, and I also get local business owner opinions.)

Going to the services place of business has been very valuable along with checking out the surrounding businesses. I would also recommend watching how happy the people are going in and out of the business from the parking lot if it is a small single shop place. If it is in a bigger building I would recommend going to their lobby to see how the people and facilities are up to your quality standards.

You can also get a good gauge on some of quality by how your are treated on the phone and in person at the front desk. Normally many of these places have brochures you can get by visiting them to learn more about their specific services and in some cases if they are a big firm their clients if the clients agreed to be named.

It will normally come down to which preference you have (small or big business service). Then once you know your preference you can begin to narrow it down. I would recommend testing the waters with a few consultations up front which would be well worth it in the long run.</comment>


Newscoop announces API for news apps and 4.0.2 release - <AUTHOR> http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/newscoop/latestrelease/

<comment><USER2> To me Newscoop is a really strong Platform. I am sure that the fact it is also opensource makes it very beneficial for the emerging democracies around the world to get this powerful tool</comment>


Walgreen Sues Theranos, Seeks $140 Million in Damages - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/walgreens-seeks-to-recover-140-million-investment-from-theranos-1478642410 <comment><USER2> Theranos has got to be my favorite tech story of the year, possibly of the decade. There's nothing quite as satisfying as the schadenfreude of watching an "elite" who got by for years on charm, connections, hot air and wealth finally get called on their BS and go down in flames so publicly!

There are plenty of hard working, talented tech people out there with grit and integrity and even actual products, held back by their lack of deep-pocketed Ivy-league connections. Yet borderline fraud gets funded and gushed over by the press. If there's justice in the world, the Theranos drama is a sliver of it.

<comment><USER3> >There are plenty of hard working, talented tech people out there with grit and integrity and even actual products, held back by their lack of deep- pocketed Ivy-league connections.

As someone who launched a side project in the _pharmacy_ space and closed a 6 month pilot with the World's largest company and still can't get a YC interview or VC response...I can tell you there is no justice in what happened to Theranos because it doesn't make it any easier for those people with actual products, it's just business as usual.

<comment><USER4> Releasing a diagnostic or prognostic test shouldn't be easy. I've worked in biotech my entire career and it's just too easy to screw up. There are already far too many shortcuts taken in CLIA labs and the LDT space.

<comment><USER5> > too many shortcuts taken in CLIA labs and the LDT space.

jesus fuck, this is NOT what I need to hear as we push our salvage therapy companion biomarker into a 160 patient trial.

then again I work in pediatrics these days and nobody ever made any money in peds. So I guess there's that. People expect their 99-year-old grandpa to die of prostate cancer (or apnea, or constipation, or...). It's rather a more unpleasant shock when your 3-year-old does the dying.

Won't make anyone rich but maybe it'll relieve a little suffering in the world. I guess I'd best be OK with that.

<comment><USER4> Well... hopefully it doesn't apply to your company!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is following the suit filed by $96MM investor Partner Fund Management last month.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/partner-fund-management- sues-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/partner-fund-management-sues- theranos-2016-10)

And Theranos' announcement of shutting down their labs and firing 40% of their staff.

[https://news.theranos.com/2016/10/05/an-open-letter- elizabet...](https://news.theranos.com/2016/10/05/an-open-letter-elizabeth- holmes/)

<comment><USER7> Yet David Boies, a lawyer and Theranos Director, continues to defend the company and its leadership [1].

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-19/theranos-d...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-19/theranos- director-defends-ceo-holmes-says-investors-have-faith)

<comment><USER8> His firm represents Theranos. Although, see: [http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/02/03/business/dealbook/david...](http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/02/03/business/dealbook/david- boiess-dual-roles-at-theranos-set-up-conflict.amp.html).

EDIT: what the hell Google, stop hijacking links.

<comment><USER7> He is still a Director. That entails a fiduciary duty to Theranos' investors.

"But management pays me to kiss their asses" isn't a valid excuse.

<comment><USER8> Right. You expect him to paint a rosy picture but he's walking a very fine line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As always, I'm still waiting on criminal charges for this classic case of fraud.

<comment><USER10> I fear you'll be kept waiting.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I suspect that you're absolutely correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well _that 's_ gonna make it tough to raise another round.

</comment><comment><USER12> a similar statup ubeam by a female founder, with secrecy, and non proven prototype yet.

however, a16z invested in them to my surprise.

[https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/11/charged/](https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/11/charged/)

<comment><USER13> UBeam et al don't make a product, their product is the company. A16z is betting there's high demand for pie-in-the-sky, female-ceo, headline-making companies. So far, they've been right.

<comment><USER14> I really don't like your tone about female CEOs. UBeam and Theranos are terrible examples. Far more companies have been run into the ground by male leadership.

PS - I'm a dude

<comment><USER15> There's a present fad to seek out and support female contenders, and this makes those with good intentions meaty targets for those inclined to exploit good intentions.

It's not that women are less capable, it's that there's an angle where well meaning individuals may be exploited by predators.

In a way, it's flattery to claim that there may exist women who are aware of this opportunity and are exploiting it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm actually pleased to hear that a tech company is going to perish. Too many of them think they are invincible (airbnb)

<comment><USER17> What makes you say that Airbnb feels invincible?

They seem like humble guys who are constantly at battle to save their company.

<comment><USER18> Honest question: at what point does a company stop being called "[two] guys (...) at a battle to save their company", and starts being called a multinational enterprise with ~2000 employees?

<comment><USER17> It's fair to say they're a multinational company and that they're big.

I was talking about the founders being humble.

My point was that the company doesn't seem to think they're invincible. They seem aware of the dangers.

<comment> j-walker >I was talking about the founders being humble.

[http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/22/9591596/airbnb-san- franci...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/22/9591596/airbnb-san-francisco-ad- campaign-proposition-f)

<comment><USER16> This perfectly illustrates the founders and CTO. Their arrogance is striking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> long form article on theranos: [http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/09/elizabeth-holmes- ther...](http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/09/elizabeth-holmes-theranos- exclusive)

<comment> at-fates-hands Jesus, red flags EVERYWHERE

\- _was also bubbling throughout the company's mustard-and-green Palo Alto headquarters, which was nearing the end of a $6.7 million renovation._

Not sure how many startups you guys have been apart of, but none of the ones I worked for were making 7 million dollar renovations to their offices.

\- _Holmes largely forbade her employees from communicating with one another about what they were working on—a culture that resulted in a rare form of executive omniscience._

This also keeps your employees in the dark when the ship starts sinking.

\- _Moreover, he was also struck by Holmes's limited ability to explain how it all worked._

You're running a biotech company and you don't even know how the technology works? Another HUGE red flag.

\- _And, as a then dark-haired 19-year-old first-year at Stanford University's School of Chemical Engineering_

So somewhere she was able to charm people that she was some kind of biotech expert after only having ONE YEAR in a chemical engineering program? Unreal.

There's a bunch more, but I'm quite shocked frankly she got as far as she did. There should have been so many red flags on the investors part to stay away from this company and they all got suckered into it.

<comment><USER20> > There's a bunch more, but I'm quite shocked frankly she got as far as she > did.

That's only because you don't know who she knew. With such deep connected friends when you bring powerful people to the board, money will follow.

<comment><USER21> It's also worth noting the context: the media/large segments of the population were (still are) clamouring for women in STEM. Holmes emerged as a woman in STEM, who was a college drop out, dressed like Steve Jobs, apparently had the work ethic of Elon Musk, came from a well connected family, all while also being some sort of science prodigy who found a way to defy the physical rules of biology.

They ate it up and anyone who asked any questions was immediately labeled a misandrist, so I think it's quite easy to understand how she got this far. Virtually everything was stacked her way and she was immune to criticism.

<comment><USER22> Pardon me but why misandrist instead of misogynist?

<comment><USER21> Apparently I get those two words confused. Should be misogynist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Actual court docket:

[http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/32vhjo5i9/delaware- district...](http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/32vhjo5i9/delaware-district- court/walgreen-co-v-theranos-inc/)

</comment><comment><USER24> How well connected is Holmes that there are still no criminal charges or even a criminal investigation?

This is stark constrast to little people put in prison or harassed for any small transgression.

Seriously this is in healthcare with tons of rules and regulations covering every minutae as any well developed country would have. How can it be remotely possible Theranos has not run foul of any of these rules by deception, fraud and endangering the public?

What does this tell us about the american legal system and rule of law if the well connected are systematically spared or loopholes intentionally left like in the banking crisis and now.

This is not about retribution or seeing bankers or Holmes suffer, its about a civilised and not feudal justice system. Currently it does seem there is a completely different set of rules in operation for the rich and privileged.

</comment><comment><USER25> None of the top VC firms were invested in Theranos. Was this intentional on Theranos' founders part? Were they evaluated by top VCs and found lacking?

<comment><USER26> Do the top VCs really play in biotech?

<comment><USER27> Biotech/medical venture capital is a completely different and only slightly smaller industry than software VC but yes the top late stage firms, like Sequoia Capital, generally invest in both. It's hard to find companies to invest tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into (each) and biotech companies can easily require that much in an industry with proven exit strategies (and greater annualized returns than software according to some studies). Since pharma largely outsources R&D to the startup world, there are many exit paths including technology or talent acquisition (people, techniques, and equipment), patent acquisition (before and after approval), and even pre-revenue IPOs which are surprisingly common in the life sciences to this day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Can somebody please objectively fill me in on what caused the failure of Theranos? Is it a scam from the get go? I had high hopes after reading the profile of their CEO.

<comment><USER29> The existing industry has rigorous standards that have been established over decades of tragedies.

Theranos announced that it had a technological breakthrough that took less time/money/blood for the same results.

Walgreens, seeing a potential competitive advantage, partnered with Theranos to start administering the tests with a promise from Theranos that everything was good & on the up-and-up.

When the FDA started looking at the quality of the tests Theranos was administering they felt that they were not good & not on the up-and-up. The tests failed the criteria that made them valid.

In the mean time Walgreens customers potentially received treatments for illnesses they didn't have (or worse, missed illnesses they did) because Theranos misrepresented, implicitly or explicitly, the quality of their tests.

The part that makes it hard to disentangle the internet hates from the actual problems with the company is it's founder: Elizabeth Holmes. Questions have been raised around whether Elizabeth Holmes did anything meaningful or if she simply curried some personal connections into a company that then became a shell game of smoke and mirrors. She spent a lot of time currying press attention, bilking herself as the next Steve Jobs while her company was being ran by ???

<comment><USER28> Thanks. Just re-read the original WSJ article that started it all. Here are some things that caught my attention:

\- No Research to prove this methodology worked \- Influential parents with connections in D.C helped create a powerful board with members such as Henry Kissinger \- Theranos knew their results were flawed but did not report \- According to FDA, labs were deficient and their quality control methods themselves were deficient \- They claimed to run 70 tests from a tiny sample of blood from your finger tip when they had permission to do only one test from FDA.

This stuff is crazy. Kudos to the folks who did the investigative journalism to uncover these things. It looks like people's lives were put at risk with this company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Anyone see where this was filed? I can't find it on PACER or the Chancery court website. The article says "Delaware federal court"...

<comment><USER23> Delaware District Court

[http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/32vhjo5i9/delaware- district...](http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/32vhjo5i9/delaware-district- court/walgreen-co-v-theranos-inc/)

<comment><USER30> Now I'm really confused. That case number is not in PACER as of right now.

<comment><USER23> You may be looking on the wrong site? In any event, this is why I created PlainSite: because PACER is too expensive and too difficult to use!

<comment><USER30> I've had a PACER account for years and am definitely not looking in the wrong place. Since you've familiar with PACER, feel free to double check yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> You guys remember Channing Robertson, the professor who first bought into this BS? I would looooove to understand what he was/is thinking.

</comment><comment><USER32> The Eagle* 1 might be in trouble now!

*Theranos CEO hired a top notch security firm to protect herself (for no good reason) and her code name was Eagle 1.

<comment><USER33> She's a multi-billionaire heavily featured in the press. I think it's reasonable to want security.

<comment><USER32> Taken from WSJ :

Ms. Holmes maintains a heavy security detail. Men with earpieces escort her wherever she goes outside the Palo Alto headquarters. Their code name for her is "Eagle 1," current and former employees say. Mr. Balwani, until he retired, was "Eagle 2," they say.

Despite the meetings with attorneys, Ms. Holmes still finds time to work on her external messaging. Several weeks ago, she traveled to New York and met with the television host Charlie Rose, the person who recently interacted with her said. Mr. Rose didn't respond to an email seeking comment.

She has also been talking with Jason Blum, who was executive producer of HBO's "The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst," about a potential documentary that would chronicle her life and career, people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Blum's production company didn't respond to an email seeking comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> noir-york Great day to bury the bad new Theranos!

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm stunned it took this long.

</comment><comment><USER34> Anyone else see the recent WikiLeak about Theranos?

<comment><USER35> Do you have a link for those who haven't?

Edit:

"I don't think it was wise to have Elizabeth Holmes host a Clinton event," Clinton donor Herbert Sandler wrote in an email to campaign chairman John Podesta a week before the fundraiser. "There are significant questions concerning Holmes and her company. She may come out alright, but it is certainly possible that everyone associated with her venture will be embarrassed."[1]

[1]:[http://us11.campaign- archive2.com/?u=f8609630ae206654824f897...](http://us11.campaign- archive2.com/?u=f8609630ae206654824f897b6&id=bc1ee3dff7)

<comment><USER10> TBQH the Russians probably faked that email. Sure makes you wonder how the Russians were wise to their scheme when the Americans were falling for it!

 _(I honestly can 't tell if I'm being sarcastic or not...)_

<comment><USER34> Did they also fake the Record article reporting on the public fundraiser that Hillary held with the Theranos CEO? The email was just commenting on the actually controversial and interesting event, which was publicly available information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This has also hurt the cause of feminists. [http://www.returnofkings.com/76246/is-theranos-a-girl- powere...](http://www.returnofkings.com/76246/is-theranos-a-girl-powered-scam)

<comment><USER36> Nah.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Theranos is probably many things, but bringing criminal charges might be going to far. From 20,000 feet, it looks like an ambitious girl out of Stanford that got way ahead of herself and her abilities. This Company should be allowed to quietly recede into the sunset.

<comment><USER10> _Too far?_ Everyone in a position to know the true state of Theranos should be publicly hanged for attempting to defraud the American Government, and by extension, the American people themselves.

The fact that the fraud was related to healthcare should earn them all _short_ ropes.

<comment><USER38> You and my late father would have gotten along. His theory was that the death penalty should involve hanging people and re-using the same rope to keep it cheap. When it finally breaks, commute that individual's sentence and get a new rope to continue on with the next person.

<comment><USER29> There's an episode of "Murdoch's Mysteries" about the process of hanging a man. The rope was consistently reused, it was nearly as thick as your wrist. Too short and the man would strangle, too long and he would be decapitated.

<comment><USER38> I don't think my father actually knew that. I think he was just trying to be nasty/snarky.

Things learned talking to people in online forums...

<comment><USER29> I find it kind of interesting that there was a whole process/methodology behind it that modern society has forgotten.

<comment><USER38> We have forgotten tons -- like how the Romans made ice in the desert, Greek fire and how to bend mother of pearl to clad statues -- yet imagine ourselves superior in every way.

<comment><USER39> The Romans made ice in the desert by leaving a bucket of water out overnight where temperatures drop below freezing, which deserts do.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Deep-learning AI on Raspberry PI: build your own smart speaker with Snips - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/snips-ai/how-to-build-a-voice-controlled-speaker-that-protects-your-privacy-ec6429a2c673 <comment><USER2> I have plans for the weekend now ;)</comment>


Jeff Dean explains TensorFlow [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90-S1M7Ny_o&t=21m2s <comment><USER2> Just wanted to repost this from the other thread on TensorFlow, since I joined the party a bit late:

I think some of the raving that's going on is unwarranted. This is a _very nice_ , very well put together library with a great landing page. It might eventually displace Torch and Theano as the standard toolkits for deep learning. It looks like it might offer performance / portability improvements. But it does not do anything fundamentally different from what has already been done for many years with Theano and Torch (which are standard toolkits for expressing computations, usually for building neural nets) and other libraries. It is not a game-changer or a spectacular moment in history as some people seem to believe.

<comment><USER3> I think the fundamental differentiator might be how "production ready" TensorFlow is - the promise of simply declaring an ML pipeline and have that run in very heterogeneous compute environments from mobile phones to GPU blades to plain-old clusters, if fulfilled, can indeed be a huge game changer. The promise is that you literally do not have to write _any_ new code when you are done with a research project / a series of experiments and are ready to deploy your pipeline at a large scale. None of Theano / Torch etc make that promise.

<comment><USER2> That's not really a _fundamental_ differentiator. Torch/Theano are definitely production ready. I think the portability is definitely an advantage, though.

<comment><USER4> I think you would not use Theano in an end-user product. It's made for developers to run on developer machines. It's very fragile. It has a very long start-up time, might be in the order of several minutes at the first start.

Maybe it would work good enough in a service backend. But even there it would not scale that well. For example, it doesn't support multi-threading (running a theano.function from multiple threads at the same time).

<comment><USER2> Good point. Torch, then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> FYI, Jeff Dean is the inventor of most of Google's distributed computing infrastructure including MapReduce. Definitely up there with the likes of John Carmack and Fabrice Bellard as one of the great software engineers of all time.

<comment><USER6> The Jeff Dean Facts are worth reading: [https://www.quora.com/What-are-all- the-Jeff-Dean-facts](https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-Jeff-Dean-facts)

Personal favorite: "Jeff Dean once shifted a bit so hard, it ended up on another computer."

<comment><USER7> "Jeff Dean's resume lists the things he hasn't done; it's shorter that way."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there anything an "early" programmer like myself can do to play around with this stuff without a background in the related math?

I'm dying for this stuff to be dumbed down enough where Joe WebUser can feed in arbitrary data in a csv or point an app at a data source and get some sort of meaningful results.

It truly seems like an area where once the barrier to entry is greatly reduced, the creativity of laymen will lead to some truly amazing executions.

<comment><USER9>
        I'm dying for this stuff to be dumbed down enough[...]

It kind of already is. Have you read the docs/examples? I don't think your mentality is fruitful. Having argued with people who shared your point of view, it seems there will always be _something_ too difficult that prevents them from being good at X.

There's no substitute for sweat. Have fun with the code they gave you and see where you end up!

<comment><USER8> I think we have different definitions of what "dumbed down" means.

I never said I could/would never put in the work to learn it. I'm saying that the place it is in right now is still too advanced for someone with my background to pick up and play around with without sitting down to seriously study the underlying concepts that are objectively fairly dense subject matter that can require advanced math and CS backgrounds.

To be clear, I'm not advocating that everything should be dumbed down for the sake of it. My point was largely that when the barrier to creation gets low enough, more creative types that don't have the heavy technical backgrounds can pick it up and create things that more technical users may never have imagined.

Not everything is best served as remaining elusively complex for the layman.

Also, for the record, I will probably read up on some of this stuff because I find it interesting and enjoy learning. I just wish it was a step more accessible than it is today, even with this development.

<comment><USER9> Hi Shostack,

I wasn't trying to bring you down. Maybe what you're looking for is a visual programming environment, where you can drag and drop functions, data, etc?

<comment><USER8> Not sure I even need a visual programming environment as I'm comfortable using a command line and hacking stuff together in Sublime.

However I am highly visual and visualizing the impact on the results would be really helpful. I deal with a lot of analytics and data as part of my day-to- day managing digital media. I often find that I can easily spot trends just by glancing at data visualizations, and infer insights from them.

Further, being able to visualize the nature of the functions/data/etc. would also be very helpful. I tend to need to visualize something to fully grok it.

If you have any suggestions for a more visual take on machine learning that is beginner friendly, I'd love a link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> TensorFlow looks amazing, and the Google team deserves huge kudos for open- sourcing it. It may well become one of the best supported OS DL frameworks out there.

People have been asking about its fundamental differentiators. I'm not sure there are any. Theano and Torch already set a pretty high standard.

We know what good tools look like, and those tools exist even if they're getting incremental improvements.

Now it's just a matter of building really cool things with them.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is from ~22nd of October, and he is being asked whether it is an internal thing or going to be released - his answer is that it is internal and there are no plans to release it. Did they change their mind in a couple of days (not likely)? Was he not in the loop (also unlikely)? What else?

<comment><USER12> Maybe touching to lips gesture is a body language sign of not telling the exact truth:

[https://youtu.be/90-S1M7Ny_o?t=2043](https://youtu.be/90-S1M7Ny_o?t=2043)

He says "I don't have anything to announce" so technically not lying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It would be great if one could automatically dispatch this to a commercial cluster. So you could say: I want this network to be trained in 1 day, and the system would say: that would cost $X, and it would instantiate some AWS/Azure/Google instances, and run the task.

</comment><comment><USER14> > TensorFlow™ is an open source software library for numerical computation > using data flow graphs.

> ...

> Gradient based machine learning algorithms will benefit from TensorFlow's > automatic differentiation capabilities. As a TensorFlow user, you define the > computational architecture of your predictive model, combine that with your > objective function, and just add data -- TensorFlow handles computing the > derivatives for you.

Interesting, it kind of look like the machine learning focused version of NASA's OpenMDAO (also a graph-based analysis and optimization framework with derivatives, but for engineering design).

</comment><comment><USER15> Jeff Dean has an amazing resume. He designed and implemented MapReduce, BigTable and much more.

OT but how much does a super engineer like him get paid at Google?

<comment><USER16> Largely it'll come down to how much money he wants.

His salarly will probably be in the 6-figures, but he'll be a millionaire many times over. He joined Google in 1999 (IPO was in 2004), so his stock will have made him a very rich man.

<comment><USER2> Way off. He's a Senior Google Fellow and his bio used to be on the executive leadership page of Google (I can't find that page any more). He is being paid on the order of 10MM per year, base, easily.

<comment><USER16> Perhaps, I doubt his salary is that high, but he'll have significant amounts of of stock grants, options, etc.

Executive compensation is a very odd area, as I said, it pretty much depends how much money he wants.

<comment><USER2> Yeah I should have been more clear. But I'm pretty sure his equity alone is more than $30M / year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This was a great watch. It made me want to apply to the residency program. Edit: wasn't sarcasm.

</comment><comment><USER18> Yay!! An open sourced voice engine in the future? That would really shake things up.

<comment><USER19> No.

a) Stuff similar to this has been available for ages and there are no (good) open source voice recognition packages.

b) It requires absolute mountains of training data which we don't have.

c) It requires designing a suitable network, which I'm not sure if we have, but I would doubt it.

d) It requires training a network on the mountains of training data using an immense computing cluster, which we requires money that we don't have.

Don't hold your breath.

<comment><USER20> Sometimes creativity is the only thing holding people back from exploiting the natural insects of the web.

Case in point, ever wonder why those captchas include street addresses or 'pick the shape with a hole in it?' Spoiler: you're building training data and validating training data.

How else can we silently retrieve training data?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Who cares? Gradient descent is bandwidth limited not software limited. (edit: for ANNs)

<comment><USER22> Only for some applications, I think.</comment></comment>


Electronic Weapons: Gangsters Gone Jamming - <AUTHOR> https://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htecm/articles/20191215.aspx <comment><USER2> I wonder if it would be possible today to bring back old school navigation techniques (sun, clock, stars, inertia) with the kind of precision we're used to with gps.

<comment><USER3> I'm going to wager the answer is, no. By and large, the main advantage of GPS is it is now extremely compact and relatively low power. My gut feel: To do the same with the sun and stars, you need very finely calibrated optical instruments, probably on a motion compensated surface to get maybe 1/10th of the precision. Also a precise timesource would need to be thermally compensated etc. That's not portable or low power and I don't really see how portable that can be made. The inertia + gyros thing is already used by GPS systems as a backup when traveling in tunnels.

<comment><USER4> The answer is yes: [https://www.thedrive.com/the-war- zone/17207/sr-71s-r2-d2-cou...](https://www.thedrive.com/the-war- zone/17207/sr-71s-r2-d2-could-be-the-key-to-winning-future-fights-in-gps- denied-environments)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> previous article about it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21552081](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21552081)</comment>