skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're thinking of waste too narrowly. That power wasn't available for other things, so more had to be produced to cover Bitcoin and the other things, which meant more of all the negatives that come with energy production. Does Bitcoin provide something valuable enough to human civilization to account for that? Could that value have come from a more efficient source?

Failing to account for externalities is how we get rapid ecosystem destruction (before even bringing in climate change). Those Bitcoins aren't innocent little bits on drives. They have a cost to the planet they're produced on and the life that inhabits it.
>it's significant because code has to be additionally parsed and JIT-compiled.

Which again be insignificant compared to the time it takes to download those assets from a cellular connection.

Not to mention that today's (and 2015's) mobile CPUs aren't that slow, they are comparable to mid-level laptops from 2010 or even later. If you're catering to the developed world, visitors wise, you'll be ok with 30K.
OCaml even does relatively well compared to Haskell: OCaml is a much simpler language with more predictable resource usage (space and time), but still gives a sizable fraction of Haskell's power.

If you like Reason, you might also be interested in BuckleScript.
An iOS app can't access anything significantly different than a website can, unless you give it permissions to.
I've heard creosote bush was used by Native Americans and early settlers as medicine for a lot of things.

It must have some properties, it grows in unbelievably dry and hot areas and nothing eats it. It doesn't seem to be susceptible to fungus or rots or really anything I've ever observed.

And if this has anything to it, there is a whole lot of creosote stretching from West Texas to California that isn't much good for much else. Except making the desert smell wonderful when light rains pass through.
I disagree that nerd fears are different than fat girl fears. The article lists the following as fat girl fears:

>fear of being (physically) unattractive and fear of unemotional relationships (often linked with a third element — fear of being assertive).

These are usually the same fears that nerds have. Nerds are afraid of being assertive because from their experiences in the past, being assertive gets them mocked or shut down. Nerds are constantly reminded how they are physically unattractive. The article mentions physical inadequacy but this is really just the same as physical unattractiveness.

>If you believe that you’re physically inadequate and therefore you might fail in approaching a potential dating partner, the disappointed emotions that can arise from that are precisely the kind that would have gotten your ass handed to you when you were younger. The entire process could open you to ridicule (think the famous quote about men being afraid that women will laugh at them) and so you don’t even try. You stay stuck.

I think the article fails to acknowledge here that nerdy men do actually approach women and women actually do laugh at them. The problem isn't a lack of approaching, it's a lack of attractiveness. For unattractive nerdy men, it's not just a "belief" that they are unattractive, they actually are unattractive.
TTS Bug Bounty: The First Civilian Agency Public Bug Bounty Program
The comparison to VISA is a common one. Whether it makes sense to use BTC in a certain way ultimately depends on the user and how they're using it. But honestly, as a medium of exchange Bitcoin simply doesn't make sense in most cases.
When you first write design your program, you might indeed use a different data structure than a linked list when you anticipate 10k+ elements.

But often programs are used long after they are designed, and it is great if they can degrade gracefully as you move outside their original design parameters.
>Some people (myself included) don't like the aesthetics of Lisp as a language, nor do we like the enforced functional program structure, nor do we like the lack of infix operators

Is it that "Some people" don't like those, or that "some people" have been to Algol-style languages first, and they can't easily adapt to the other style?

>Maybe I "didn't have good enough teachers," but for every other language I've ever learned I didn't need those "good teachers" to achieve a strong level of mastery, and I've learned more than a dozen to a high level of mastery.

Yes, but I bet the first one's you've learned were already algol-like.

After that, adding other languages does not mean much if they all share the same paradigms and syntax style. It's like a Common Lisp person also learning Scheme, Racket, Clojure etc -- in the end it's not much difference.

Going from those to different paradigms is what makes an actual difference (e.g. learning Coq, or Erlang, or Haskell, or Lisp or Forth, etc).
Do that and it would no longer be useful as proof of work. Proof of work-i-was-going-to-do-anyway is not useful for securing the ledger.
NW: close to 0 net given debt and the market value of my homes.
If you think you can replace bitcoin with something more efficient, please do so. The millions of people who use bitcoin every day would gladly switch to a cheaper version if it was truly just as good.
Watching television does not use up more energy than mining bitcoin, that's the point of the linked article.
Slaves are unimportant to his point. Gold being scarce means it was hard to counterfeit gold coins in a time when you couldn't mint coins in a reliable way. Likewise, the purpose of bitcoin mining is to verify transactions in a way that is hard to counterfeit, making it more difficult to get a majority share of mining. The difficulty enforces scarcity.
> "audio" than "sound" yet for menu purposes, particularly discoverability, they should be treated as synonyms

The answer for that has been staring us in the face since the 80s: good icons. I shouldn't have to navigate words, I should be able to navigate concepts and intuitions through icons that work at subliminal level. But good icons require good icon designers, which are few and far between; they require icon designer to work closely and in harmony with UI designers and developers, which is challenging; and they require a shared body of iconographic culture that is often impossible to achieve (e.g. a "rescue" concept could use a red cross in Europe / Americas / Australia, but it would have to be different in other continents).
Compare it to cash and coins seems the most appropriate. How much energy does harvesting cotton, making into bills, and distributing it all over the place take? Don't forget those fun armoired trucks that have to cart it from place to place. Pennies famously cost more than $0.01 to produce because of the cost of metal. Metal that has to be dug out of the earth, trucked, smelted, trucked, stamped, trucked again.
It would be nice to understand the Banking Industry Energy Consumption.

Let's add up:

- human time and labor for tellers

- cost to feed floor traders cocaine

- cost of ink,paper, etc

Let's add that up and see what that looks like.

We already know that FIRE (Financial Insuranc Real Estate) sectors siphon off about 40% of total economic value from GDP.

1/1000th of global energy for BTC and ETH is amazing in these early days. It will become orders of magnitude more efficient.

Another FUD article that does not compare opportunity cost compared to the cost to run the current financial systems.
Thanks for that link. I'll have a look.

But why can't we act on multiple fronts? We can do many things to reduce our carbon foot print, and choosing not to eat meat or reducing it is one of those things.

Our meat consumption is a big problem environmentally - see https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/meat-and-environm...

Also, the way we farm animals now a days is completely different to when your grand parents farmed them. Using factory farming to feed the world is just not sustainable.

Look, I get it - most people can't give up meat, we're addicted to it and it's also cultural. But what we can do is giving a signal to the market that we demand better, by choosing to buy alternatives that are better on many fronts, like Beyond Meat etc.

That's why I really admire the work by Ethan Brown, he's trying to create meat using plant protein. You should watch the presentation by him I posted earlier - you might find it interesting.
This.

That site is spreading FUD and fails to show the true impact (in terms of energy and lives) of the current legacy financial system.

Next thing you know they will demand you register carbon credits to run a mining rig.
Appointments, SLA, and quite probably some level of arbitrarily selected Veblen differentiators. Much as elsewhere. Private vs. shared space as well -- think an service which might collect and drop off multiple passengers en route.

The ultimate differentiator would likely be a dedicated chauffeur.
Sorry, I thought it was a thinly-veiled moral argument equating bitcoin mining to use of slaves. Glad I was wrong.
Energy doesn't back bitcoin, it just stops the currency from inflating. Or it would, if mining could always produce new bitcoins, but IIRC its supposed to stop after a while.

The difference being that a bitcoin does not entitle you to some unit of energy or work produced from it. The energy used to verify bitcoin transactions is just lost.
Do you have any idea if there were private records that were included in such searches? Church or baptismal, or medical records, perhaps?
As an added bonus, the big coal exporting countries tend to be relatively more democratic than the big oil exporting countries.

I.e. electrical power is already relatively cleaner by not supporting horrible regimes (cf. Saudi Arabia or Nigeria).
You are right about the difficulty of a functional _language_ taking over the world anytime soon. But as a consolation prize we are seeing functional features making it into more and more mainstream languages.

Even people using eg C++ no longer look at you too funny if you explain that you prefer all your variables to be 'const'.
>Isn't it a fun time to be a front-end developer?

No.

I came to frontend development on the peak of web 2.0 craze, when 10mb of jQuery "bells and whistles" on a corporate front page was considered hip and progressive. No matter how awful these 10mb of animation scripts were, they ran faster than 1mb of "highly optimised" react spa today.
I don't take it as a given that Bitcoin is a good solution to the problem those people solve with it. The best of the bad solutions is still bad, and Bitcoin isn't looking too good by its power consumption. It's okay to stop, really think about a problem, and find a good solution instead of charging ahead with a bad one oblivious to the brick wall ahead.
You are literally just quoting the most recent John Oliver episode.

There's an interesting rebuttal to his episode here that is worth reading: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/08/24/please-jo...
Some would go to fight with a Long Sword, others would prefer a Katana. I think that's fine. Master what works best for the way your mind and body works. That said, I'd hate for languages to adopt a lowest common denominator just so companies feel then that all programmers can replace any other and all code base is understandable by all. That would be like having every sword fighter fight with a knife.

After a while you have to stop blaming the people and instead just admit that Lisp isn't as awesome-for-all-purposes as some famous people seem to think it is.

I don't know, sounds like it's just not as awesome for you, but probably is that awesome to all those famous people saying it is.

I spent months working on a Lisp project in college. I pretty much hated it.

Like I said, its possible the style doesn't bode with ya, and that's cool. That said, here's my anecdote. I also did Lisp in college and hated it. Thought it was stupid, had the worst most unreadable syntax I'd ever seen. It made every trivial thing hard, like why can't I just loop?!?, where are the variables?!?, how do I just do one thing followed by another?!?. Where do things start and end?!? I don't even remember what Lisp it was, but trust me, it was some academic cryptic variant, probably maintained by some teacher himself, had no library ecosystem, lacked documentation, the ugliest editor I'd ever seen. Anyways, moved on and never thought of it again.

Then became a dev, did C++, some assembly, moved to ActionScript 3 lots of event programming, then C#, JavaScript, Java, all that. Suddenly, I gave Lisp another shot, at work, on a real project, not some school project, with Clojure. First thing I realized, there are libraries and documentation, and frameworks, you can set variables, loop, do infix even if you want too. There's easy ways to do imperative code, OOP, all that is there, I just couldn't see it before, I think it was college shadowing the obvious from me, and maybe my coding instincts weren't good enough then, so I couldn't recognise things if they looked and behaved slightly differently. Also, I had coworkers who used Lisp for real projects, commercially. I realised Lisps are often used in school for teaching theoretical programming concepts. But in practice, you'd not use Lisps like that, you'd use it like any other language. Anyways, eventually, I also got recursion, tail call, collection mappings, pure functions, higher order functions and all that. Once I got all these things, it was like, how have I had been using anything else before. Now its such a drag to go back.
Initial Coin Offering Hack? What We Know About the Enigma ICO Scam
I am one of the "panicky" ones and I want to explain my point of view.

When I was a kid, living in the equivalent of Kentucky, a nuclear accident in the equivalent of the Bahamas made it so we couldn't eat wild berries from the woods anymore.

Now a middle aged man over 30 years later, sheep from my home area still measure levels of radioactivity too high for human consumption.

That's why I feel most options are better than nuclear power, for any purpose except perhaps space probes.
The one on Harden Street in Five Points. That part of town, and the whole downtown area, was mostly unscathed.
did you mean price will go up? either way it doesn't offset that high cost of use, so if humans here still value efficiency they might find it worthwhile to switch tools.
Don't worry; strong mode will be the only mode going forward and it already is the only mode for Flutter. Not merely optional.
>The correct comparison would be to compare the cost of Bitcoin to U.S. dollars or gold. Gold requires hundreds of dollars per ounce and untold energy to extract. U.S. dollars require the existence of a powerful economy and trillion dollar military to keep the currency secure and desirable.

No it isn't- the energy cost of bitcoin is ongoing and depends on the volume of transactions. Each time money changes hands, it costs energy to verify it. Comparing it to VISA or ACH makes the most sense, because those also incur ongoing costs per transaction.
Energy backs bitcoin in the sense that "cheating" (reversing transactions or double spending) costs inordinate amounts of energy.
Just want to note that 60% is the expected future (ultimately), but the current % is more like 22 (found by taking the total cost # divided by the total annualized mining revenue #).
The classic Bell System standard was that generators were started once a month and run for several hours. Once a year, each central office ran on emergency power for 24 hours, with external power shut off.

In the entire history of the Bell System prior to electronic switching, no central office was ever offline for more than 30 minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster.
I haven't seen SYCL until now, but it looks quite promising. Hopefully Codeplay will keep their interest and investment into that piece of software.

Unfortunately, I don't have the time to wait for NVidia support. I have a window of opportunity to rewrite some core things right now, but that window will soon close.
Much of the mining is done next to hydro plants in China.
The article states that the "electricity consumed for a single transaction" is equivalent to what 5 households use up in 5 days. Which seems to make you think that one would "use up" less energy by watching TV then by doing a Bitcoin transaction. But that is not true.

Making a Bitcoin transaction uses up hardly any energy.

The miners mine for the block reward. That is completely unrelated to transactions. They even mine if there are no transactions and generate empty blocks.

If nobody made a Bitcoin transaction for a month, the energy consumption of that month would stay pretty much the same.
I think with Cloudflare it's possible, at least I'm pretty sure I did it with sites before using the "@" record (I could be wrong of course).
If you're interested in getting into dance and looking for a community that welcomes young and old, can I recommend the Contra Dance community?

Contra Dance looks/sounds like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m9EGS4iiOg

If you are near Boston, you should definitely stop by the Boston Intergenerational Dance Advocates dances http://www.bidadance.org/. They teach an intro lesson and then every dance has an introductory runthrough. People there are enthusiastic about welcoming newcomers.

If you're not near Boston, Contra dance is found all over the US. (Also in London! email me.) You can find a local dance by putting your zip code into http://www.trycontra.com/
"Wasting" energy is required to make PoW work, but if we could achieve the same with PoS (and that seems to be the case since ETH is switching too) then it would really be a waste.
The classic text is "Grativation" by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler. It's very dense, but very thorough. The other classic is "General Relativity" by Wald. They don't really include the math background though, for that you need texts on multivariable calculus.
A certain important data center near here has dual fibre links, as mandated by their redundancy requirements. They're installed along both sides of the same major road.
Check out Walmart.com (or most any big box store), search for Alcatel. You're likely going to find quite a few devices in the $15-25 range.
Facebook attempting to induce Stockholm Syndrome.

Craziest FB story ever though. Glad you are ok.
I spent weeks searching for free dns parking. Ended up just removing the name servers. I'll try this!
People that chain commands without && makes me cringe, I had an Infra guy delete a prod website once like that...
Over in Polymer, we're exploring ways to do exactly that: https://github.com/PolymerLabs/lit-html

Template literals in JS give us a way to always tell the static from dynamic parts of a template. HTML <template> elements let us stamp out pre-defined trees of DOM quickly. Combined we can then only update the dynamic parts without a virtual DOM.
How much battery drain does such a race cause?
What is the question you want to ask? I think this is a bigger question than it presents here. We don't really know what is thoughts actually, what is the actual representation of it. If we don't even know what we trying to study, the conclusion might be pretty useless.
The more energy Bitcoin network uses, the more valuable Bitcoins are... If Bitcoins value falls down, energy usage will fall down too. Energy is used to create valuable document - The Block. And block is not necessary new Bitcoins, its transactions too.
I require menus. I dont want dozens of icons and i certainly dont want to employ a keyboard. I dont care that the full menu is ten layers deep. Ill move the dozen programs i use every day into a top layer. i dont judge a ui on simplicity or artistic merit. Let me launch my software via my mouse and then get out of the way. Everything beyond that is overthinking.
So in that case it's only ~2 houses rather than 5.58? Is this your website? Do you think the figure should be made more accurate?
Show HN: Draw How to Make Toast
> Electricity consumed per transaction: 165 kWh

Thats about $20 in the US.

If a transaction is that expensive, how can this system even work for transactions with a value of that order? Are large transactions "sponsoring" small transactions?

What happens if more people use the system for small transactions? Will BTC become unusable?
isn't all investment speculating?
The self-hosted solution I use for this (switched from LastPass) is pass[0] plus syncthing[1]. Passwords are just GPG-encrypted files, so they replicate seamlessly - much better than the "single monolithic database" approach of things like Keepass which is prone to sync conflicts.

Syncthing mirrors everything between my desktop, laptop, and phone (and there's an Android app[2] that works with OpenKeychain[3] so passwords are accessible from my phone). I haven't done this yet, but it'd be trivial to also run syncthing on a cheap VM somewhere, and replicate the passwords to it (but obviously not my GPG private key) for disaster recovery.

0: https://www.passwordstore.org/

1: https://syncthing.net/

2: https://github.com/zeapo/Android-Password-Store

3: https://www.openkeychain.org/
>Gold requires hundreds of dollars per ounce and untold energy to extract.

The gold you trade is already almost all extracted, I doubt there's 1B$ a year in gold extraction investment but maybe there is.

>U.S. dollars require the existence of a powerful economy and trillion dollar military to keep the currency secure and desirable.

All currencies require a relevant economy using them to be valuable so that's not a real requirement. As for a trillion dollar military that's doubtfull. There are plenty of currencies with the market cap of Bitcoin that don't have nearly as much of a military backing them.
Can you really prove that feeling? because that's far from my experience and far from logical too..

Additionally, this 'fatigue' with front-end is getting a bit over told, I suspect it might be more alienation from developers who hacked jquery scripts together and feel they need to transition to app frameworks (I see so many simple websites and landing pages as react etc now).. where as those sites should just transition to vanilla js + dom..

The thing about inspired frameworks and 'churn' isn't a javascript/front-end thing, it happens everywhere, constantly... how many IOC, DI, ORM frameworks did Java and .NET have..
How drones could plant a billion trees per year
Wow. Nice rough math! Thats ridiculous. Hopefully Ethereums POS (proof of stake) system will fix this.
Don’t Panic, Liberal Arts Majors. The Tech World Wants You
> ... but they returned money when they stopped.

After they took a couple mil for themselves :) [0]

[0]: http://www.businessinsider.com/secret-founders-pocket-6-mill...
This is a misleading argument. Yes, miners will always spend more until marginal revenue == marginal cost. The problem with the proof of work system of bitcoin (and many others) is its inefficiency that only allows for a low transactions throughput. Proof of work has no inherent value for the system, it's simply a way to cap the network throughput to about 1MB per 10 minutes because anything lower than 10 minutes will make the network increasingly vulnerable to adversarial attacks [1]. There's got to be a way to increase network throughput beyond this while maintaining
censorship resistance and decentralization.

[1] C. Decker, Information Propagation in the Bitcoin Network: http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23...
people's exposure to infix operators way precedes any dabbling with an algol language; it's the common notation that everyday mathematics has settled upon. you learn it in school.
This is very interesting and mostly true but I think I speak for all coastal Texans when I say it's not really a good measure of how we're doing, especially those of us that have lived through several hurricanes.
Energy usage rises if Bitcoins value grows. Miners are mining to get profit. If they will use energy and don't get profit, they will stop mining.
tufte CSS! I knew it looked familiar :D
What about subdomain?