skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Zero bitcoiners going "BUT WHAT ABOUT CONVENTIONAL MONEY HUH" provide numbers.

Since you're too lazy to, I will:

* Bitcoin: 0.1% of all electricity in the world, 7tps.

* THE ENTIRE REST OF HUMAN CIVILISATION, EVERYONE IN IT AND EVERYTHING THEY DO: 99.9% of electricity, a hell of a lot more than 6,993tps.

Bitcoin is the most inefficient payment system in history.

Bitcoiners' usual objection at this point is to claim that transactions per second is a bad measure, for some reason - though if you're comparing how much each system achieves for the resources it uses, it's precisely the obvious and correct measure.

But if tps doesn't matter, then the entire bitcoin ecosystem should be replaced with a small rock. A whole country's less electricity use, and only 7tps less! Also, it'd be hard currency.
It's less annoying that getting dozens of spam calls each day. If you will be calling the person frequently, just have them add you as a contact. No big deal.

Not answering unknown numbers not only saves you the trouble of getting them but also results in fewer robocalls over time since you do not answer.
> Especially, as Windows updates, given basically infinite combination of hardware (often broken) and software (broken even more often) are super rock solid.

Apart from breaking SSDs [0] less than two weeks ago. And deleting your certificates in November [3]. And breaking Kerberos in November [4]. And moving your files to another user in February [1]. And breaking their own reset feature in February [2].

All of those are massively disruptive and breaking changes. And all of them have Windows Update to blame (especially the moving files bug) - not some buggy underlying hardware that Microsoft had to work around.

[0] https://borncity.com/win/2020/12/18/windows-10-20h2-chkdsk-d...

[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/658194/windows-10s-new-update-is-d...

[2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-pulls-security-updat...

[3] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information...

[4] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information...
My problem with bitcoin is the fees just to use it.

Coinbase charges 4% plus a fee to exchange to another crypto currency, plus 1% for the buy/sell spread and then even more fees to put the money back in my bank.

Western Union is much more competitive and is actually used.
"Works on my machine" is not a serious person's response to anything
I’ve driven a Tesla and found it completely confounding why people like them. It was a terrible experience. The build quality was worse than cars half the price and the driving experience was terrible.

I want electric vehicles to become mainstream and think Tesla is an important driver to that goal. I also have no direct position in their share price.

But to suggest that the cars themselves are transformative experiences is just wrong.
Wrapping Up a Weird Year
Got a few gem's, a few eldritch horrors, and a few that were both.

I love it.
MULA Entertainment
Without knowing anything about how the cost compares, it might make sense to look into building a home out of some thick dense walls of cement or something for natural insulation.

And you can look into some of the passive temperature regulation of traditional architectures from parts of the world with similar climates or newer green architectures that accomplish similar.

There are probably architecture firms in Central Texas that could help you with the last one.
They are trying to cancel him, unsurprisingly
It’s a near certainty that Fred Hampton was assassinated as part of COINTELORO. I agree with you.
>The browser is the best at doing the things it does, and any control that you implement yourself is going to be worse.

There are plenty of counterexamples.

For example, the date input control does not allow to enforce date format by design, and the auto-detection of user facing format is buggy and inconsistent across browsers on the same system (e.g. Edge legacy ignored Windows' region preference and used the keyboard locale). It tends to show the American-style dates even on non-American locales, making the control not just useless but sometimes actively misleading.

Even apart from that it's pretty basic. Keyboard navigation is bad everywhere bad but in Chrome where it's just mediocre - there's no inline/auto-popup mode like other js pickers, and it requires nonintuitively pressing ENTER to pop-up.

Some browsers like Firefox don't have a 'Today' button, and even in Chrome you can't hide it when it doesn't make sense. No browser has a 'Clear' button which makes sense in some scenarios.

I can go on and on about how flawed that control is, but this is long enough.
You can either get information from other people you trust and you think would give you accurate feedback or by trying to develop a clearer sense of how your own mind works via ego dissolution.

For the former, its probably ideal to pick someone you trust and respect, and try to be clear with them you want critical or constructive feedback.

For the latter, meditation, therapy, and Vedanta-style self-inquiry can all trigger more self-awareness and self-dissolution. As the amygdala shrinks and prefrontal cortex gets more activated, the fear-based, survival-oriented self erodes and you start to be able to see more clearly and objectively.
>they don't play an active and knowing role in foreign intelligence operations

Let's recap the evidence you have provided showing he played a "active and knowing role." First, that his show aired on RT. Second, that Wikileaks published the information they received. That is not a convincing argument.

If further evidence did emerge clearly showing Assange knowingly and actively assisting Russia, my position on the legality of his actions may change, and punishing him would not violate his rights.

>And it wasn't a foreign spy agency feeding them stolen materials to leak for destructive purposes

No, but many of the CIA's worldwide operations are exactly that. Plus, I don't find a domestic spy agency feeding them stolen materials for destructive purposes much better.

>Yeah that's not what he said

Those are my words, based on similar trials I have mentioned. He may have had other choices, at this point he would not receive a fair trial. Zaid already believes he deserves the punishment, like you do, so you both seem unconcerned about whether his trial would be fair.
This an interesting view point and have to admit I've been in the situation where I thought everyone else in the room had lost their mind. Turns out they where on LSD and I was not.
The main reason games are violent is that you are usually presenting the player with a challenge to be overcome. That challenge has to be simple and visual. The simplest way to do this is with a fight - it’s why my game will have combat for example. It’s exciting to hear that such a superhero developer is tackling nonviolent games because he could start a really neat trend
Looking back on the last year - didn't this already happened without Bitcoin?
You have to activate hardware acceleration. And it will be the snappiest you ever saw.
It's the fundamentally superior technology. It's likely to be much cheaper than batteries in the long run, and I suspect will eventually equal batteries on efficiency too (fuel cells are technically batteries themselves). We can go into elaborate details on this, but that is the gist of it.
Your numbers are totally wrong. The fact your own link suggests that bitcoin uses as much electrical energy as Chile should tell you it's not close to the USA. Recheck?
Cement is about 7% of all our CO2 emissions Worldwide.
Steel is another 5-6% IIRC.
How to write good prompts: using spaced repetition to create understanding
From this description it sounds like just name resolution that still uses the regular banking system.
“All big letters but it isn’t no acronym” - DOOM, _Ballskin_
I started reading hackernews in Nov 2019 and get a daily mail with the top 30 posts of the past 24 hours.

I've never missed a day during this time and have learned invaluable things from all of you specially the ones posting thoughtful comments. I'm a believer of "Success is the product of daily habits, not once-in-a-lifetime transformation" and all of you contributed to me getting a little better one day at a time. I'm pushing myself to write and comment more, so I can hopefully be able to return the favor with the things I know best.

Thank you mods for all the hard work,
See you all in 2021
@dang why is this flagged
Yeah but, why BTC specifically? Why not ETH or ETH tokens, or any of the hundreds of other cryptocurrencies that are faster and have lower fees?
Excellent language! I’m using it for scientific computing and like it a lot. There are a few but useful and good libraries. Arraymancer,ggplotnim, alea and stats. Also, great Python integration nimpy library.
The article goes through a list of known cosmic phenomena trying to see if this observation can be explained by each, and concludes it’s unlikely. “Can’t be explained” clearly means “can’t be a explained by a known phenomenon”.

Human language is a beautiful and powerful and (sometimes) ambiguous tool. We could write everything in terms that are completely unambiguous —- like some awful formally-verified programming language —- so people on HN couldn’t possibly adopt an absurdist interpretation and spend time knocking it down. Or alternatively, we can just use common sense and the world can be a slightly more interesting and mysterious place.
The IRS issued official guidance on it but there's no need for new laws around it.
Try The Ancestor by Danielle Trussoni. It's gothic fiction with a science twist. https://www.amzn.com/B07S6NM6TG
Happy New Year!

Thanks mods for manually gliding my Show HN post[0] to the front-page after 4 days of getting a single upvote! <3

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24746921
would love to see a subreddit simulator for HN, the finance jabber alone would be amazing
I live in a rural area in North America, a stones throw away from a municipality of 160,000 people, and our internet is marginal. The constant push for https everywhere is making the web almost unusable for us. Https is being used to deliver fonts, javascript libraries, and images also over https from multiple domains all requiring multiple ssl negotiations. Usually one of these fonts/js/images times out, and as a result the entire page doesn't load.
Commercial Unix suffered from a lack of vision. They could have made version to run on x86, but they basically conceded to the low end to Linux. They were too busy making money from selling super-expensive RISC-based machines.

Solaris had a good version, which I used for a time, while I was running a data center full of Sparc equipment. All the user space stuff was happening in Linux-land. Solaris x86 had a nice repo for various packages, but there was always something you wanted that wasn't there. It got really close, though.

If one of the bigs would have gotten serious about packaging up, say, Debian's userland stuff, they could have put a serious dent in Red Hat, and maybe things would have played out differently.
This sort of thing was the kind of statement we heard pretty frequently over the course of the Brexit process, but it’s really horribly nonspecific - “big government excess”, “bureaucratic overhead” etc.

The total EU budget is about 2% of the total public spending of the member states. That’s a chunk of change at at international level, but is relatively lightweight as a layer of government. Much of its spending is investment into shared projects that are intended to encourage development, trade and collaboration between member states.

What are the specific EU programmes or endeavours that represent “globalist excess” and should be cut? Do those changes really fundamentally affect the structure of the EU?
Synth nerds are among the most ardent gear fetishizers there are. Personally I'm very happy to have my gear finally reduced to a laptop and a set of headphones.
I would assume Google isn’t just gonna try to start needless fights with Facebook’s lawyers, so it’s likely legal.
Suppose you had a particular debt, denominated in currency A, owed at the end of the year. Would you want to hold some amount of currency A throughout the year to ensure you could pay that debt? I suppose you could argue that you'd buy some currency swaps or somesuch, but most people would just hold that currency.

Remember the Asian Financial Crisis, when a bunch of the "tigers" had loans denominated in USD, Francs, etc., and then there was a big capital outflow, tanking their local currencies against those debts? People will want to make sure they don't float against the currency they owe.
> We’re finally at a point where people who played with Nintendo’s characters as children are playing with those same characters with their children. That longevity is special.

I'm the generation he's describing, and some of the best parts of my life have been on both sides of that interaction. Looking forward to being the grandparent.
What's the easiest, cheapest and legal way to convert Bitcoin into rub?
> As a side note, I think it's better to refer to the northern Irish as republicans and unionists

The reason I spoke of Catholics and Protestants is because there is a religious background question ("what religion you were raised in") on the Northern Ireland Census, and it is widely expected to flip in this year's census, and if not this year, then almost surely by the next census in 2031.

By contrast, the Northern Ireland Census doesn't directly ask about whether one identifies as "republican/nationalist" or "unionist". The closest thing it comes to that is the question of whether one identifies as British, Irish, Northern Irish, or some combination of those three. But it isn't clear how exactly the answers to that question map to the community divide.

Religious background doesn't exactly map to community affiliation, but it mostly does. One thing to keep in mind is the distinction between small-u unionism (pragmatic support for the continuation of the status quo) and Big-U Unionism (support for traditional Unionist symbols such as the Orange Order parades, 12th of July celebrations, etc) – a decent percentage of Catholics support the former, very few (if any) Catholics support the later. Likewise, there are some Protestants who would vote for Irish reunification but very many of those would not want to associate with traditional nationalist community symbols.

> The division lines might be the same but religious labels add irrelevant impactions.

I think, historically, the religious division did play a major role in the partition of Ireland in the early 1920s. Many unionists saw Unionism and Protestantism as going hand-in-hand. The Republican/Nationalist side placed less emphasis on religion – although the vast majority of Republicans/Nationalists were Catholics, there was a small Protestant minority among them. Now, as the decades have passed, with continuing secularisation, religion is less an issue than it used to be, but it still lurks in the background. The DUP was originally strongly linked to the Free Presbyterian Church, although the DUP has de-emphasised the religious linkage as time goes by. Their traditionalist moral stances (anti-abortion, anti-LGBT rights, etc) have even won them the support of the ultra-conservative end of Northern Irish Catholicism, but that's only about 2% of the electorate. Still more than the number of Protestants voting for Sinn Fein or SDLP.
Happy new year! Won't be hard to have a better one this time :)
Could it be hawking radiation from free-floating black holes?
RIP. Definitely one of my favorite artists.
Microsoft fired their Quality Assurance staff, hence the regressions in reliability: https://www.ghacks.net/2019/09/23/former-microsoft-employee-...
If people are curious about Talley's civil case, this should provide a place to get updates - or at least the case number to look on your own. https://www.docketbird.com/court-cases/Talley-v-USA-et-al/co...

Legal back-and-forth continues as of 12/14/2020
Astronomical radio images are naturally overwhelmingly sharper than optical images, because radio telescopes today can have much larger apertures than optical telescopes.

The best-resolution optical images are made with two large telescopes and a temperature-controlled optical fiber from each one, arranged to interfere optically, yielding an image resolution equivalent to a mirror the size of the distance between the telescopes as the visual field is scanned on each simultaneously to sample pixels of the image, in sequence.

The electromagnetic interference operation must be conducted purely optically because we are not equipped to sample and record time-registered electromagnetic signals at 1 trillion samples per second. (Yet. It is possible in principle, it just hasn't been achieved.)

In contrast, output from radio telescopes can be sampled and recorded with careful time registration, and the samples interfered numerically, so signals from radio telescopes thousands of miles apart can be treated together, yielding images of overwhelmingly finer detail. Even when using just a single radio telescope, a reflector dish can be made much larger than any practical earthbound optical mirror.

So, if a radio-telescope image is indistinct, it is likely that the object imaged is itself indistinct.

The recent image of a black-hole accretion disc was composed from radio-telescope traces. No optical treatment could produce an image of such resolution.
similar is the "return the shopping trolley" thing - identified as almost uniquely representing an act demonstrating commitment to community. Not returning the shopping trolley to the designated space is not punished. But if enough people don't return their trolleys then the whole system breaks down and the car park becomes unusable.

waits for American to suggest shooting the shopping trolley to solve the problem
The situation reminds me a bit of Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. It's a great bit of political philosophy where he argues pretty convincingly that an anarchist society cannot exist for any appreciable length of time. Because the arrangement is fundamentally unstable, and will inevitably be replaced by certain minimal set of social mechanisms in response to some basic social forces. Those mechanisms are, collectively, things that we recognize as basic features of government, such as police and taxation.

Bitcoin strikes me as an experiment to see if the same kind of thing happens in economics. It would seem that it does.
Sounds like it's straight out of a "falsehoods programmers believe about names" article. I was going to pose my opinion on the topic, then realised WP being WP, that horse has already been flogged by committee.
I wrote about CompatTelRunner partly because Billy O'Neal (@malwareminigun) was complaining about it on Twitter. Fun trivia: there are a lot of source path strings in the code of both CompatTelRunner and Appraiser. There are "enterprise mode" and "indicator generation mode" in Appraiser as well that MS don't document and you can easily find out that they exist by using these strings.
Logseq – The Open-Source Note Taking App
are acai berries actually good for you? I remember a period of time when they were like the most scammy product ever and ads for them were everywhere online
Install irfanview and compare.
I'm still sticking to my original 'resolution' of not having any "New Years Resolutions" and preparing for 2030. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21921521
I just checked, it seems that WU charges approximately 1% for transfers relative to the nominal exchange rate.

I don't transfer money much, but superficially that doesn't seem too expensive considering the volatility risk to WU due to fluctuating exchange rates combined with the overheads of regulatory requirements.

It seems to me that Bitcoin is only as cheap as it is because it sidesteps those regulatory overheads. So it's great, I suppose, as long as everyone is fine with it being used to launder money from human trafficking, the drug trade, corruption, or whatever...
Developers model and reproduce this drift in software synthesizers because it's pleasing to the ear of many...
I get it. But this is the antithesis of Duty.
The cabal that runs CPython ignores both standardization, the standard library and interop with other implementations.

PyPy shouldn't be the new default, but neither should be CPython.
Interestingly, the phase diagrams look a lot like the diagrams for controlling a charge-coupled-device (CCD) image sensor. While CCD's are being supplanted by CMOS sensors, they still have some specialized applications.
My mom never believed in those issues. And even if she did, I have severe doubts that those issues would have had an effect on my personal family life.

I've got creationist family members. I've got cousins who believe that washing their hair is unhealthy and have greasy, smelly hair. Vegetarian cousins. Etc. etc. Lots of silly issues I don't agree with but frankly, have no effect on our lives aside from maybe an idle curiosity. So I really don't care that they disagree with me.

This COVID thing, it affects us all.
javascript is required, you probably have it disabled (3rd party scripts).
My prediction is this will be less useful than twitter results in Google search. Btw, I like the direction of tiktok and ig videos being less walled garden. One thing I like about tiktok is that by default creators allow downloading the videos. There is so such option for youtube.
I once attended a music festival where they banned attendees from bringing in telephoto lenses. Trouble was, they didn't specify it as "35mm-equivalent", so my PowerShot SX40 was allowed in - at 840 mm equivalent for the highest zoom. It was funny, kinda spurred me to get some nice closeups of artists performing.
Why is this even here? Are we reddit now?
I suspect you could take a lot less cash out of crypto without collapsing the market.
You are sad when others exercise the right you want for yourself.

What a great comment - it really shows true nature of collectivists.
Show HN: Playlist-ify tweets or a custom message
I think those laws might already exist, imho anonymous mixing could be prosecuted under the relevant money laundering laws.
A more close example is how there's a Tweet carousel that can sometimes show up. I personally find that very useful. This is no different from that.
Actually successful later on with the DMCA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzar....
Mine was Hoe Cakes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNB5eIiIsUc) at #4.

I was a little surprised how much DOOM I listened to on Spotify in 2020. I two tracks from MM...FOOD in my top 20 (the other was Guinnesses (feat. Angelika & 4ize) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MW4d-Cp19E), and some collaborations (J Dilla, Avalanches/Danny Brown) farther down the list.

This is sad. I didn't even know his real name (Daniel Dumile), nor that he was actually British (mostly raised in NY). Weird to mourn the passing of someone you've never met and barely knew anything about, but he was only 49. Like a friend of mine once said in response to another artist's death: "something that brought me joy has disappeared from this world." He will be missed.
I don't have kids, but my nephew is 6, and I love playing Mario games together with him. I just love seeing the same type of joy in his eyes playing Super Mario Odyssey that I had playing Super Mario Bros 3 as a kid.
That must have been one expensive phone.
Last I looked, bitcoin p2p connections are not encrypted by default, so your ISP/government can see any transactions you initiate yourself. I implored the bitcoin developers to add this functionality about five or six years ago for this exact reason.

That said, someone who isn't in a position to monitor the L2 network can't know if you are initiating a transaction or simply rebroadcasting it.
If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we bury reposts as duplicates. After a year (or so), it's fine, and that's why you're seeing links to previous discussions.

This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.