skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I am also skeptical of the parent comment's quotes. The Euro is still backed by a centralized state(s) which does indeed have a monopoly on violence and require huge amounts of resources to maintain legitimacy. Crypto currencies demonstrably do not need these kind of resources. The rest of what people preach about crypto might be Bullshit, in a strict sense, but they are right about the anarchism thing.
Excellent doodad.
> It is impossible to regulate and tax miners; they live in various countries and in some it is impossible to apply such regulations, if some countries will do it then minim will move to other places.

Other countries can sanction them until they figure out how to apply such regulations. This isn't unique to PoW; it happens for other such dangerous pollutants as well (like CFC emissions).

> When you have an industry, you get a product that you can use. Mining energy consumption is just about how hard to make the mining, not a real limitation like in industry. It is like "let's make car building 3 times more energy consuming".

Energy usage and product/market fit are both irrelevant to this discussion. What is important is the pollution PoW creates. If we can get a global handle on that (along with basically every other energy-intense industry), then it hardly matters that the energy is used for PoW. The point is to not pollute.

> No, there is no misdirected anger, there are good reasons.

You may not think Bitcoin has a right to exist, but it's not up to you, and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. Love it or hate it, we're going to be living with it for likely a long, long time, so we might as well figure out a way to get a handle on the pollution it could cause.
He said he is using the laptop of his secretary.
The whole "Cryptographically securing your currency is wasteful, you should fold proteins!" talking point has popped up several times over the years, despite the fact that it is silly to complain about when considered in relation to the present solution.

> Whataboutism arguments regarding traditional currencies and the financial sector are a completely absurd response. Yes, a real currency like the Euro and by proxy the Eurozone absolutely emits more CO2 than bitcoin.

lol, and there it is.

I've never seen such a concerted effort to hammer this misinformation into peoples heads as I have for the last few days. Like I said, the concern has been raised and addressed before, but this volume of messaging is new.
‘A Game Changer’: Drug Brings Weight Loss in Patients with Obesity
The author clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Bitcoin is an attempt to establish hard money.
An off-topic segue since Stephen Diehl is being linked... Does anyone know if he plans to finish his exotic programming ideas series? He was suppose to do one every week, but stopped with three left in early December. I quite enjoyed the series, and was hoping he'd get around to the remainder.
If there were _zero_ transactions, Bitcoin would take the same amount of energy. The proof-of-work calculation is _completely decoupled_ from how many transactions there are.
Hey! Thanks for the positive feedback! Moderation is a key topic for discourse.fm. As the name suggests, it's a place to come freely discuss ideas without fear of being kicked out for simply having different opinions. Hence, we're going for "decentralized moderation" (i.e. no one is in control, not even the creator of the rooms). Obviously we'll have to implement some mechanism to protect against ill-willed users, but what exactly that'll look like is yet to be seen.
The are fundamental differences to all of those things versus Bitcoin, and lots of really good sources of information about why they are different.

It doesn’t matter if there are a finite supply of integers. I’m guessing you are alluding to being able to “print more Bitcoin” by moving decimal places or changing code or some such. That’s probably not going to happen, since you’d have to convince 51% of Bitcoin holders to dilute their own stake, since that’s how the consensus algorithm works. And if you don’t, we’ll then you have a fork, and as we’ve seen with Bitcoin cash etc, those typically don’t hold value, because fundamentally the value of a store of wealth is that everyone agrees that it’s a store of wealth.

No one ever agreed or assumed beanie babies or tulips were stores of wealth. Those were speculative bubbles based on the assumption that tomorrow you could sell it for more.

Bitcoin doesn’t need to be worth more tomorrow to make it valuable. It simply needs to hold wealth in a convenient, transferable, counterfeit proof manner that’s also not easily manipulated. And it does all of those things very very well. Ethereum likewise stores value, and also permits useful decentralized finance systems that also provide for storage and transfer of wealth.

If you told dollar holders 100 years ago, that the money in their pocket would only be good based on the good faith of the US Federal Reserve they’d look at you cock eyed, because back then the dollar was gold backed. To the average joe, that gave them confidence in its value.

And don’t get me wrong I’m not a gold bug that thinks we should go back to the gold standard. Just the opposite. Instead what the US did was brilliant. They simply said “trust” “believe” that the dollar is valuable and will remain valuable.

And it’s been incredibly successful, again because it comes down to faith in the ability to hold wealth and have others respond in kind when transferring that asset.

So do you believe the US dollar will hold value over the next 20 years? If you base it on the word of the government then that’s not as different as the the word of millions of Bitcoin miners. (Democratic consensus) If you base it instead on the value of the underlying economy using the dollar as a wealth exchange medium, well then again, Bitcoin currently does 87 billion USD worth of transactions per day.

So it should be pretty clear that it’s incredibly different than tulips or beanie babies. If it’s not clear, I’d research a little more about the concepts of wealth historically, along with macro economics and monetary policies the world over.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Store_of_value

If you think Bitcoin is an odd thing to believe in to store value and wealth, check out this island that uses giant stones...

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/02/15/131934618/the-...
You can receive encrypted messages and store them while locked. You only need the key material when reading the messages, which then uses the apps unlock pin to retrieve the key material from the Secure Enclave.

Quite how Signal deals with notifications I’m not sure, perhaps your right and the encryption key s persistent while the app is in the background so it can show you the sender and message on the Lock Screen? But it doesn’t _have_ to be that way. Wickr (which I trust way less than Signal) seems to at least have its UI set up to imply that’s what it’s doing.
I'm not sure if you got downvoted because humor isn't appreciated on HN or because your joke was bad / not accurate.
This is a very nice and thorough write-up. Frankly, I would've dropped IE support altogether, that browser has been dead a long long time. No need to futz with gzip and base64, just fetch the wasm, engines optimize for the common path.
1. The post I was replying to was about how Windows was great.

2. Do you actually run linux/bsd as your only desktop operating system, with no binary blob drivers? Because otherwise, you still don't own your computer.
Yes, I think it's perfect.
The dam project is causing a lot of heartburn, so you weren't far off either...
There absolutely is. Generally not in the US. I have contributed to high quality education research personally (as IT support).
The Longer Telegram
You couldn't be more wrong, even the people complain about this made up problem will admit it when pressed. Follow the link and see for yourself.
Thank you! Appreciate the kind words :)
If you go through the free signup flow we currently offer a really special price. I tried to make the price comparable to just 1 single service (sometimes two). For example you may already be using Unbounce for Landing Pages paying $80+/mo and this is a steal. Plus you might end up comparing their Google page speed of 54 to our 99.

Even if you are just using Zapier + Jotform you are broaching our price with 10x the functionality/value.

I think we can price aggressively one on one with some of the single services. Without needing a hodgepodge of subscriptions! I do agree with you the on the all-in-one psychology aspect. We many end up making different paths into the service with each path focusing on just a single need.

Appreciate the great feedback!
Impressive work, and a very nice speedup.

Just a PSA, if you including a .wasm binary in your app, especially if it is large, be sure to request it separately as a .wasm (with MIME type "application/wasm", as your browser will cache the compiled code along with the original bytes in its HTTP cache, so you'll get lightning fast startup.
This post promotes Snikket, a chat app built on top of XMPP. It talks a lot about decentralization and protocol development, but I doubt it will be able to best Matrix in this regard. Matrix has bridges connecting it to other apps like Facebook Messenger.

XMPP, meanwhile, seems to have been shuffling along slowly for 20 years without many users or features that appeal to a mass audience (GIFs, etc). So while Matrix could potentially (or already does) link up with Signal, this app doesn't seem like it could get traction/expand because of the dubious base that it stands on.
Changing SQL column types without rewriting every row in the table
> It reeks of entitlement.

Some company just expecting free work comes closer to the definition of "entitlement", in my opinion.

> Who wouldn't want to do this? Sure, it's stressful and it takes time, but it's also fun. You get to talk about yourself! That's everyone's favorite subject.

I wouldn't, so there's that. And, mind you, I don't even consider myself particularly introverted, so I highly doubt that I'm the single exception to what you said. So what I'm trying to say is that one can't assume that one's sensibilities are shared by everyone else.

> someone who just walked in off the street.

Not only had the author already been through a process, the fact that there was a recruiter involved makes it seem to me that the company (or the recruiter) contacted him, not viceversa. So it doesn't seem like he "just walked off the street".
> But it's something that could, in theory, be regulated if we find the will to do so.

Oh definitely we can, I just don't expect it to be realistic. Similar to being a tax haven, it's profitable for some countries to not make something illegal such that the people will go there to do it and pay only a small tax (or, in this case, be allowed to do it at all). Other countries can put pressure etc., but it would take time we don't have. Hence my alternative idea of making it illegal to use and forcing people to use alternatives, rather than to require it to use a precious resource (renewable energy).

Then again, making proof of work illegal to use seems like it would be too easy for a non-trivial part of the population to start screaming that the tinfoil hats were right.

> Why not impose a global carbon tax on all goods and services known to produce pollution?

Full agree. I genuinely don't know why we're not already doing that. Well, I mean, corruption, fear of change.. lots of things, but nothing fundamental. Not as if not literally everyone realizes that we will need to start with this. And I understand that some industries are so dependent on it that your economy collapses if you, from one day to the next, impose a tax equal to the real environmental damage done. People wouldn't get around, steel would cost more than gold, we can't build wind turbines anymore because they're made out of unobtainium (aka steel), etc. But we all know we need to get there anyway, and with the capitalistic system we have, well, the super fucking easiest way is to just start with a low carbon tax that increases to "real environmental damage" in <target_year_for_climate_neutral>. Probably an exponential curve to give companies some time to build out and use alternatives, but we do need to get there, everyone knows it (yes, also the politicians, and the delusional ones aren't in enough power to use that as an excuse), but we're not doing it.

> My original point was to channel focus on what matters

I suppose I agree with that. I am just frustrated with people invested in Bitcoin, people that are otherwise rational, waylaying logical arguments because they subconsciously don't want it to be true. It's clear as day, why can't we just stop this madness...

In general you're right of course, universal carbon tax would seem like it solves most things in one go instead of trying to fight a lot of individual battles for bitcoin, coal plants, and other individual things that produce CO2 or take renewable energy away unnecessarily.
Putin’s Once-Scorned Vaccine Now Favorite in Pandemic Fight
I'm not a supply chain expert, but just envisioning that export controls have been and will be getting a lot more challenging going forward. Not to mention higher risk at stuff getting held up due to other logistical challenges (i.e. bad weather, etc.) while doing the full roundtrip to Asia and back.

If there was chip production (CPU, memory, etc.) out of an Austin fab and LCD screen, battery and other material production in a special economic region in Mexico, seems like there could be a full 3-5 day reduction in the production.

Apple sells about 43 million iPhones in the US per year. Shipping 43 million of anything (i.e chips) to Asia only for it to be shipped back (as a finished product) to the US seems counter-productive?
Oddly, there are people out there who feel that exposing vicious government-employed predators is more important than preserving your blissful ignorance. At any rate, one nice thing about the internet is that nobody will force you to click the links, so you can easily maintain your happy-bubble if you so choose.
Twitter suspends more Indian accounts amid free speech debate
Not a lawyer, but I seriously doubt any prosecutor would bring a criminal case against a law enforcement officer whose access to a system was denied for being a law enforcement officer, and while there are some situations where one can make a civil claim under the CFAA, what legitimate damages could you show that an officer caused you by accessing your site in the furtherance of their duty? If someone actually tried to sue for this, it would be a very interesting case indeed.
The wording implies FB is running an A/B experiment where randomly selected 0.01% of their users get shown 10% less political content and a committee of highly paid statisticians will write a 50 pages summary of how this experiment would affect their ads revenue, should the experiment be increased to 0.05% of their users. A separate committee of highly paid execs will decide if they should proceed. If there's a hint of revenue drop, they'll quietly cancel the experiment and we won't hear about it.
According to the Snowden leaks, Apple's been a part of PRISM for quite some time.

Seems to me like the trial was a show for PR, and a win for the FBI because now a ton of people are under the impression that they can commit crimes without a trace if they have an iPhone.
Can you actually point out the misinformation?

This article is not proposing to 'waste energy' on folding proteins.

This article points out that other systems may also consume a lot of energy, but they give our societies a ton of value in return.
> it's a commonly held misconception spanning decades that cops must identify themselves if asked. I wonder where it originated.

Perhaps it comes from some of the loose laws that require police to make some attempt to announce themselves and their purpose in specific situations (i.e. when executing a search warrant where they don't have reason to believe announcing themselves would pose a risk to their well being)
WooCommerce 5.0 Released
It very much depends on what type of position the interview is for, IMO. If it's for a SWE position and the company is asking for a PowerPoint presentation about the SWE's background and past projects, that seems tangential at best and doesn't seem like the best use of interviewing time. But if by presentation we are talking "pull up some code you wrote and tell us what it does and why you coded it this way", I can understand that more for a SWE, and I think that would possibly be even better than a standard whiteboarding session (but it assumes that the candidate has some public code available they can talk about, and not everyone does).

OTOH, if it's for a position like a consultant or solutions engineer, which are positions where you are likely going to be giving PowerPoint presentations and training sessions to customers, then I think such a presentation during an interview is actually very useful, even though I personally hate doing them.
There are some pretty good YouTube videos on the subject, worth a search
I agree that wasting so much energy is not good. But it would be amusing, if we end up getting fusion energy sooner because someone makes a business case to mine bitcoins with the produced energy.
> edit: did i win the fastest comment to the bottom on hn? what do I get?

downvoted, apparently. As a Rails dev though, Crystal does look very promising, and as a Typescript dev, it has optional strong typing with a syntax that is much, much more appealing than RBS.
Modern FreeBSD is probably closer to Linux than it is to MacOS.
Twitter, Facebook, etc. seem a lot more personal to me where it's easy to get wrapped up in the minutia of other peoples' lives. In contrast, HN is a feed of articles with comments on the specific topic and strong moderation to keep it that way. The latter may be "social media" but not like the former.
This isn’t true, the reason devs use Electron is for market share not some design-usage principle.
I mean, what Microsoft did pales in comparison to Apple's standard business model. How many third party apps have been driven out of business by Apple's preferred first party copy? We still cannot run anything but Safari (or an older, less-featured, reskinned Safari) on iOS.

Anti-trust is a joke and holding Microsoft accountable for 1/10th of today's standard operating procedure was ridiculous.
Larry Flynt has died
> It had broken a big company who had then contacted Google directly about the business impact and it taught us a lesson about being careful.

How can normal users accomplish this same task?
The target audience seems to be enterprise developers, running JVM applications and needing an introduction to distributed computing. Very unlikely these sorts will jump on the BEAM-wagon.

But completely agree that it should be mentioned, in my view Erlang is probably the most elegant approach to the problem.
Exactly my problem. Poetry 1.1.0 through 1.1.4 (aka every release since Jul 2020) are broken on our private PyPI instance. If you maintain OSS python packages, poetry might be great for you, but it's apparent the maintainers aren't willing to support enterprise use, and I wish that was made clear to potential users.
That's awesome! Don't personally have funding, but I'm wondering what if anything is holding this back from being deployed more widely? Why aren't other companies pursuing this?
When I visited Kenya, people literally just burned their plastic trash in a pit on the side of the road.

So yeah, any form of reuse/recycling seems better than that.
If it was centralised, that's fine. Not everyone shares this decentralisaton fetish.
Like the blog post says, people have already made their minds up about whether or not Ruby is fast enough for them, and incremental speed upgrades, or even faster languages like Crystal that market themselves as Ruby-like are irrelevant in this decision process.

For the majority of us who use Ruby, we use Rails, and Rails is great. Crystal is irrelevant as a comparison to Ruby, because there is no Rails (I'm sure there's web frameworks, but they're not nearly as productive as Rails). Rails isn't perfect, and there's plenty of room for improvement, but switching languages and starting from scratch isn't the solution.

The biggest downside of Ruby compared to other languages (besides speed, but like I said, that doesn't matter here), is lack of static typing. That may or may not be a problem depending on your usecase.
Étoilé showed some signs of life recently. They've moved to GitHub since Gna! is dead now.
Unobstruct app on iOS does wonders for pages like that. Just a happy customer.
I am 100% sure this is way worse on reddit, that paradise of armchair experts.
The 'fnt preview' mode is amazing, reminds me of watching music videos in the terminal with blc and aalib or calib in the 2000s (Ascii Art Library or Colour Ascii Art Library).. and then decreasing the font size to get a better resolution. Love it.
Same old misinformed opinions 'ma energy', while feigning some kind of environmentally superiority. We have to get off Planet Earth! We need to reach Kardashev Type I before we start talking waste. The energy usage argument is a neoluddite position and will doom humanity to die on this rock stuck forever in some kind of mid 20th century malaise.

You could scream into the abyss, or you could enrich your future. Some people keep screaming, year after year, while others keep on building, earning, working and playing.
I guess the only thing you would gain then is the ability to have circular dependencies - or some other pattern nested in your application. Right?

That was super helpful - thanks for explaining!

I'm still lost as to what the advantage is other than a faster start-up time. What am I missing?
A comparison with cash would be completely arbitrary: bitcoin doesn't replace cash, so it only adds to the problem.
Absolute bs. Let's just say someone got my home address from Facebook, despite me following every possible safeguard against data being leaked, I find out it is leaked to some unscrupulous individuals. If say, no one has attacked me at my house yet due to this leak, it doesn't mean no one else can do it in the future. Assuming one can even find out what data is being leaked.
Yes let's create a Dyson Sphere to mine Bitcoin. Seems like a noble goal.

Hm...
There'd be 99 hacks and they missed just one.

I don't get what you are asking.
AWS Cloud9 visual source control integration for Git
It's also a financial weapon which looks to be slowly but inevitably sucking the whole world into a pyramid scheme. You can only grow exponentially so long before you run against limits of physics and something fractures. Well, maybe when Tether gets shut down it will unwind under the pressure of electric bills and taxes.
Amazon probably builds everything in house. Smaller shops rely more on open source tools like npm or Ruby gems.

I think there are supply chain attack vectors in those resources
Fair enough, but my point still remains. You need the key material any time the phone is unlocked. Because we are doing instant messaging that is going to be a lot more exposure time than with some sort of offline system.
The US government is functionally bound to the dollar, and its size is enough to guarantee the continued functioning of the dollar. On the other hand bitcoin is backed by speculators and criminals, hardly a stable foundation for a currency or commodity.
In the UK we have a rather unimaginative news diet of Covid-19, Brexit, lol-Trump, repeat ad nauseam.

One day our media will have to discover doing proper journalism - I think it will be quite a shock when the news stops writing itself. It's been like this for roughly five years (or 50, depending on how much wine I've drunk.)