skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They charged only 1 US Dollar, after the first year. That was removed after the Facebook acquisition. https://www.cnet.com/news/whatsapp-kills-1-subscription-fee/
I believe that they are referring to quantum computing
For some more context: you cannot usually read scientific papers without a university IP, hence you need to connect via VPN if even briefly to download PDFs from Elsevier etc. unless you want to go the scihub route.
This is perhaps the best comment in this thread so far. I’m shocked by the number of anglo graduates in HN that seem so convinced that the current academic trends in their school’s department is “the most correct” or “clearest”, or how “Plato got so many things wrong”. With all the many great readings and interpretations available, I think one has to be extremely misleading or narrow-minded to believe in any kind of linear progress in philosophy.
I've always thought a monopoly on violence trumps a monopoly on logic. I don't see how blockchain overcomes this.
Maybe less tech startups, but im pretty sure a bunch of people popped up to bilk other people out of their money during the beenie baby craze.
>>> Because of this, governments could no longer do any automated taxation, they could no longer have any verification of who owns what, and so they would have to manually tax everyone based on manual observation of physical assets, as they probably couldn't look into most peoples actual financial records either, unless it was voluntary. This is untenable of course

They could tax you by a percentage of each asset. At the end of the year, you might owe 31 bitcoins, 0.0125 acre of land, and a chicken.

Ironically, this is why money was invented in the first place -- an asset that represents value rather than having inherent value (such as, the inherent value of a chicken is one chicken).
I think this is a roundabout way of saying Google has a quantum computer.

Bitcoin does not involve encryption, and it's a common mistake by journalists to toss that buzzword in there.
Why not use something like gRPC or cap’n’proto to make the request/response stuff easier to manage?
A QC to implement shor's algo at a practical level would need millions of non-ec'ed qubits. At least publicly, we are likely quite far from any such advance.
To the people who really want to learn: you won't get quality advice here.

BTC has been hated on HN since it's creation. Even over 10 years later, the crypto luddites keep coming at it.

Learn by yourself instead of listening to the doomsayers: some people thought independently, like this person in 2011 who was ridiculed here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2596475

Check the discussion from 2017:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15976946

Then the new one from 2020, 3 months before the current rally:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24259700

Then make your own judgement, as most of the people here won't learn. They refuse to - they are too emotionally invested in their past lapse of judgement, so they need to rationalize it and double down, in the hope that maybe it will crash and everybody will know they were right all along!

It's been going on for over 10 years, so follow their advice at your own risk.
I am guessing the poster is referring to quantum computers, which are not yet even close to breaking cryptographic hashing algorithms as far as I understand.
> Bitcoin is better money, because it allows for more pure self-organization, as a result of its money supply being predetermined by hard-coded algorithm, rather than by fiat decree.

Because bitcoin requires substantial inputs (hardware, energy), if it actually has legs, it will end up being controlled by whoever controls the most capital.

That's not self-organization, that's just replicating the same broken economic system we have right now, but (ironically) with much lower efficiency.

> It has the potential to completely eliminate the boom/bust cycle

Citation needed. =)

> eliminate currency manipulation

"A single anonymous market manipulator caused bitcoin to top $20,000 two years ago, study shows"

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/04/study-single-anonymous-marke...

> free hyperinflated jurisdictions from that aspect of their poverty.

I'm sure that'll work great for folks who can afford to buy (or would be payed in increments of) approximately 0.0005 BTC at a time. What are transaction fees these days, anyway? =)
15 years is a looong time, though. Can you compare your returns with having put everything into ETFs or even some kind of bonds way back?
Vaporware still, at least for practical applications.
Everyone wants to be rich through bitcoin as an investment. No one will actual use it as an everyday currency. If it is the winner of the cyrpto digital currency war. It will be the end of civilisation.
This seems more like it's questioning cryptocurrency itself, and putting it at odds with fiat currencies and states.

As for states, they're rolling out their own cryptos. The Chinese have CryptoYuan, the EU central bank is releasing a currency likely by late 2021, and the Federal Reserve is also planning to create a new currency. That's how they beat Bitcoin.

Fiat currency is likely going to be slowly phased out as cryptos take hold, like an old iPhone.

States will absolutely gain power if they adopt cryptos, because they can implement currencies that can always be tracked and disseminated much faster and easier than fiat.
LOL. No longer not using the term "earmarks" in financing legislation is not the same as ending pork barrel spending.

If it is, please explain the SLS. It's entire design was dictated by Congress to use specific components from specific contractors.
It is pretty useful for cross-border payments
If you think about it, they own the entire business stack or have the potential to. Give it time.

Atlassian are working incredibly hard to control the dev stack. Tight integration between Jira, Confluence, BitBucket. Bringing documentation, development, estimation, backlog together in a unified view.

Microsoft now have all the pieces. Office 365 managing users and the business side, SharePoint, GitHub, Azure, Teams.

When they start working to unify/integrate these pieces together in to a seamless experience so you can communicate, plan, build, track and deploy all on the Microsoft stack it’ll be very compelling product for businesses and very difficult for any competitor to compete. Not only would Atlassian need Jira/Confluence for example, they’d need their own Cloud for you to deploy to.
You have two choices: trust the device or don’t let it on the network. Voluntary measures like local DNS only work to the extent that the device maker wants them to.
It's perfectly usable for actual legal transactions on a regular basis.

Which government exactly would do the outlawing? We're actually seeing the opposite.[1]

[1]https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/japan-cryptocurrency-re...
Fiat currency is an agreement of settlement using an inflationary mechanism created at will with no work required to provide value.
Bitcoins are an asset created in response to work performed, scaling proportionately with the work required giving it value.
It really is that simple and makes perfect sense.
> It consumes more power than Switzerland. It's bad for the environment.

Compared to what? You think fiat money has a zero environment footprint?
> each Bitcoin is more expensive than the last due to increasingly difficult nonces.

Bitcoin difficulty can change in either direction.
According to this article: https://decrypt.co/28560/quantum-computers-could-crack-bitco...

It looks like you need a lot more qubits than the most powerful quantum computer we have now. Also, it's fairly trivial for Bitcoin to adopt a quantum resistant algorithm with consensus.

I think the far larger problem would be every non-quantum resistant encryption on the planet being broken at once.
DNSSEC provides authenticity, not confidentiality.
The Alpha was such a fantastic chip. I thought it would take off since you could get them in an AT form factor system and Windows was ported over. They were so much cheaper than any Sparc or MIPS.
> It's just a bubble and can be popped anytime.

That's been said for years since Bitcoin emerged, this is starting to get a little old as Bitcoin survives longer and longer.
A single bitcoin transaction (that is, literally one) uses as much electricity as a house consumes in several weeks. The entire system uses roughly the same amount of electricity as the country of Ireland, or Denmark. For ~300k transactions per day.

No, the "huge energy waste" is so vast as to be nearly inconceivable. It cannot reasonably be compared to anything else. Even shipping literal gold around by helicopter might be more efficient.
Same. Or maybe you're someone who was born in a country embargoed by the United States and you want to accept payment for freelance work.
A bit off topic,but I'm sure some positivity is needed, especially under such articles.Back in 2004, I finished the school and shortly after I was a freshly baked student at my little country's tech university. I was young little shit,so naturally, paying for the internet in the student dorm was beyond me. The entire campus is scattered all over the city, and more or less everyone was using this internal chat on the LAN( great to meet fellow students, especially women,as it was in my case). So it took me a few days to figure out that all I had to do to reach the Internet is to use any user's, that was on the chat, MAC address. There was at least 100 people connected at any given time,so plenty to choose from. As soon as I would give myself someone's MAC, they'd be kicked off the internet. It was glorious.I was little shit on wings! Anyway, one day, two,very very very pissed off people walk into our room( there were 3 of us living there). One looks like sys admin(he was),the other,who had a baseball bat, was the muscles.They ask to check everyone's PC.. he goes to my roommate first... It took me seconds to realise what's going on,so while the admin is checking my roommate's PC,I quickly try to change my PC name... And I run out of time before he goes on my PC...He goes mental... It's you!!! I've been trying to find you for nearly 6 months, checked so many rooms and buildings!!! I thought his head would pop.. The muscle man thinks it's an opportunity to hit me. Well, here I come..I put on idiot's play. I explain them that I'm clueless about computers, the room is more or less 24/7 party place with 20 people visiting just last night(not true,my roommates were calm). This goes on for 5 min or so,and they kind of believe and leave us, even though not quite satisfied with the outcome. Loved every single second of it..Still Karma exists,so fast forward 15 years later and I have to have very difficult conversations with people at work, who try to cheat the system...I became the sys admin.. of sorts..
I still use a mac with an nvidia GPU, and the driver appears to be leaking memory a lot. Unless I reboot it about once a week, it becomes noticeably laggy.
“I think one thing that should be distinguished here is that the media is always taking Trump literally. It never takes him seriously, but it always takes him literally. ... I think a lot of voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously but not literally, so when they hear things like the Muslim comment or the wall comment, their question is not, ‘Are you going to build a wall like the Great Wall of China?’ or, you know, ‘How exactly are you going to enforce these tests?’ What they hear is we’re going to have a saner, more sensible immigration policy.” - Thiel in 2016
>you can today exchange btc for monero, ethereum or whatever and back again and it's virtually untrackable who owns it or where it came from.

I don't get why people buy into this idea that BTC is super-hacker-cash that can't be traced.

BTC can be traced. That's the point of an open ledger. If you want 'untraceable' BTC, you have an big burden to do so (buy it for cash in a parking lot with no cameras and using an alias).

The problem is the second you start buying things with the BTC and sending them to your house, your anonymity is shot.

There are coins (like Monero) whose purpose is to make transactions more untraceable but BTC is intended to be traced.
I would also recommend the 'Story of Philosophy' for an introduction to western philosophical thought.
There was little to no damage from VW's cheating.

Don't confuse the silly state-imposed fines with "value" of the researchers' findings.
Dimas, I already clearly listed the problems with those investments, in case you didn't understand, I will repeat:

Stocks - all time high during COVID-19, propped up by fed printing money. Very risk invesment atm.

Property - buying real estate of any form is a very complicated process, where you get burned if you don't understand the market.

Securities - same thing as stocks - unless you are trading options, features, interest rate swaps, etc. The same arguments apply, with more complexity.

bonds - aka padding for mutual funds to reduce their risk with, on paper. Near-zero yields.

Investments - are you going to repeat the same words that mean the same thing ad nauseum and act like it's an argument?

Diversified portfolios - oh, I guess you are. Next you are going to say "Index funds" - what do I win?
If you turn off location history, you shouldn't get the notifications to review stores and the like, IME. I've had location history off but location services on (damn you, uber!) for ages, and I don't get those any more.
I'm not sure if you're defending bitcoin or comparing people buying it to crazed beanie baby collectors. At least, nobody was talking about a beanie baby based financial system at the time - however adorable it may have been.
> the state has the guns the state can outlaw it

The state has the guns to outlaw a lot things. Yet many of those products, I can still purchase on the local street corner. Simply having a monopoly on force isn't enough to totally stop trade in some good. Especially when that good is easy to hide, and easy to move. Crypto is pretty much the easiest good to hide and move in the history of mankind.
(Again, this is a rather cynical take, but...)

Brown's monopoly on undergraduate housing is an essential source of revenue. Brown generates twice the $/ft² in revenue as private landlords in the area, but pays only a fraction of their running costs (Brown pays no income tax on this revenue, nor property tax on its dorms). There's nothing wrong with students commuting, per se, but for a University that's come to rely on residency fees, ditching the residency requirement is no easy financial feat.
LOL Earmarks clearly still exist, just under different names, and have always been used solely for corrupt purposes. Pork barrel spending is a huge price to pay for enabling national legislators to agree to legislation that's clearly bad for the country as a whole, in order to fund projects for their political supports.

And most social security payments go to people with living standards at or above the US median.
> Oh, right. Stocks, property, securities, bonds, investments, diversified portfolios.

As the parent poster mentioned, the US’ monetary policy is awful and many believe is on the brink of major problems.

China’s financial reporting is untrustworthy- you never know what you’re getting investing there.

EU is in the middle of brexit, financial crisis in member nations.

So, yeah, some new alternative financial instrument seems attractive to me.
I made the same bet too with my very first startup (1996). We bought a clone version, and at the time was much cheap than the sun servers.
>Seems to me like a lot of SF (and SF-inspired) "big tech" wants to be known for their "wokeness"

It's just a fashion. It would be so dead in 10-20 years as being a hippy was in 1985.
Comments from an HN user with username brianacton, from 2 years ago -

"I remember this pretty clearly. I always liked the $0.99 per year model because it was pure and simple. However, it was a three way decision with Mark for it, Jan somewhat on the fence, and me against. The primary argument being that payment was artificially hindering growth. Frankly, our growth was just fine at the time. History tells us how the decision landed."

This may or may not be the actual Brian Acton (founder of whatsapp)
Sorry if my edit caught you off guard - Thanks for the informative article, even if it is seen as obvious/reasonable for most of the HN crowd!
It is contradicted by some modern scholarship, but it is by far not the consensus in the field. There are many scholars who do believe that Europe entered period of civilizational and intellectual decline for a number of centuries after the fall of the western Roman Empire. The debate is very much open on the issue.
That's a pretty good comparison, because, like the energy and custom hardware thrown at bitcoin, beanie babies are also intrinsically useless at the scale they were sold.
Heya Jimmy! Glad to see you on HN.

In case anyone would like a YT video so they can listen/watch at 2x instead of read... check out: The Complete Case for Bitcoin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjeXIGWY2DI&ab_channel=Block...
Here is a tool you might be interested in:
https://egalito.org/
They didn't (and probably still don't) subnet by building on wifi, so more precise location than "on Brown's wifi" would have required intentional information sharing.
Accusing students of lying does not avoid covid exposure, though? It just creates bad will (and possibly legal issue).
As an abstract symbol to represent value, yes, government printed cash works better for most people's use cases.

Bitcoin is interesting because of its decentralization, but it definitely pays a high cost to support that feature. If decentralization is not a feature you care about, than a central authority printing cash is a much better system.
> That said, as a manager, I would have "accepted her resignation" and/or fired her without hesitation.

Her manager, however, apparently would not have: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=3469738016467233...

Something is seriously wrong, BTW, when a manager has to find out from their own ex-employee that that employee has been fired by the manager’s manager, who, while not informing the manager, has sent a message about it to the fired employee’s direct reports.

Irrespective of the merits of the firing itself.
Most of the money is going to places that aren't immediately visible: it's paying to keep people with marginal financial situations in their homes (and paying to keep newly re-housed people housed). Without that help, there would be many more people living on the streets than there are now. The stuff that you do notice, like hiring people to do street outreach and try to help homeless people directly, is a small part of the homelessness budget.

That doesn't mean it's going super great. There are still a lot of people on the streets, obviously, and depending on where you look, either it's getting worse, or at best it's like they're treading water.

But it turns out combating homeless is just expensive, even though arguably it can be cheaper than just doing nothing (taxpayers end up paying for those 911 calls and unpaid emergency room visits after all), but there are a lot of people who have an aversion to "just giving away money to people who don't deserve it". They'd rather pay to clean up after a homeless person, year after year, than pay to make that person not homeless, even if the latter would cost less. So funding is hard to fight for, and funding levels are never enough to fix things.

San Francisco's allocation for this is a single-digit percentage of the city budget (your assertion that their budget is "huge" is incorrect; here it's a few hundred million on a $5B budget), and yet it is one of the biggest, most obviously visible problems the city is facing. Sure, simply throwing more money at a problem doesn't make it go away, but insufficient funding -- as is currently the case -- is going to ensure the problem remains.
Consider that there are many other countries than the US, where laws are often oppressive and should be broken.
I remember my friend running Linux on an Alpha workstation around 1999, and you could run a command like

date -d 'now+10000years'

to find out what day of the week it would be in 10000 years. Whereas on a typical 32-bit Intel system,

date -d 'now+40years'

didn't even work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
Bitcoin makes a lot of sense. Not for physical things but for digital ones.

Bitcoin (crypto) will be used for second hand sales of digital items from gaming characters to digital weapons or other unique items across different games from completely different gaming developers.
With BSD man (default on Void Linux) you can do:

MANPAGER=<some-pdf-viewer> man -T pdf <command>
> and pay out everyones' bonus checks at the end of the year

Yes. This is understated. Poor(financially) developers need to make money with lowest resistance(cost). Then, when you have enough for yourself and family, you can help or join rebels to fight for whatever you think is right.
Hardly. The finance bros came from traditional finance based on fiat. That's where the majority of bilking still goes on. All of us using it as a currency since the start are still here. Sure, it's nice that it's worth over 9000 now but what matters to me is being able to send and receive money myself. Besides physical cash there's nothing like it.

And unlike other currencies this one doesn't require the energy expenditures of a full standing army or the diplomatic trades to enter into protection with someone who has one. Seen through that lens bitcoin is absolutely green.
So I cleaned up that 15 GB mailbox a bit. I had previously deleted all messages over 500KB in size. Still several millions of messages left (all from 2014 to 2018.) Don't even know how to count them, because Gmail counts only conversations. Maybe it can be done via IMAP or the API, but I'd expect hitting limits on the way, so I did not spend any time trying.

The irony is that Gmail cannot delete more than a couple of thousand messages from Trash/The Bin in one go. It says "All messages deleted", but when you refresh you see that it's not true. You need iterations. I guess they are using something what AWS calls a lambda to empty the bin (don't recall the Google term) and that job hits a limit.

Yeah, I don't use that mailbox for anything serious at the moment. Just an experiment...
bitcoin uses less resources than traditional banking. I think people should stop judging it in a vacuum and instead speak in relative terms. If energy use is a concern then fiat is the greater offender. https://bitcoinist.com/banks-consume-energy-bitcoin/

further crypto would be a much more flexible domain at working towards reducing carbon emission than deeply embedded and slow changing fiat systems
I'd argue its storage value is capped by how efficiently you can convert it to other currencies.
Way back in the day when I worked at Microsoft I had a DEC Alpha, MIPS and X86 computer each running Windows. I miss the Alpha but I don't miss having to support so many processors for the same platform.
Oh, there is lots of shady business happening around coins, not only but also gold coins ...
Consider pokemon cards as an alternative example to beanie babies.