skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think he's referring to miners stealing electricity in China
And even if it isn’t, how is it a developers job to explain why when there is a linked ticket in the commit message from product explaining it.
I think whats impressive about the Taycan is that the performance is reproducible time and time again, like an ICE car. It doesn’t overheat. So you can cane it on the Autobahn for 45mn until the battery runs out, instead of for 5mn until it overheats.

I agree that there isn’t any impact to real world driving, but then again any car above 200hp isn’t really making a difference to real world driving
From what I can tell there is still a healthy influx of people from overseas to offset those who are moving away.
> No VAT on bitcoin transactions

Sounds like a defect in the technology to me. A good currency should be able to support the full range of social policies (like VAT).

One of the problems of the Euro is not being able to inflate different countries within the Eurozone at different rates. If Bitcoin were ever to become popular for regular transactions within many countries, it'd be a fiscal policy disaster. Pretty soon you'd hear Portugal, Italy, Spain, and Greece banning its use, along with similarly wobbly countries in other parts of the world. I remember Malaysia catching flak for halting foreign currency exchange during the Asian Financial Crisis, but it turned out to be a really smart move. It turns out that a globally integrated economy isn't always best for the smaller economies. They need to be able to adjust the spigot.

Edit: I suppose this suggests a feature request for Bitcoin: namespacing, of a sort. If the currency were able to support cross-namespace conversion controls, like a tax determined by a function of the velocity and acceleration of exchange ... that'd be pretty darn cool. Each country could pick its namespace, and have control over its exchange tax function. Taking it further, you could tax intra-namespace transactions. VAT with no bureaucracy. Each account could be tied to a citizen, transactions taxed at some progressive schedule, and then uniformly distributed to every account daily. The transaction tax could be dynamic, to encourage currency flow in bad times, and to add some friction when things are overheating.
I agree but will add that a lot of those issues are significantly pandemic-worsened.

"If there's literally nothing fun and social to do, I might as well work" has been the calculus for me for hundreds of hours of extra work in 2020. I'm not even upset (at my company) about it; in some ways, it was nice to have something to stave off some of the boredom and I'd honestly rather work than watch some mindless television programming.

Without a pandemic, but with remote work, I still have team beer-league sports to play, dinners/BBQs with friends, social events relating to the kids, etc.
That seems like a very "hackernews centric" take on the actual issue.

We are in the middle of a once in a century pandemic that's pushing many healthcare systems, and lots of the involved people, to the maximum of their limits and often even past those limits.

In that context it seems a bit tone-deaf to make the problem out as people just not wanting to "leave the fast track/go to B league", as for many HCW these are not even realistic options or prospects because there's really not that much of a career ladder/B league for occupations like nurses and others in the sector.
Are there about to be scraping wars between the FAANGs?
I mean, the 21 million cap is just a line of code no? No reason why if enough people agree to it they could just print more. Or they could fork and print more no? I find it strange that people speak of bitcoin's scarcity as if it were a physical thing.
The appropriateness of different styles of planning is based largely on how much the work is labor vs knowledge-work. Programming disproportionately ends up being knowledge work, because everyone is always working in a language, framework, scale, or business area that they don't understand.

After all, programming is a craft that can have things akin to "writer's block" (for instance, being stuck on a bug or design). It's more like writing the script than shooting the movie.
I had to google was VCSE was. Incase anyone didn't know its Voluntary Community and Social enterprise. For some reason I can understand this sentiment coming from someone in tech or some other highly competitive industry... but a non-profit?
Not a chance. Austin isn't even the third largest metro area in Texas.
That's what most companies do, though.

"Differentiate your product."

"Let's build an IP portfolio."

"We don't want to be the dumb pipe."

"Build a moat around the product."

"Don't let yourself be commoditized."

Etc.

All that coded or not so coded business language says the same thing: make it proprietary/uncopyable and make money off of it.
Compare the way media covered the Snowden leaks vs the Vault 7 ones. The Vault 7 leaks basically show that as soon as you're a person of sufficient interest to the state, tools like Signal and Tor (for which Snowden is probably the highest profile proponent) are at best useless, and at worst might just paint a target on your back. But hardly anyone has ever heard of them.
Sounds like the TV show "The Americans", although that focuses on KGB sleeper agents in America during the Cold War.
Bitcoin doesn’t care about these articles. Ignore it if you want - many people do. Bitcoin gives the choice to opt of the current financial system. No problem if you don’t, it’s completely voluntarily.
I don't see the irony.

The point is that Bitcoin has introduced an actual "digital cash" currency without institutional/governmental middlemen. That institutions can be built on top of that, and that some people want such institutions, doesn't change the novel utility of finally having a currency that functions like digital cash.

It's like saying it's ironic that people use physical USD for anonymous p2p transactions when USD banking systems have KYC laws. It's a non sequitur.
the biggest difference between this rally and 2017 is that it appears to be mostly just bitcoin and, to a smaller extent, eth, and seems largely driven by institutions who now feel it is finally investable.

imo there isn’t quite the same level of excitement even though the price is much higher now. just feels like another asset Wall Street is accumulating.
Same here. I thought it sounded great because I have zero knowledge of monetary policy, which has been at it in modern form since Isaac Newton. So naturally I thought it was a godsend. Truth is: financial institutions aren't just something a few hackers can whip up in a decade. The mill-billionaire bitcoin hackers were in the right place at the right time for lightening to strike. I think like ADAS/SDV, cryptocurrency has a looooong way to go.
If you think the courts are on Trump's side, you haven't been paying attention.
They aren't allowed in!
> Completely agreeable, albeit it misses a point: Governments can't print more of it.

That only matters if Bitcoin has a monopoly for a given use case. Bitcoins chief advantage is its hash power, and therefore, its security. So far, the only use case I can think of that relies strongly on that is digital gold use case.

For everything else, having a constrained money supply has side effects that are often pretty undesirable. Folks can simply mint new coins for those use cases.
Last time I checked it was the only currency accepted by most dark markets.
Well it’s a software development forum, so yes I think it’s natural that in discussions we talk mainly about the software development profession
Cheers, appreciate you clarifying.
Ask HN: What would you do if you had an extra hour in the day?
I'd spend it as a dedicated time for working on building side projects or with family!
> Hal shipped the prototype because he had just been told he had a terminal illness.

That's from Phillip Hallam-Baker.

Is there evidence Hal was Satoshi, or is this just more speculation?

Or am I misunderstanding his response?
This[0] seems to be it but it's behind a paywall. I'd have loved to see it.

[0]: https://www.vuemastery.com/courses/vue3-deep-dive-with-evan-...
Ok, that is good news. It has been a while since I read up on the literature. And it is always nice to see findings revised by better studies.
> "But what I soon learned is that most of the people associated with Bitcoin saw it as digital gold "

Since it was basically designed to work like a pseudo-physical commodity, and most of the rhetoric to support its existence is warmed-over goldbuggery, why should this be surprising?
It’s like refactoring a codebase without understanding the problems behind the current implementation, and then acting surprised when the code is just as ugly.
The original post didn't work, and now the updated link (ccc.de) reports 404
It is well known that the bulk of the budget for the American communist party was, and continues to be funded by CIA stooges’ dues.
I agree forks haven’t been successful, but I still don’t understand how we’d be free from the ‘clutches of Mozilla’ if Firefox died.

I don’t see Google funding anyone else at this point.

If the battle won’t be won by a fork are you suggesting someone build a clean room browser?

If so, who is going to fund it?
This is written from the perspective of a person who believes in blockchain-based currencies but thinks Bitcoin as an implementation of said currency is a failure. He thinks the concept of mining is a fundamental flaw.

But he keeps the door open for different implementations. Personally, I think the whole concept of blockchain-based currencies is flawed. But let’s not go there right now.

The value of Bitcoin is very high and that’s very scary. Who is buying? All those investors who have no place else to go? Gambling on Bitcoin to find ‘growth’?

Bitcoin is quickly becoming too big to fail. But it will fail at some point, because I believe it isn’t anything. (You may disagree, but hear me out). So when the music stops, I think it could be the event that triggers another 2007/2008. Bot big enough by itself. But it triggers the same avalanche of bankruptcies, the dominos will fall.

This time though, all financial instruments to save us are exhausted. Interest is zero. The worst may yet to come.
Happy new year to HN. I have learned a lot from the valuable discussions over the years. Thanks to everyone who has made that possible! May 2021 be a good year for all.
But then what would one invest in? The stock market may just as easily crash.
> What kind of things do you buy with it and where?

Drugs, CP, cryptotrojan ransom, other crime related transactions.

Bitcoin value is directly related to relevant criminal activity.
Anecdata:

We recently instituted a 20mph limit across our town (I’m the chair of the town council and also a keen cyclist). We do regular speed surveys.

Not everyone sticks to 20mph. But no one drives above 30mph any more. When we had a 30mph limit, we’d regularly get people driving up to 40mph.

So it’s not perfect, but it does make a difference, here at least.
Textbook example ^ and right on the money, I think. You barely even have to send anyone " over there " just take what they produce and roll with that. Free goodies. Of course if you have a few idle provocateurs, it's probably a good return on investment.

Honest question ; why is this thread [flagged] ? I get the answer might be obvious and disappointing, but surely the thread is not being cancelled right ?
I wonder how many Bitcoin users have read and understand the following extensive list of privacy "pitfalls" (mistakes that can reveal information about unwary Bitcoin users):

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Privacy

Are you careful to avoid these numerous privacy pitfalls? If not, you're leaking information about yourself, into the public ledger (blockchain)
Bitcoin is pretty much the modern gold, if you’re looking for something revolutionary as in “can be used for day to day transactions” you’ll have to check more modern cryptocurrencies that aim to be stable, regulated, and fast.
I used to have a desktop gadget that displayed the current radar image. It's broke too. It used to pull the layers from the NWS radar server but they've (NWS) stopped providing that data.
For that particular use case, how does PyPy perform in comparison to CPython's array module[1]?

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/array.html
This is definitely a top-down solution. Our CIO mandated “no meetings Fridays” before COVID-19 and it became a blessing when everyone started working from home. It reminded people that our coworkers are people. Don’t expect them to drop everything for our employer. Or for our work needs. We can all responsibly manage workloads.

The author of this piece lists CEO as a title. Sadly, if she wants to reduce the workload and expectation of her staff, she’ll need to lead by example. I wholly expect her to be able to do so, and it will only make her employees happier.
Find Your Jujubes in 2021
Considering that what you've quoted is making a different point, I am not sure that "one" scholar disagrees with me...
Very sad news. Quite interesting that exactly two months after his death passed before it was revealed.
Perhaps it was a wish of MF Doom?
For going from text to spirv cant you just use?:

glslangValidator -V shader.vert -o shader.vert.spv

glslangValidator -V shader.frag -o shader.frag.spv
I definitely am!

I can't believe btc got this far.

I never bought anything because it sounds ridiculous and the kind of thing any western government would ban immediately - turns out I was wrong.

I know people who are completely clueless about the economy who retired just by betting on BTC.
Duplicate discussions don't seem to be an issue (I see a lot of them, and someone usually posts a hint to previous discussions). It's also not an arbitrary "political" topic, but a request of recognised computer scientists to the Association for Computing Machinery. If everything would be flagged that anyone could get upset about, soon we wouldn't be discussing anything at all.
Have certainly seen and experienced what you did, so I hear you. However, there are improvements slowly being made to be optimistic about. DevOps (or DevSecOps as they like to refer to it now...) is definitely becoming a more ingrained practice. If you’re interested, take a look at initiatives such as Cloud One, or some of the work being done by GSA (especially 18F) and USCIS (of all places).

Interestingly, the 21st Century IDEA Act mandates compliance with the USWDS now (at least for publicly facing sites) and there is a maturity model built around it. We’ll see whether or not agencies comply, but it’s a step in the right direction.
I aspire to build a product that has a website dedicated to how much it sucks, in namesake.
China uses tourism to smother Xinjiang’s culture
I have to agree and disagree at the same time.

My higher ups were shocked when I presented them with >540 hours of overtime accumulated from mid March to September.

Not that I didn't more than once tell it in different video meetings with my team lead as well as managing directors.

But they only reacted shocked when there was a paper trail. Before that telling them that I would run up to that amount of overtime did nothing.
BTC prices have approximately zero relation to inflation in the real economy (for whatever definition of that you want to use). Rising BTC prices are driven by pyramid scams, fraud, and speculation. There is no useful signal here related to anything else.
There does seem to be a fundamental design issue in bitcoin and proof of work in general: Mining has economies of scale and therefore winner takes all mechanics leading to centralization.

At that point the mechanism that ensures ledger integrity is the calculation that if the miner tampers with the ledger, that would destroy trust in the coin and hurt the miner in that way.

But 1) that's exactly how conventional currencies work too and 2) it's actually an untested hypothesis. Who knows what would happen in a world where the economy runs on bitcoin and there's some "good reason" to deviate from the protocol.
We have already reached many tipping points, and in the future we will eventually reach many more. However, that is simply another way that the effects of CO2 is non linear even though the quantity of CO2 is linear.
I was a JIRA admin for a waterfall-based company (Japanese). They did process hard. Agile was a cussword, and the JIRA workflows were standalone engineering efforts; complete with custom JIRA plugins, written in Java, because even JIRA couldn't handle some of the process.

I guarantee that it would have had most of the folks here, whimpering under their standing desks.

It was the Tenth Circle of Hell.

It gave me a sort of PTSD, so that, now I'm on my own, I try not to write anything down, and, if I do, it's usually a small list on a whiteboard.

If I never see JIRA again, I will die a happy man.

That said, it is like blaming the asphalt for the eminent domain seizures for a road. It's a symptom.
Very cool.

In a similar vein (but much less techinically sophistcated), I recently realized that making "cloze" cards (esp. ones w/ a large number of deletions and/or incremental-reveal cards) in Anki can be made a much less painful process by ditching the native method in favor of an almost entirely CSS implementation (basically, you use Anki's editor to underline the cloze deletions, use a line of JS to add innerText as an attribute to the element, and use CSS to make each answer appear in a little pop-up as you hover over (or touch, if on mobile) a blank. An example: https://streamable.com/xwewa4).
because you can't use it as a money if you need to pay capital gains on every stick of gum you buy. they should find other ways to collect taxes that doesn't inhibit it.
Huh. Didn't know these were all the main exports of Nigeria
(Sorry about editing the rug from under you - I write these comments by adding to them bit by bit, but it somehow only 'works' if I do it live.)

You're raising an important point which I think about a lot. It's very clear to me that most users who get into intense arguments about divisive topics are sincere. The anger and hurt feelings that energize these arguments and get re-energized by them are too unmistakeable to just be cynically planted. But it may be that these are second-order effects of propaganda systems. If you convince enough people and get them feeling angry and hurt enough, they'll do your job for you, and much better, by being intensely sincere. You can't say that these commenters are manipulators, because they're not. "You're a shill!!" will meet with justified indignation, and "you've been brainwashed!!" is no good either. The whole distinction between "manipulated" vs. "authentic" doesn't address what really goes on in these discussions. You can't use it to make anything better. That's not to say that we should do nothing when we find some real indication of actual manipulation—the opposite is the case. But it doesn't make that much difference when the 'organic' dynamics point in the same direction. Certainly it doesn't solve the problem.

Another extremely powerful factor that does the propagandist's work for them in an entirely innocent way is tribalism. Is it manipulation if I feed your beliefs about your identity and (especially) the opposing identity in a way that inflames you with indignation against the enemy? That "food" is so eagerly gobbled by the consumer that at some point you have to ask who's influencing who. The tribal psyche, which we not only all have but are almost totally dominated by, is enough to generate the situation all on its own. Media stories will feed it because that's what people want. No one can get enough of hearing how good their group is and how bad the opposing one is. This force is so powerful that it's not even possible to discuss it, except in the abstract.

In my experience, if you take that seriously then you come to feel that such external manipulators as are lurking out there are only effective because they activate the real manipulators, which are inside ourselves. "We have met the enemy and it is us," etc. This perspective is much better because it is empowering: we can do something about it, we can work on it, we can change. The other perspective (external agents are manipulating!) just leads to a wilderness of mirrors, even if external agents doubtless are manipulating. There's nothing we can do about that, except in the important (but relatively rare) case where evidence appears; in the absence of evidence, all we're doing is projecting our shadows onto each other.

The reason I think the sufficiently-smart-manipulator argument is a good one is that besides being the only response that can actually work, it points us directly at what we need to be doing anyway, which is addressing these more powerful factors in ourselves.

Ok, I'm done editing for the moment :)
What's "digital cash" in this context? What does it offer extra compared to regular cash and online payments?
The Oligarchic Phone Companies already have a system like this in place, to lookup names based on phone numbers, and it's based on DNS. On the downside, each Oligarchic Phone company charges for each lookup (everything on the Oligarchic Phone Company costs money).
The Lightning Network doesn't solve the congestion problem for global adoption. To open a lightning channel you need an on-chain transaction. The same is true to close one. Assuming 2,500 transactions per block, you will need ~970 days to just open a lightning channel for each US citizen (assuming 350 million citizens and no other Bitcoin transactions).

Due to his limitation the Lightning Network is unsuited for any large scale use outside of exchanges.
Ask HN: Would you re-align incentives to simplify web development and DevOps
Obviously, it is a subjective opinion that modern web development and associated devops are unnecessarily complicated.

The reasons are discussed often right on HN.

- The desire to mimic the technical infrastructures of big companies like Google and Facebook whether one’s system needs that level of scale or not.

- The desire to replicate software architecture’s of the bigger companies things like micro services.

- I also think engineers want to work on interesting things and complex things probably tickle certain parts of engineers’ brains.

what would one have to change to incentivize engineers to build simpler (perhaps even boring) systems/technologies/architectures?
The Perfect Media Server – 2020 Edition
I thought there was literally tons of gold stored in the WTC. Now I'm going to have to go look up the stories.
This is a good question. I think the problem lies in the fact you would have to include in your business decision to block roaming. Roaming is a money maker, so I think you would have a hard time convincing telcos to block that. There are laws around roaming as well that you would have to augment or remove internationally. If numbers were not portable and roaming did not exist; meaning, you have to acquire a local number through some form of authentication and your source country forwards the calls to that temporary number, then that might work. When you call people back, they won't see your number though. They would see the loaned local number. At this point we are reinventing the proposed shaken/stir but in a more cumbersome manor.

all calls either originate from a network that is trusted

That is also tricky. What does trusted mean? Does it mean that if someone on that network is abusing SS7, that they become untrusted? If so, every network would be untrusted within 10 minutes. Maybe a cost penalty to self regulate? You have to block your own reported abusers or lose peering? I like the idea, but I think that would put us back into that realm of legal and political quandaries. This would require a fairly significant addition in full time employees to police the abuse reports and entirely new reporting systems to log all the SS7 data, learn and report abuse patterns.