skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the problems we face are not solved by technology but through policy.

It may never be solved, but I believe no crypto currency will ever solve an inate human trust problem.
Wow that's a ludacris list of pitfalls. I've overwhelmed just looking at the list of sections in that document.
Native to the UK and I’ll use signs for navigation both in areas I’m familiar with and those I’m not.

Some examples:

1. I want to go to a show at a popular venue (arena or theatre sized) in an area I know. If I know vaguely where it is, I’ll drive into the city centre and probably meet a one way system and follow the signs for the venue.

2. I want to visit a National Trust property. Head for a major road that runs past it and there will be brown signs that give you the best route to it.

3. Travelling somewhere and decide there is a problem with traffic / the weather and look for a detour. Signs are often perfect for choosing the best roads to head for another waypoint and then the best way from there to where you were originally heading.

I’m not some kind of crazy person who will only navigate by signs - I check things out on maps and put sat nav on, but I know the limitations of all and often the signs send me on the best route.

The people who figure these out and keep them updated are amazing at their job.
True, but we’re already on datacenter, so won’t be affected.
There’s a good quote in the recent Increment issue on remote work, of a manager’s email signature:

Received this email outside of my standard working hours (ET)? That means I’ve chosen to do some work at this time; it’s not an expectation that you do the same.

As someone prone to working odd or odd hours, I’ll often preface slack or email messages I send with a bold ‘not urgent’ or similar, in the hope that the recipient will feel comfortable ignoring it until their working hours.

I think if more people clearly set response time expectations, off hours messages would read as less of an intrusion, even to people with fewer firm boundaries.
You are talking about an extreme: those "most negatively affected" are definitely not comparable to my situation. FWIW, I have not stated my position on "wealth redistribution", since you seem to be arguing as if I said I am against it (and no, I still haven't stated it).

I am personally just well-off and in no way "wealthy" (as most senior software engineers likely are today). I am not complaining, I am just putting out a data point that I've never seen mentioned, let alone studied.

I am fully aware of the non-direct benefits things like "good looks" (height being one of those in males — my sister is over 6' herself and you can guess what her experience being above average height has been) have on people's success: it's easy enough to notice a difference in how people treat you—one single person—depending on what you are wearing (sweatpants, jeans, or more formal attire).
Are you serious? You would report coworkers to HR because they messaged you?
Rosetta 2 is not a virtual machine. It does binary translation, mostly ahead of time.
Thanks. This is super interesting. Can I rephrase to make sure I understand?

What you're saying is that; due to debt issuance in the US, it's hard for commodities and consumer goods to be priced efficiently. I interpret "confusing price signals" to mean that e.g. Apple can charge $1k for an iPhone and sell out to families who wouldn't typically be able to afford it, but the price of bread remains the same. Your medical bill comment -- you're basically saying that when one of these families hits a statistically predictable snag, they're instantly bankrupt because they've always been functionally broke, propped up by the consumer debt industry?

And so you're saying that most commodity goods face deflationary pressure as a means to stabilize the market? So if the price of commodity goods does increase significantly beyond the capacity of debt issuance, we're likely to see a depression?
Since Bitcoin transactions are enabled only by spending electricity, isn't the whole system dependent on utility companies, which are either in part or in whole extensions of the government?
Well bitcoin is as much money as FIAT money, except if you consider money credit. Than indeed, bitcoin would not be money.
> You don’t need most to agree. Just the basic majority (50%+). And of course that’s exactly what the major mining consortiums will do

You don't need anyone else to agree to start mining your own fork / altcoin. However, even if most of the miners change the protocol, it doesn't mean that the users will.
> and Google figuring out hardware didn’t matter on the server side (2000).

What do you mean by this?
Generally the details have been sorted out at some level otherwise how did you estimate it? And the ticket was likely estimated 2 months ago and you may not have been a part of that. I prefer a ticket with as much detail as possible so I'm not making the wrong assumptions.
Felice anno nuovo! Have a wonderful new year you all, hope things will be going great for you and you will experience great joys and many unforgettable moments!
> Bitcoin are "shock absorbers" of sorts, or early signals of inflation-yet-to-come.

Bitcoin doesn't go up because inflation is coming. The current value of bitcoin is an early indication of people betting on inflation. There doesn't need to be inflation, there only needs to be an expectation of inflation for investors to pile into bitcoin, thus massively driving up the price. And investors piling in will drive the price massively because there's a fixed supply of bitcoin so the price is entirely driven by demand and the current present value of all the bitcoins in existence is still ~500Bn, the same amount as a company on the stock excahnge. The price of all the gold in the world for comparison is ~10Tn. Or to put it another way, if inflation now doesn't happen, the price of bitcoin looks ridiculous and there'd be a massive crash as everyone floods back out. In fact, further than that, if inflation doesn't sky rocket then the value of BTC looks silly.
What are you talking about? They make a new type of content that is available on the internet searchable. That’s how Google started and got successful in the first place.
So essentially all code right?
I worked on a big distributed system with C# and windows servers. Was rock solid I miss it so much. I'm not drowning in Java/Spring/Linux app its such a horrible mess, security is the worst nightmare but even stuff like NFS is regularly breaks. Windows was great.
Or maybe the other way around. Don't just assert. Explain.

From the article:

> The whole idea of proof-of-work mining is broken the instant hardware comes out which is specialized for mining and useless for general computation because at that point the need to have compute power for other purposes is absolutely irrelevant in having any effect on mining, and there ceases to be any force that causes mining to be distributed around the world. It becomes a "race to the bottom" to find where people can get the cheapest electricity, and then mining anywhere else - anywhere the government tries to make sure ordinary people actually get the benefit from electricity bought for tax money, for example - becomes first pointless, then a net loss.

It's the same story as some countries not having good quality coffee, avocados, quinoa, etc. because the export-quality goods are priced out of widespread domestic consumption.

With electricity production and distribution being a natural monopoly (and therefore typically regulated by the government), blockchain can't escape the realities of foreign exchange rates and government control.
If you don't live in the US, then it becomes difficult to prove state residency as they want things like pay stubs, cellphone bills, and rent payments. Or you need to find someone who can prove residency and then claim (lie) that you reside (domicile) with them.

I don't have any of that. But maybe you can appreciate that I don't want to have to jump through those hoops just to be able to send someone $100 digitally.
Agree with you. But none of this is useful for practical (applied) machine learning. I don't want to disappoint you but you can read it as machine learning porn, but otherwise don't waste time on it.
This is a knife in the gut right now. I had listened to him on and off since 05 or so. Just recently, I rediscovered "The Mouse and the Mask" and have been humming the bars to Sofa King for the last week or two.

RIP DOOM.
Happy hogmanay!!
That sounds like it could be a PITA for everyday people tho.
>You barely even have to send anyone " over there " just take what they produce and roll with that. Free goodies.

The term is "useful idiots". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
Bitcoin is a very interesting piece of technology that has become a bubble due to a combination of historically low interest rates (and QE, and other forms of actual money printing) combined with a scarcity of good investments.

Without the forces transforming it into a bubble, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies would be interesting technologies used by enthusiasts, as an international wire transfer method, and for some black and grey market commerce. They wouldn't be anywhere near as insane as they are.

These same forces are causing the stock market and real estate to go apeshit in the middle of a pandemic-driven massive recession, which is in some ways even more insane than Bitcoin.

We are in a chronically demand-constrained economy. Until we actually recapitalize the consumer, nothing will change. We'll continue to print money forever in an attempt to revitalize the economy, and all it will do is inflate more bubbles and probably even nuttier ones.
Yes, many have speculated that as oil and gold prices in the past acted as hedges against inflation, btc may very well be that next place that investors go in times of heavy inflation. If liquidity is good, I think that this works. But the problem is that liquidity in bitcoin is so different from other classes of investments, and we don't fully know what is possible with this kind of market yet.
I also see a lot of people who feel overworked are mistaking async for sync. At our company, we harp on the fact that slack is async.
Consumers want safety(fraud/transaction protection) not anonymity.

Currently the largest and most motivated group of users that want transaction anonymity are those that want to deliberately circumvent tracking for gain.

Credit cards solved the digital currency problem decades ago.

The anonymity feature argument was always going to fall on deaf ears with consumers.
yup, similar sentiments are always given whenever MS code leaks, whether the MS DOS 6 that MS officially released, or the more recent Windows XP leak. Nobody who looked into it claimed any of the code was "messy" or anything but excellent engineering.
> Don't keep it on exchange.

This advice has always made me chuckle. It so profoundly misunderstands how non-techies actually think and operate, that I genuinely wonder how it arose. Exchanges exist and are incredibly popular because they're convenient. If you want to convince people to stop doing something that you think is bad, you need to provide a more convenient alternative, otherwise your advice will be ignored.
Greenwald has really hurt his credibility in recent years.
Prolonged lockdowns and new habits kill 75% of small businesses and greatly increase inequality as the richest 10% stay at home saving/investing instead of spending.

This will trigger an economic collapse which will bring down the eurozone. Germany will want country rated euros to avoid having to bail Italy.

House prices in Europe will drop to a rent / value rate similar to the USA, as property owners scrap for money.

USA will face similar problems and inflation will start being a problem.

China will start buying more in Europe and USA (same as they did with Africa).
I would suspect GP is referring to precision as amplified through the gear chain
Gelukkig nieuwjaar allemaal. I wish you a healthy 2021.
But industrial use is big (see the link from the other poster, 37% in the US), and growing. Gold is a very useful material and not only for its shininess.
Apple enforces APRR on macOS; you need to use their APIs to work within the confines of W^X.
You also need a valid ID verification to buy BTC from the main platforms now
Yes the public nature of transactions is a feature. Yes the scarcity is a feature (remember this in 5 years when hyperinflation hits you). And the point of making money fair isn't to reinvent its features its to make them transparent and equal to all without catering to the special parasitic aspects of our societies.
Farmville was the game that attracted me and my friends to Facebook and I honestly loved playing

It’s crazy how things have changed so much
I wish sometimes we could turn back time
Brilliant :-D
>It's my understanding that each of those is considered a taxable event that you have to report on your tax return.

Isn't that trivial to do from a reporting point of view? Just export your wallet history and do a lookup on that day's price.
Bonne année !

Many years lurking here...

Thank you HN for all the great comments and discussions.
I read both articles but it isn't very convincing. He goes on to point out the 150 different companies and projects that solve the same things as bitcoin/ eth. However, instead of a million different 'endpoints' there's one its self-contained. You have this extremely powerful technology that has the ability to do all of these different things that have taken hundreds of thousands of people 20 years to make. Eth has done that in 7 years with a fraction of the resources. As adoption grows so will the development speed.
Mimblewimble and Grin Are Different
A little over a year ago I heard of a technology called Mimblewimble. I skimmed over some explanations and somewhat understood what it was trying to achieve. I've been in the space a few years and I've not been this excited about any other project in the space. It was without a doubt the single most interesting idea I've encoutered. By far. I soon joined the community and continued learning about its inner workings. During the learning process, I soon realized that there are very few in the Grin community, and outside of it, that understand the underlying idea. This was surprising to me because unlike all the alternative technologies that aim to improve privacy, Mimblewimble, specifically the Grin implementation, was designed to be extremely simple. In fact, I'd argue that it's the only technology that has a simpler design than Bitcoin!

I'm convinced the idea stands out among all the other ideas in the space (at least the ones I've seen). It's very hard to find a design that fits this nicely together. A few days ago, I've decided to write a short series of posts that try to present the idea to the wider audience. In order to reach the average crypto Joe, I avoided talking about the underlying cryptographic primitives because they would only confuse people. They're also not important to understand the idea underneath.

Most privacy technologies make certain tradeoffs and Mimblewimble is one of them, but I promise you that if you take the time and try to understand it, you'll at the very least learn something new and appreciate the idea.

I hope you guys enjoy the read and if you find it interesting, consider joining the Grin communication channels.

https://phyro.github.io/what-is-grin/

Happy new year and all the best in 2021. Cheers!
On the bright side, at least 2021 is guaranteed to be better in that the GOAT can't die.

F

His music helped me find a big part of who I am.
There are more but they are not exposed to applications. Apple wants you to ship standard arm64 code.
As was easily predicted: the fees have been waived.

https://twitter.com/josh_wingrove/status/1344783964926578689
Yes, I see the irony.

So much talk about the benefit of crypto currencies seems - in my eyes at least - based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how societies work.

And most of all: you can’t replace trust with tech.
"No one treats Bitcoin as a currency. It’s treated as an investment vehicle."

I, for one, have and will continue to use it as a currency in some cases. I'm quite sure I'm not the only one.
Yeah, that is explicit US policy, and implicitly supported by most other nations that have significant debts and reserves denominated in USD.
I don’t see why this is controversial. Video is content. Google has always shown content from other sites and sometimes it’ll embed a whole YouTube player. If anything, it’s good that they feature content from not-YouTube.

The “quality” of TikTok videos is not really important here because one might actually look for them.
> and all the work they've done with Dotnet Core seem to really have bought them a lot of goodwill, at least with the people I know.

Microsoft has done some good things with .NET Core, but they still don't have a very friendly OSS or partner strategy.

AppGet is a pretty good example; there was an existing Open source solution that filled a need, and Microsoft decided to create their own replacement, not bothering to give any credit (until there was an internet ruckus) to the original despite the very striking similarities and relative level of obviousness that they were at bare minimum 'inspired' by the tool; after all, they interviewed him for a role and even warned him the day before it came out... [0]

Octopus is another example. I -hate- TFS Release pipelines. Octopus Deploy was (until they ruined their pricing model) a far superior product overall. You can really tell the way TFS Release pipelines were done, they tried to 'checkbox-copy' Octopus Deploy's features without making it too much like Octopus to be obvious.

But the checkbox-copy strategy is inferior in many ways. In Octo you can have a stage that runs in all environments (but certain steps on/off per env) and configure server groups that way. In TFS Release, You have to have to 'copy' the steps for every stage. It's like their data model is missing a 1-many relationship or two somewhere.

And the impacts in the case of their behavior has a second-order effect; I am curious whether TFS Release eating into Octopus's market share was a factor in their price hikes a couple years ago; in that regard, I can't blame them if that's the case.

[0] - https://medium.com/@keivan/the-day-appget-died-e9a5c96c8b22
You can rationalize the sex trade too by saying without being able to sell sex the 14/15 year old would have to sell an organ, or starve.

What do you think a 9 year old working as a human mule for $0.75/day at a cobalt mine in the Congo?

There are labor conditions below which you cannot (humanly) talk about the "incentives" of the worker.

But look, we are 50 years into the problem with consumer electronics at this point. It is complex and will be very hard to unwind, but I think at a minimum you should be forced to label products made with exploited labor.

Apple is one of the only companies to even attempt to improve these conditions. It's a huge disservice to go back to trying to justify them instead.
Happy new year thunderbong!

That we many have none like it forevermore.
See also The Meme Machine, which is a book from the 90s (I think) that attempts to take Dawkins' idea of memes to its logical conclusion (and the book has Dawkins' blessing as evidenced by the fact he provides a foreword or at least a quote of praise/approval). I believe the author argues that memes are essentially a new form of life. Genes are the biological form of life that we're most aware of. Memes are basically the same thing, just in a different medium. I'm probably not doing the idea justice but that's the gist of it.
They do, in macOS and in what concerns iOS, JSCore.

PyPy doesn't get much love from Python community overall, too focused on CPython + C, no matter on which platform.

Hence why efforts like Julia and Chapel spring to life.
I think the point is that any of these style of attacks are quickly discoverable and immediately destroy the value of all bitcoins.
> But most of people I know don't care enough to stop their life completely for something without an expiry date.

Except there is an expiry date, the date you get the vaccine (or at least, a week or two after you get the second dose). And for most people, that should happen by this summer. If there were no vaccine on the horizon, then yeah, things would need to be different. It doesn't make rational sense to be taking any unnecessary risks when people are getting vaccinated as we speak. In 10 years, will you regret being extra careful for a few more months? No, but there's the potential that you could regret not being careful for the rest of your life.

> And your assumption that things will go back to normal is not true

I didn't say anything about normality on my post. All I talked about was the vaccine.
Physicists are working to develop a unique Tokamak Fusion Device called 'SPARC'
>> Economists weren’t born yesterday.

So? They can still be idiots. Idiocy does not have an age limit.

>> Inflation is measured in many ways, most often by looking at a basket of goods where the prices are relatively non-volatile.

Meaning you remove the items from the basket if it's price jump too much ? so if you tamper with the items in the basket you can project(pretend) that the inflation is not happening.?

>> using the USD/Bitcoin ratio as a yardstick for inflation seems very misguided, as Bitcoin is heavily speculated.

No it doesn't need to be a yardstick as Bitcoin is not yet in full circulation in the economy but it's growth indicates people are increasingly prioritising it over paper to store value.

Re: speculation, everything is a speculation, there are those who keep holding USD in cash and banks and keep speculating that the economic prophets will do the right thing to retain value in their chosen currency.
Regarding size, I like to remind myself how much bandwidth it takes to watch just seconds worth of Netflix or YouTube.
Emacs is gone IIRC
> that's a lot of people mate.

I agree, but I think my point still stands even if it doesn't apply to everyone, or even a majority of people.

> The particular person here runs a charity for inmates, and if you're self-employed or own a business in a sense ironically enough you have even less control over your schedule because you can't just dial the numbers down and people depend on you, in this case both workers and clients.

This is a manifestation of the same problem of not setting boundaries. People only depend on you if you agree to take them on as clients. It might be heartbreaking to have to make those kinds of decisions when it comes to something like working with inmates, but I do believe you'll help a smaller number of inmates much more effectively if you're well-rested and take care of your health. And, again, that actually is entirely within your control. You can certainly choose to help more people at the expense of your health, but that may not be the best decision for yourself (or the people you're trying to help) in the longer run. But it's still a choice.
There exist those who predict the collapse of everything. That's not a valid answer.

Who are they? How many are they? What insight do they have that we don't have? Is this chance higher than the possibility of collapse for Bitcoin?
There was an interesting article in Wired, in 2018: https://www.wired.com/story/obamas-us-digital-service-surviv...
Unless I'm mistaken, this is showing gold used for anything but storage of value. So that number is misleading.
Parts of Darwin are APSL.
During the summer I looked at my commit activity on our github and it was a solid green since March when the lockdown began in the UK. There was nothing else to do and the went on until perhaps mid November. I've been on holidays since mid December and I had no idea how mentally fatigued I was until I stopped working.

There's no way next year will be as frantic. And to be fair to our HR team, they did regularly warn people to take time off and not burn out.
It's not one guy bartering, it's a lot of services offering it as a payment option, treating it effectively like a foreign currency with a different set of payment providers