skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I 100% agree on Bitcoin.

But for Ethereum transitioning to Eth 2.0, can't that be debatable? Because ETH 2.0, uses a proof of stake, rather than roof of work?
if a non mining node decides a block is invalid it will fork onto its own chain. If no mining nodes start mining on this forked chain then the original node is left on a chain where no transactions can be processed.

Non-mining nodes have no power or influence over the networks state. It is the mining nodes who decide which chain lives and which chain dies.
Would proof-of-stake systems ever have been developed if proof-of-work systems didn't come around first to build widespread trust in cryptocurrencies?

If not, then you could say that the energy consumed up til now by proof-of-work systems was essential to the development of proof-of-stake systems.

I think that OP is strawmanning Bitcoin as it exists today into being the end goal of all cryptocurrency technology when really it's just the very first stepping stone.
What is a bitcoin "app"? For me it is useful enough that I can buy fancy designer drugs online with it.
The article opens with several references, from 1915 all the way to 1949, in which Einstein reports Hume's influence on him and says that without Hume it's possible he would never have come up with relativity. That's as solid evidence of a link as could exist. More importantly, though, this material is interesting and worth discussing rather than dismissing.

(That's in the site guidelines, by the way: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
I'd like to see the estimates in the coming months. Lots of people report exchanges having less and less bitcoins, allegedly due to people storing their wealth and not being interested by transactions anymore. I may be naive but it could mean the network will become underutilized for a little whiel.
Your solution to nationalism is a government you cannot flee from. At least with two states if one mistreats you it is possible to flee.
Well, actually it is a bit more complicated than just God having a (or more than one) son:

„The Christian doctrine of the Trinity […] holds that God is one God, but three coeternal and consubstantial persons: the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit. The three persons are distinct, yet are one ‚substance, essence or nature‘. In this context, a ‚nature‘ is what one is, whereas a ‚person‘ is who one is“, from [0] where you can also read a lot more about it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity
> The engineering that went into this block was probably in the thousands of person-hours and involved some pretty rare engineering skills.

It’s probably in the tens of thousands - one person working on it by themselves for a year gets you to 2000 hours.
Researchers rewind the clock to calculate age and site of supernova blast
The fact that you don’t offer a technical description of your application, and the fact that “Twisted Apps LLC“ does not have a credible online presence, does not inspire confidence in your security.
Pigovian tax[0].

Excerpt:

>A Pigovian tax (also spelled Pigouvian tax) is a tax on any market activity that generates negative externalities (costs not included in the market price). The tax is intended to correct an undesirable or inefficient market outcome (a market failure), and does so by being set equal to the external marginal cost of the negative externalities.

- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax
Is the problem is the surveillance or the lack of consent?

Amazon had a problem where they charge employees for the spent doing bag searches. If rather be video-recorded (temporarily) than wait in a bag searches line.

Also bag-searches seem more invasive than video.
I used to worry about this question too. But how much energy has mining gold cost? Was it worth it? Will bitcoin have a similar impact? I imagine the answer is more, yes, and yes.
You mean this?

> there is no time or culture in the history of the world where humans have not been in contact with some kind of "otherworldly" intelligence.

If so, I'm just pointing out that communication with other non-human beings is common to all human cultures. Every culture has people who communicate with angels or spirits or people from the sky or under the ground or some other realm, sometimes those folks are central to the culture, other times they are peripheral. I think our modern rational materialist fundamentalists are the first to seriously posit the idea that humans are strictly alone in the Universe.
The Buy Nothing Project
Can you elaborate more on what would be a useful app in terms of Bitcoin?

Or do you mean like an educational tool helping teach how/why/what is bitcoin/blockchain?
2021 is the year of the Sea Shanty!
For DSSS demod, my guess is a 20 tap match filter designed from a resampled RRC filtered barker sequence. Haven’t looked at the VHDL, but that’s how I’d do it.
I definitely second these comments. The app that I maintain at work started with Angular 5. We're now on Angular 11, but upgrades have never been an issue!
I also like how Angular can be quite easy to get started with when simply using two-way data binding without rxjs or some complicated state management library.
Not every company has access to devs who are proficient in reactive state management and functional programming. Angular work surprisingly well for the average developer.
An index measuring country stability finds the U.S. dropping
What do you mean? Laws are different in Europe. "Harm" isn't the question, policy is.
There's been a number of articles and papers on this topic, but I've yet to see one that attempted to look at the energy mix miners use.

It's virtually entirely renewables, hydro, wind, solar.

Bitcoin mining is a perfectly elastic operation, one of the only energy consumers that will turn off when rates are high.
When I was a kid, me and a friend would be amazed at a 25,000 dollar 1 TB multi hd array.

We couldn’t imagine how anyone would ever need so much space.
Did you use checkbox labels with it? I like the technique, but am concerned about accessibility.
But at that point your site is more an application than content
> A single bitcoin transaction alone consumes 621 KWh

That sounds like a lot, but it's about $10 worth of electricity for the miners. Another comparison might be that that's about how much electricity it takes to smelt 4kg of aluminum. I don't think it's meaningful to think in terms of "waste" wrt energy consumption any more than gold mining is "waste". Most of the energy generating capacity would not have been turned on if it wasn't going to be used for mining bitcoin.

The only useful framing is in terms of externalities, but it turns out the cheapest forms of energy generation (underutilised hydro and solar in china) tend to be zero carbon. Using energy isn't bad, emitting carbon is bad.
Upvoting so HN could see this nonsense. Such claims must be backed by a peer reviewed paper with authors and data.
Amusingly, my local newspaper's paywall only works with JS enabled. Disable it, and you can read everything unencumbered.
Clearly it is not, e-Ink, 3d printing, VR, and hosts of other technology has been held back not advanced because of patents

Now that is not to say I would advocate for complete removal of the patent systems but I do think Compulsory FRAND style licensing should be a requirement of obtaining a patent

Your distinction between Copyright and Patent is also strang as the suffer from the same flaw so it seems your only justification is that you believe 20 years is "reasonable" but Life is not

I think both are unreasonable, I would personally like to see both dropped to 10 years, or some compromise where you get 2-3 years exclusive use of the creation then have some kind of compulsory license where the creator is compensated but can not with hold the creation for 20 years (with some kind of scheme that the license be fair and equitable)
This guy sells a book. But it comes with a DVD so I can't read it.
What about a carbon tax on... well, carbon!! I mean, carbon extraction. Carbon, the thing that pollutes in so many ways, so more terrible ways than just electricity generation?

Let's start with the bad things first. Then the others. Then the others. And then, finally, we can talk about Bitcoin.

</rant>
jails are great, coincidentally I started using them too with Freenas (now Truenas). The only big disadvantage is that the FreeBSD ports are less uptodate than docker (Linux).
I wonder what other editors allow to dynamically extend/adapt much about anything.

I remember trying turbo pascal 7.0 on dosbox. I was shocked by how brilliant that tiny program was for its era. So light, so packed with features, so fast. Yet at the first editing ergonomic need I had, I was stuck.. my brain couldn't stop thinking .. 'this would already have been fixed in emacs'.
Yes, I'm talking about "within a lifetime" and with feedback/observable results. As it is, that kind of colonization would mean nothing to Earthers.

10-20 generations and it will most likely be all but forgotten. Zero impact on our solar system. Might as well be a story in a videogame.

Perhaps it would be worth it if we worked on extending our lifespans first.
the website requires providing personal data including an email address to access the full report.

I recommend using an email @cockroachlabs.com so that they can get spammed by their own marketing bs (besides the report).

You will be directed to the download page anyway.
Ask HN: Will data sharing destory human freedom?
I rarely use Facebook, but can confirm too. The older version wasn't great either.
The US has an interesting problem right now. Wild hogs are wreaking utter havoc and we don't have effective means to control their population. I'm fairly confident that humans will win that battle. But what if we nuked population centers? Most of the hogs would survive, but only a fraction of the humans. Who would win out in the decades to come? Hogs can eat all sorts of roughage, survive out in the elements, etc., humans are much more dependant on their technology. Want crops? Sorry, hogs ate 'em. Wanna eat hogs? They're smart, and after your ammo stores are depleted, you're back to the stone age.

But the question isn't mere survival -- can intelligent life thrive to the point where we can achieve interstellar travel?
The amount of power the Bitcoin network uses is proportional to the number of miners, independent of the number of transactions. it is designed to have one block per ten minutes and adjusts the "difficulty" to match. As long as the price of Bitcoin keeps going up, I can't imagine mining will become less popular.
I often wonder if there is anything else in society that could scale in a similar way to moores law.

Is there anything else we could use a lithographic-like process to make massive numbers of very cheaply, yet still find buyers for?

Floors of a modern skyscraper are nearly that - they're made with moulds that get reused again and again on every floor. But to get decent scaling, you really need to make instances in at least 2, and preferably 3 dimensions in one go.

We've already done it with things like the printing press that can churn out books very cheaply - but it turns out that we've now reached the limit of the numbers of books people want.

Humans also reproduce exponentially - with a sufficiently high birth rate, numbers of people can rapidly grow. One needs enough space to support that growth, and we are sadly lacking in that... Perhaps Mars will allow us to practice our fast-scaling of civilization?
Interesting premise, but as reported maybe lacks some mechanisms? The foot soldiers that are being recruited and deployed in the conflict seem to be from different pools too.

If the elites are using the non-elite as their proxies for combat, then the non-elite (in terms of education and economy, anyway) have a lot of common ground against the elites that pit them against each other.

Reflected a bit by Neil Young in his comments regarding Jan 6.
At least in case of Germany, the article presents their approach:

"Germany’s federal and regional data protection authorities have been keen to focus on steering organizations away from “common” privacy violations under the GDPR—such as video monitoring, cold-calling, etc.—rather than pursuing record fines. Regulators feel such an approach creates a greater understanding of what privacy means and how the GDPR impacts people and work on a day-to-day basis."

I imagine similar thinking applies in other EU countries. Though I sure wish they'd deal with the telemarketers and websites with GDPR-non-compliant GDPR forms already!
My understanding is that the index relies on estimates of what homeowners would pay in rent for equivalent housing.

If you think longtime homeowners are paying less, then substituting equivalent rent should push the CPI rate of inflation to be higher than the genuine rate. An overestimate.

So you think correctly calculated inflation is less than the CPI says?

I thought everybody who thinks it is inaccurate thinks it is an underestimate, that the government is covering up inflation being rather high.

Also, if they just didn't survey non-renters, then the result would not include how much homeowners spend on, say, hamburgers or whatever.
Legal Templates for Startups and Entreprenuers
Pickagem released the first pack of 6 ready to use Legal Templates startups. The pack includes API License Agreement, Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policy & Cookies, Sale & Purchase Agreement, Work Contract, Internet Advertising Agreement. More docs coming soon.
> Cargo isn't just TOML, it's TOML, plus a build.rs script, written in Rust, for everything you can't express in the TOML.

Cargo is nice--until you have to coexist with something else that also wants to own the world of the build process.

And that build.rs script causes a LOT of heartburn when your needs get larger or you need repeatable builds.

I don't know what the right answer is, but cargo is exactly the kind of system you describe that you have to start working around when you have more sophisticated needs.
There was a rumour 3 weeks ago that Apple was "Researching Keyboards With Adaptive Displays on Each Key":

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/12/29/apple-researching-keybo...
Peter Turchin: The Magnetism of Mathematical History
Firstly 0.05% I think. Secondly, if you just compare to electricity output (25,000) you get to 0.3%, which puts it ahead of many countries.
Why do they consider Square and Paypal dirty companies? Do they support Bitcoin?
> The tables might have 500 rpm, 1000rpm, etc cells with timing values, but when you log the ECU you do not see big jumps in timing at those cutoff points.

Because in the old days you had little memory to work with, 32kb for PROGRAM(Flash) and 2kb for DATA(RAM), so you'd store a few points in your table and use a linear interpolation function for the rest. Now, because silicon is cheap, even the chip controlling your headlights has 1MB of PROGRAM memory or more and could run DOOM but instead of fancy algos it's used to store all AutoSar libraries it needs for networking and certification.
Huh, I detect sarcasm. Did the words "jerks" and "idiots" really upset your sensitive nature that much? Or was it the labeling the outgoing president who tried to cause an insurrection as "mentally ill"?

I'm going to have to say, that's about as respectful as one can get on this topic without ignoring reality. Unless you think the rioters were "wonderful and intelligent" and that the president's obvious sociopathic narcissism isn't a sign of severe mental illness.
> ... or at least it’s certainly not making an obvious attempt to differentiate.

It does not need to.

Yelling "Fire!" in a cinema hall does not need to be accompanied by precise instructions as to where said fire is burning. It's a warning, not a debate.
I second that. Stdlib is great to get a feel how the language works. Some small programs are always the best, if they are written by a good programmer. A cli game i study right now but in Rust. A small program with a lot of logic, but without all the graphics distractions.

https://github.com/VladimirMarkelov/solkit
And on every headline about an SV company being investigated there are complaints that they are unfairly targeting them and not do enough about local companies.

Big companies are investigated, but a) for more nebulous cases the processes take longer, b) rules to avoid parallel investigations in many places also apply to the tech companies, which takes time for international coordination and somewhat restricts local agencies from acting against them (which is a bit of a loophole, or at least delays it further - see the various Schrems cases against Ireland), c) Whatsapp/Facebook have backed off from some things in Europe already due to previous investigations and agreements around the aquisition.

Pretty much everyhwere, the privacy agencies are working on extremely limited resources, and can not address everything at once. (Yes, this is a problem)
Totally agree. One of the banks I bank with has a fully interactive JS application with no reloads. It's super smooth to interact with and makes the experience amazing.

I also bank with another bank that does full-page reloads and it's a huge pain. And it's frustrating when I have to do something because of how slow it is comparatively.
Ask HN: Should you be loyal to a company/job?
In my experience the answer is a resounding no, but curious to know if anyone sees it differently.
"Wastes" I don't think you are using that word correctly. Would you say that all the electricity used by Chase bank is "wasted". What an absolutely nonsensical use if the word.

Bitcoin USES electricity to secure financial transactions. Just because YOU think those particular financial transactions are being over valued does not mean resources were wasted to make them. Really, lol!
Related from 5 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25742276
Not a GCP user myself, but I've read a lot of stories about GCP deprecating products at a very fast rates (as google does with the general public).

I don't know if I'd be okay with this? Once a project is done I wouldn't want to do any re-engineering that's not strictly needed (and outside general maintenance).
This ignores some forms of religion. A fairly old cross national system. Complete with is own set of problems.
Iranian government is mining bitcoin and causing countrywide power shortages. It's also burning mazut in power plants and polluting the environment. Currently 8% of the world's bitcoin are mined in Iran (which has 1% of the world's population and 0.5% of world's GDP).
I don't know if it's behalf of China or not yet but this must be stopped.
The average transaction costs around $16 USD. I'm not sure what you mean by the network becoming underutilized but bitcoin's tiny transaction throughput is in high demand.

Also what do you mean by "exchanges having less and less bitcoin" and what are you basing that on? Most people unfortunately don't transfer what they have out of exchanges in the first place, even less so with transaction costs being enormous.
Only a quite small number of the Greek pantheon have Indo-European forebears and were brought to Greece with the expansion of the Indo-European languages from the Pontic Steppes. Most of the Greek deities derive from the non-Indo-European autochthonous culture of Greece, or from interaction with the Greeks’ neighbors in Anatolian. Your own linked article emphasizes this:

"Despite the popularity of Greek mythology in western culture, Greek mythology is generally seen as having little importance in comparative mythology due to the heavy influence of Pre-Greek and Near Eastern cultures, which overwhelms what little Indo-European material can be extracted from it."
No, office cannot have cameras (in Germany).

The legal framework is rather easy (and hasn't changed with GDPR, as far as I can tell): video surveillance is generally illegal. There are specific circumstances where it is legal, and those tend to require two things:

- there needs to be some "risk" that is higher than usual, and where video surveillance can make a difference.

- it's extremely hard to justify surveillance of spaces where people regularly spend long amounts of time, such as their workplace.

Generic offices fail both tests: what, exactly, are you looking for? Stapler thefts? And, at the same time, the intrusion is rather is far more significant than, say, a public transit station that you pass through.
You've just given two bad examples, contrasted with one good example, to prove your point. Pick a good example of a contextual ad and a bad example of a personalised ad (there are many) and the proof is reversed.
Coal was burnt to get to our current level of industrialisation. A lot of steel for wind turbines was smelted with coke. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to find better ways and get rid of the old polluting methods.

And no, I'm not strawmanning to get rid of all cryptocurrencies. I'm naming a concrete problem with a part of them (the older, legacy, proof-of-work ones) that needs to be corrected by changing to better ones. That your investments might suffer is tragic of course. But the same goes for all the coal miners...
Beyond Me: Insights from a Professional Volunteer
If you want, that doesn’t change the fact that business is almost entirely based on communicating between humans.

Communication with coworkers, customers, investors, regulators, partners, etc. One of the main reason people interact and communicate with humans that’s aren’t their close circle is for business
It makes me wonder: in some centuries from now (assuming humanity is still largely intact), will most people stop caring about the land mass they're born on and perhaps deliberately join a powerful organization that largely takes the place of a national identity? Kind of like MMORPG "guilds" - deeper than a company, and more voluntary than a nation. Slate Star Codex's Archipelago concept might also be of interest here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic...

If this ever does happen, how might in-group favoritism and out-group hostility change on average? I think people voluntarily self-organizing based on their preferences and principles is definitely preferable to something arbitrary foisted upon you at birth, and of course tribalism will always exist in almost any situation, but there are some interesting trade-offs to think about here.

What are the odds a hypothetical future without nationalism leads to a form of tribalism that's riskier than nationalistic tribalism? People may feel a deeper identity connection to something they've actively joined for philosophical and sociological reasons, rather than due to their GPS coordinates or what their parents believe. There could be something like (cold or hot) religious wars, except with a ton of different religions forming and changing all the time, and based on differing principles and practices instead of differing supernatural beliefs.
Tell HN: Facebook just blocked seeing public company pages without login
> Especially because a full-color display uses numerous full-page refreshes to achieve all colours which are really jarring.

Can confirm - I have a Kaleido based e-reader and whilst I do like that book covers are in colour, scrolling through even a small library is jank central due to the multiple refreshes.
Like all the other claims about bitcoin?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_application
Lisa Su interview https://www.anandtech.com/show/16409/amd-ceo-dr-lisa-su-inte...
The printed dot in a CMYK raster doesn't mix pigments either!
3Most Popular New Year’s Resolutions 2021 and How to Keep Them
We've never had one where reliable birth control was available, so there is no data.
> The network produces 11.27 kilotons of waste annually or 96 grams of electronic waste per transaction. This is the equivalent annual e-waste as several small countries and equivalent to the waste of 482,456 people living at the German standard