skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A thought experiment: how much energy should Bitcoin use?

Bitcoin's mkt cap is ~$140B [0]. The world's GDP is ~$127T [1]. If we assume:
1) BTC market cap is representative of its economic output in accounting terms, or is at least an upper limit
2) Energy use by product should be proportional to its output

Then at 0.11% of world output, Bitcoin is at least ~5x more energy intensive per unit of value than the average product.

(This is obviously not wholly accurate. For one, market cap != annual value. If accounted for, that might make Bitcoin several orders of magnitude less efficient. And assumption 2 is probably a linear approximation to a highly nonlinear relationship. But I propose this as a fun thought experiment that questions the energy-value relationship.)

[0] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/
[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
So there's not even a logical organizing principle that would actually benefit someone, it's just collective insanity. There's still no obvious application of Bitcoin. This is just slavish alter building to the god of markets.
I think (hope) that Academia, or individuals, would still be able to churn out "original" languages if there were no immediate need in industry.
I am amazed that they managed to get the engines on the British Airways flight running again
I've always received multiple emails from them leading up to a domain expiration. Not easy to miss, unless your whois email contact isn't current.

(Google Domains gives you free whois privacy, but they use that contact for notifications)
Benioff has become one of the most insufferable preachy loud-mouths in the US.
Shady Marketplaces Selling Fake Facebook Profiles Operate in Plain Sight
Gonna need a lot of citations to believe that
I think the economic model here is that until there is no marginal increase in profitability from increasing mining capacity, miners will continue to increase their capacity.
FlixBus Launches in United States to Disrupt Traditional Bus Market
Don't banks use this data when you create an account nowadays too? I just created a capital one account and they were actually pretty transparent that they'd be checking the location of my phone via carrier.
Except for the fact that the requirements to become compliant with such a law, including removing past data, could cripple Salesforce
It would help a bit, but electric resistive heating is not very efficient.
Smart Compose: Using Neural Networks to Help Write Emails
Some general thoughts, which may or may not be practical depending on how the transpiling works (I have no idea about go):

- Instead of calling .Print(), have the class extend EventEmitter (node builtin, https://github.com/primus/eventemitter3 is a good browser shim for the same API), with an event that fires once for each line that terminates with a newline.

- Hard mode of the above: Add streams functionality (node builtin, https://github.com/nodejs/readable-stream is an official browser shim for the same API), with output streams that operate on bytes instead of lines.

- Combine parser and printer into a single ES6 class (e.g. using `new Parser()` syntax, rather than the indirect object generation).

- In optional addition to the above, have .parse() return a Promise for the output (not the parsed program), with parsed programs stored on the Parser itself (and examinable via an additional class method).

- Change all method names to be in camelCase instead of PascalCase. Only classes (as instantiated using `new`, not just methods that generate class objects) get PascalCase.
Yeah I saw it posted as a HN comment on a previous article but I would like to know to what extent it is true.
I completely agree. Current AI is excellent (or at least super-human) at learning to do anything where the mechanics of the situation are clear and where the measurement of success is well defined. Beyond that, I'm not sure we've made any convincing strides towards anything truly general.
There's lots of research on doing the same learning with much less resources (e.g. recent paper https://eng.uber.com/accelerated-neuroevolution/ , or the example visible in this very article of AlphaZero having much, much less compute than AlphaGoZero and doing better anyways), and even without that simple hardware progress means that random gaming GPUs can handle datasets that were inconvenient a few years ago.

I'd say it all depends on the size of datasets - some domains (e.g. unlabeled image data) have "effectively infinite" datasets where the amount of data you can use is limited only by your computing power, but in many other use cases all the data you'll ever get can be processed by a single beefy workstation.

More available compute means that we tackle more difficult problems. However, for any single given task it's often not the case that the amount of compute grows. If anything, the graph is not showing the compute required for DL, but the compute available for DL - it gets used simply because it's there.
> One the one hand, we have software originally written in C/C++ being rewritten in Rust (not often, sometimes just conceptualized), and there's often a real push back by some people about how it's a waste and not useful.
On the other, we have software rewritten in Javascript, which people are generally very accepting of, even if they don't plan to use it.

I'll be fair, while I think that both are useless, the second is so far there that I don't even take it seriously - more like a bad joke.
For further clarification, this island is colloquially called "The Big Island", while its official name is "Hawaiʻi" or "Island of Hawaiʻi", which causes further confusion since that's also the state's name (which consists of 8 main islands and many minor islands).

So when news reports refer to "Hawaiʻi", it's hard to be certain what they are talking about without further clarification.
For some reason the word “compute” in this context causes me to throw up in my mouth.

It used to be that only “coding” could elicit this reaction - nevertheless I’m quite fascinated by this new development.
There was one of these companies in Minnesota for three decades, but it looks like it dissolved earlier this year:

https://finance-commerce.com/2018/04/the-transit-revolution-...

(They never actually built a real system, though).
So I've been told! I need to commit to checking it out one weekend-- Berkeley as a whole is such a gem.
Hot desk-ing mostly makes sense only if you're 1.) short on space and 2.) have a fair number of people who only come in intermittently. Otherwise, you're not really saving anything and you make it harder to find people who aren't sitting in a fixed location.

Presentations would be the big inconvenience for me. I always carry a backup on a USB stick when I'm presenting at an event or conference. Just today, I loaded a presentation onto a conference laptop that was supposed to have been preloaded but wasn't. I could probably have worked around by getting the presentation off the network but I never like to depend on WiFi at an event.

ADDED: Especially for an external public presentation, I'd get it onto a USB stick one way or the other.
The government already mostly uses accounting instead of physical money so moving to a really expensive way of doing accounting probably wouldn't save money.
It seems like a bad comparison, since you don’t need to mine gold just to move it around. Transferring ownership can be accomplished for the amount of energy it takes to send a small electronic message.
Very sad what the article says about GitHub. Which other changes would be nice to do?
If anything this is a wonderful example of good engineering. Although on the server-side would it not have been easier to delegate commands to the native git binary?

Well done!
Okay, anyone want to confirm or add other DNS registrars to the "One of the good ones" list?

Ive been recommending my friends to do the entire thing through Dreamhost including a WP install.

I personally am more technical, and have my domain name from 7 years ago on godaddy. Any suggestions on where I should use? How about my incompetent friends?
It's becoming increasingly common to use "it's a political problem" as a conversation-ender, as if political problems can't be worked on and solved.

We already have several examples of how political problems can be hacked on and overcome. Uber's early days where they were busy opening up cities to the idea of a competing taxi service.

There's also the traditional way, activism. Activism seems to work best drumming up political support for social problems. Problems like this one tend to respond well to large sums of money collected to fund a trial run. Find just one city to try this out on.

Public transit's big problem is that it's been tried, and while it works, it requires huge amounts of political capital to be created and spent on each expansion of the transit network. A profit motive would allow this process to expand at the rate of demand.

But so far, transit is akin to utilities in that there's a real public interest in keeping prices down. Plus the transit agenda can get weirdly partisan. Here in Atlanta, the majority-white northern suburbs did not want MARTA train stations going too deeply northward. The pejorative expansion of the acronym was "Moving Africans rapidly through Atlanta."

So we need more Ubers in the world, companies that are not afraid to challenge political institutions in order to drive the public interest forward. The profit motive is needed in order to drive expansion, and the legal regime needs to be flexible enough to get around NIMBY naysayers.
> Should strings be represented as codepoint arrays in memory?

No. I think the implementor of Factor's unicode support originally did that but it turns out to not be useful:

* it blows up memory usage for ASCII and BMP (4 bytes per codepoint versus 1~3)

* this also has impact on CPU caches, lowering the average amount of data you can fit in your cache and work on

* it requires a complete conversion of incoming ascii and utf8 data (which only get more and more common as time goes on) rather than just a validation

* and because Unicode itself is variable-length (combining codepoints) it's not actually helpful when you're trying to properly manipulate unicode data

The only "advantage" of representing strings as codepoint arrays is that you get O(1) access to codepoints which is a terrible idea you should not encourage.

UTF-32 internal encoding makes some manipulations very slightly easier, but not enough to matter in the long run, and it encourages bad habits. If you don't need the O(1) access thing for backwards compatibility reasons, don't bother.
I've seen this brewing for a while, and getting worse and worse. Back in the 80's and 90's, there were developers who would code their own sorting or hashing routines rather than linking in some external library to handle this "solved" problem. The perjorative term "Not Invented Here" (NIH) grew to describe those developers and they were shamed into reusing code whenever there was code to reuse. And in some cases (like sort routines), it makes perfect sense. However, NIH accusations have grown to "if there's something vaguely similar to what you're writing, you must use it, even if that involves more custom coding to artificially bend it to the case at hand than you would have developed in the first place", culminating in things like the completely empty, useless (but enormous) Spring "framework" or, to a lesser extent, things like Angular that sort of do some things, but create far more problems than they solve (and definitely add more development overhead than they remove).
Exactly! Managers should be having regular 1:1s with direct reports—it mystifies me the number of managers I've met that concede that they only have these once a year at performance review time. How does anyone expect an employee to improve if they're not getting frequent, clear feedback on what's going right and wrong?
Yeah but when you run a playbook it's running from a single machine which is calling out via SSH
Rust's allocation API is actually making great progress! The RFC process really speeds these things along so that their merits can be tested before being stabilized (through the unstable API). https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/1398
I have an iPhone, you insensitive clod!
nobody needs to ask about it

Also any human toll is widely reported in the news media, while effects on scientific equipment is not.
"Everyone passed the test" is generally understood, in the context of a classroom, to mean "the members of the salient set [students in class] passed the test".

Saying "marketing is evil" in the context of a comment thread about GA stripping, replying to someone defending a specific brand of tracking-marketing, can reasonably be taken to refer to that variety of marketing: the contextually salient variety of marketing, which this submission and the current thread are about.
> Set your browser to do not track - we respect this signal regardless of the presence of a cookie.

Sounds like you have a fairly easy way to remain opted out. Either that or using the never ending amount of adblockers to block trackers specifically?
Yeah, any user or host singular. Execution of a playbook is driven by one machine which can be a bottleneck.
Giving money to charities is marketing with tax benefits.
This is already standard practice for several industries. For example, you’d be hard pressed to find a pharma company nowadays that allows the use of any removable media.

The likely “replacement” is that IBM employees will have to use some sort of corporate VPN to work remotely.
In this case, is cloud storage not a practical replacement?
Is 8 years not long enough for someone to change their opinion or at least have their economic incentives change?
The domain did expire, though I was never made aware of the upcoming expiration. My assumption is that there was some glitch between Namecheap, Google, and the .co domain authority... but I still don’t know exactly how my domain expired so silently. All my other domains were purchased through Google, this one was transferred in.

It really was a massive headache. I have no idea how long it would have taken me to notice (site is my authoritative presence on the web, but is a static personal page — no marketing or sales) and my email is a light trickle of messages by design: bills, bank statements, close personal relationships. Fortunately my brother told me his wedding invite bounced a day after going offline so I could follow up relatively quickly.

I filed a ticket with Google and got first line support within an hour. They confirmed it was still in Googles system. Then I was assigned a Senior Specialist who called me on Monday to confirm ownership. It is now Wednesday and my DNS records are still inaccessible.

If I were you I would definitely set an independent annual reminder to check your domain status, just in case.
Certainly not for all but the most trivial cases, but I'd use the language's build tools.

The industry has moved to language-specific build tools and ecosystems, and the article and is complaining about this in part, no?
Most dollars are virtual, so the energy cost is just sending some small messages around. It’s orders of magnitude less than needed for a bitcoin transaction.

Physical currency probably takes more energy, but printing is an old and cheap technology, so I doubt it’s comparable.
The FSF is (or seems to be) an extension of RMS, and the same argument could be made for GNU[0].

[0]: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/753646/a6ebb50040c5862c/
Here's my plug for NameSilo. Try them and you will not regret it.
I have hypothesized that long-term, crypto currency will be made illegal to some degree eventually for one of two reasons or both:
1. Governments use fiat currency as a lever for it's monetary policy and cool/heat the economy and job market. If crypto use becomes widespread enough to weaken this lever, I could see pushback from governments.
2. This, environmental concerns. Crypto has to be the least-green modern technology by ALOT. Once the public catches on, I think there will be significant push back. This is of course largely dependent on the population deciding to side with the environment, which history has shown us has to be a mixed bag.
While they were harassing Linksys about GPL the whole IoT thing happened and now we're living in a world full of trashy Linux-based devices that are a hazard to society. Sure, you can get the source code to your internet-based webcam, but because it can't be easily patched, it can also be hijacked by a couple of high-school kids in Alaska so they can sabotage their Minecraft server hosting competitors.

So good job.

As long as RMS is such a prominent figure the GNU/FSF organization there's no separation.
Browser user-agents are already lies, they already "inject" misleading data as a normal part of your web communications. Frankly, I think the fact that going to example.com means my browser could start sending my personal data to google-analytics.com and several other sites behind-the-scenes is also a "misleading" yet normal standard of web usage.

My point here is that, where you see a dishonest human communication, could just as easily have been a different convention in the computer protocol. It's pretty fuzzy where bits of data you send down the wire suddenly have real human-semantic communication impact. The Law has to make those choices, but as hackers we know that it's fundamentally a bit arbitrary, and the Law will only choose to enshrine the conventions that we -- as technologists -- have already set in course anyway.

Maybe it feels dishonest to fudge tracking info -- but to me it feels more dishonest for that tracking mechanism to have become part of the convention of how the web works in the first place. The only question maybe is what point in time are we at: do our actions precede the enshrining of the standards, or are we still forging them. Am I "allowed" to save minimal amounts of bandwidth by dropping ugly parts of URLs, or is that violating a human contract we've chosen to interpret from those bits.

My voice is to the former. The web is unstable; we've let advertising companies run wild for far too long, with the real danger that it's let bad behaviour become the norm. When this goes from social-convention into law, it's too late. But the more normal it is for software to do things differently -- express digital freedom differently -- the more time we have to build a web-convention that gives more power to users.

If they choose to interpret URLs in magical funny ways, so be it, but it's their fault for trusting silly data that silly web browsers are free to do what they want with. Hack the planet.
That doesn't sound grammatical to me, it doesn't sound like the sort of thing anybody would even try to say. I think it violates the rule that Pullum discusses in 2.4.2 p.8 (new-information condition) in that link.
It’s not really infrequent though. It’s like once a month.
With the rise of VPNs, fast home internet, and fairly ubiquitous public wifi along with laptops gaining enough power for most applications the question is what's the real use case that requires removable media that can't be accomplished with an internal FTP/network drive/email and using company laptops?
There is already some Windows software that monitor the USB ports for storage devices and blocks them.
Well Tweetbot will be paying Twitter $11/mo. For them to also make some money, they have to charge you closer to $20/mo.
This new analytics tool for Gmail is actually really impressive
Similarly, my joke is that bitcoin is an alien species or hostile AI's bloodless, costless, infinitely scalable weapon to get potential spacefaring competitors to abort themselves by subverting their star's energy to fruitless labor.

tldr; Weaponized Game Theory.
I completely missed the heyday of microprocessor programming, but I wholeheartedly disagree that hacking on things is harder than it used to be. TI-84 calculators are $100 and let you write Z80 assembly, 68k microprocessors are available for less than $10 from any number of sources, easily available documentation and 30+ years of experience to draw on, freely available plans for whole systems so that you don't actually have to figure anything out yourself, or you can bypass all that and build your own processor in a circuit simulator, like I did, or learn HDL and buy a cheap FPGA and run it for real, or use something like python to control your parallel port with single lines of code connected to a webserver if you don't mind being silly.

Heck, if I want to, I can even massively hack things, write kernel drivers for linux OR windows, do basically whatever I want. Some of them are harder than others, and some are more intended than others, and some require more time than others, but the world of hacking is still one of possibility. Pretty much the only locked down systems are smartphones, which sucks, but I just bought a raspberry Pi zero W for 10 dollars, which is incredible compared to the Basic Stamp 2 micro controller that cost $120 just a decade ago.

Literally the only difficult (at least IMO) thing for hacking whatever you want is analog circuits. I still massively struggle with that.
Knowing about Fourier the guy would have been double dope.
Noether's Theorem and the Symmetries of Reality
Square Cash Growth Accelerating Faster Than Venmo Partially Due to Bitcoin
Can't California just slap a fat tax on ports based on tonnage of coal handled?
The problem is you can apply your logic to anything and any business. I bet having a nice comfortable pencil makes the experience of filling out a form better too. Or maybe businesses should design their own paint since the texture of the paint is the first thing that anyone notices when entering a an office room, and having a nice perfect personal paint that minimizes speculars is ideal for a friendly atmosphere. Or maybe Enterprise should design their own leather since car rental is so so personal, and the feel of the leather enhances everything about renting a car.. or maybe they should make their own tires since tires affect the entire experience so much.. and on and on...

Is a font the number one thing? Number two? number three? Or maybe number 62? Ofcource a company is "allowed" to do whatever they want. I don't see why anyone should be forced to take their actions seriously.

>Design matters and it matters a hell of a lot when you are dealing with the “normal” public.

Sure it matters, just like everything matters, just not to the degree that designers think it does. Like I said in another post about UX - I'd bet half a paycheck that the only people who really really care about the new "cool" designs are (1) Bosses looking to take credit (2) Bored tech writers looking for content (3) UX Peers looking for validation (4) Tech people looking for new toys.
This is common at many semiconductor companies. Not only is it a ban at one specific semiconductor oem I know of, the usb-ports are disabled and the usb-ports on new issue computers are epoxied to prevent trying to use them.

Semiconductor technology is one of the areas of global-technological competition which surely benefit from secrecy. For example, several years ago one of the c-level executives at this specific OEM was caught taking pictures inside of one of their customer's facility. Only the engineering staff from that oem is allowed inside those facilities now, and only for maintenence activity.

It's a very secret industry, and getting even tighter now since China has been blocked from acquiring the latest semiconductor technology. China has so far invested over $40 billion in boosting their chip-making abilities, to acquire capital, IP, and knowledge-workers. Given their history of borrowing technology from other countries without attribution, if I were at the head of a semiconductor related company, I would clamp down on the secrets ahead of the danger.