skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apologies, I thought I was being clear. A payment system that lets people transfer unlimited amounts of value to 14x more people than SEPA (presuming internet access), without censorship, irreversibly, and effectively for free, has, it seems to me, substantial value.

Even if it's less useful than, say, access to SEPA, it'd have to be 14x less valuable to break even (again, presuming internet access available to everyone, which isn't a thing yet).
Is there only one transform option, or could you offer several? That might be a good way of satisfying those who want a very fancy looking image to others who want specific functionality (magnify certain portions of a window, etc).
Updates on our response to blocking orders from the Indian Government
"The sovereign grant was increased in 2017, from its previous level of 15%, to pay for extensive renovations at Buckingham Palace which are likely to run until 2027."
I think it was Bruce Schneir in the Cryptonomicon appendix (someone correct me if I'm wrong) who said something along the lines of "anyone can come up with a cipher that they couldn't imagine breaking, and then think it's unbreakable". That captures it so well.
A gas oven is 100% efficient, while a gas turbine is at most 60%.
How do you explain the reduction in poverty over the past one hundred years? It would seem to conflict with your proposed theory.
> I think that comparing Bitcoin energy consumption with a country (it used to be Chile, now Argentina), while technically correct, misses the big picture.

I think a comparison like that actually is the big picture.

Maybe your arguments point though to more nuance.
It would be more apt to comparing the cost of transacting Bitcoin to that of recycling gold instead of mining it, which is not zero, but is substantially less than mining and that's where again, Bitcoin takes another lump. Recycled gold is useful; it's a precious metal obviously and one immune to most forms of oxidation, so once reclaimed, it can be used again in the next generation of smartphones and what have you.

Gold is however undoubtedly a good comparison pick for Bitcoin; it's something with a few natural pros on it's side that's been hideously overvalued for largely irrational reasons. Like... this metal is advertised as the "right" basis to back currency but I also have some of it in nearly every gadget I own? Then how rare can it possibly be if a small amount comes in a $15 audio decoder for goodness sakes!?
Heat pumps are more than 100% efficient though, as they move heat energy, not create it
> Perhaps not all of it is entirely "wasted" though. I've largely been able to avoid heating this winter as a result of crypto mining.

I am telling myself the same thing when I play videogames. :-)
You're talking about a BTC bearer bond. Isn't that just what cash used to be? You've gone full circle.
I found you while researching how to verify a mask is good as an end-user, because I cannot get a good seal out of any of the six types of FFP2-masks I have tried. On the one hand, I've always been on the lookout for something similar. On the other hand, there are a few showstoppers that keep me from buying.

* Looks. Even if I can decide to look like the Reddit alien in a motorcycle helmet while everybody else is wearing an FFP2 mask, there is no way I can persuade my wife or kids. Would it be possible to make the exhaust pipe a bit more inconspicuous? E.g. inhale from the left cheek, exhale to the right cheek?

* Filtration efficiency and trust. There is a reason the FFP2/FFP3 standards test with 0.3um sized particles - those are the most difficult to filter out. Your marketing copy talks about 0.4um and 0.1um, and the headline screems about 3um large virus particles, which are even less relevant. Even though the 0.4um numbers look close to FFP3, any official certification is missing. Is it safe to say that your product does not meet the FFP2 standards?

Additionally, I'd love a mask that does not saturate out within minutes if I am panting (from chasing after kids).

https://fixthemask.medium.com/the-standards-for-face-masks-i...

* Sizing. How do I know which size I need? Maybe you could publish a guide like the CPAP mask manufacturers do.
https://www.resmedshop.de/media/pdf/b1/e4/06/ResMed-AirFit-F...
https://www.resmedshop.de/media/pdf/03/b0/57/ResMed-AirFit-F...

* Facial expressions. If you could make the mouth covering transparent, it would show my mimics in a conversation. That could be a killer feature, especially for socializing (or salesy jobs).

* Glasses and field of vision.

* Sticker price shock. Most FFP2/KN95 masks are counterfeit and none have a good seal, so I might as well grab the ones for $0.17 a piece from aliexpress. But, I am already spending much more on other Covid safety measures.

EDIT: Can you give me an accessible way to experience the mask's safety? So far, the best criterion I have come up with is if I can smell the smoke when I'm standing next to a smoker. In defense of that metric: There are absolutely no credible alternatives proposed on the internet. Mask fit used to be tested officially with noxious smoke. Cigarette smoke particles are pretty close in size to the virus-laden droplets. But in practise, an FFP2 mask passes this test only if I tape over all of its edges with a band-aid, and my skin won't tolerate that day-in day-out.
Arguably, modern currencies are backed by the ability of nation states to demand tax payments in them, creating a steady and stable (due to being directly proportional to economic activity) demand for them.

A currency having value abroad is arguably a side effect, not the main goal.
It also has industrial applications, not to mention that it's being used for jewellery.

A golden chain with a gold-plated USB key containing a Bitcoin wallet might have a considerable bling factor though. :)
Paw is joining Rapid API, Paw for the Web, Windows, and Linux is available
What is the point of sunshine if you sit in a box all day? You get equally zero amount of it during summer as well as winter.
>no single holder owns more than 1% of ETH, for example

Curious about this statement. Is this something that can be looked up online? I know wallets/transactions are entirely public so I guess its just a question of whether someone has made a tool to do this with ETH or other cryptos. How do other coins fair in the same regard? What's BTC distribution? LTC? Or any of their forks?
Works fine in Firefox and Chrome in both Android and Windows. Looks like a Safari bug.
Yeah, but none of the academic research on coffee will qualify this to their survey respondents. They just ask how many cups per day, then write it down. Whereas most of the research on alcohol consumption will go in detail about drink size and strength then translate to standard units.
Does anyone know how much energy the global gold mining industry uses?
If civilization collapses then I'm pretty sure bitcoins would be worthless as the whole mining chain collapses. I guess it is a good store of value in the more cyberpunk dystopia where large corporations continue to grow in influence and power and it is used to funnel funds for the shadow economy. I mean it is valuable because people with money are convinced it is valuable and that whole feedback loop.
Energy consumption doesn't cause emissions.

Energy production causes emissions.

Reducing consumption (by shaming it, in this case) means less investment in production, because there's less demand. This could slow the green energy transition.
So about the normal amount for heating a house here in Canada.
Almost half of the world gold demand is for speculative/investment purposes[1]. If you consider jewelry to be speculative as well (at least partially, since if you only cared about appearance you could just plate it), the vast majority isn't "useful".

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in...
I use TW too. But it doesn't work with post-soviet countries. It doesn't work to Vietnam. It doesn't work to Iran.
This is why there is no gold standard anymore. Like, this right here is the exact reason: because collectively it's apparent gold is not worth much to anyone in a pinch. So why bother trading with it as a proxy for your nation-state's goods and services output?

Interestingly, I went and looked up what the price of gold would actually be if it was solely used for industrial processes, and it's hard to actually figure out: it's speculated on a lot, but world gold demand in 2019 was 4355.7t. Of that, 48.5% was for the jewelery industry, and 7.48% for technology - the rest accounted for by investment. So industrially world demand for gold for productive or decorative uses is about 2439.2 tons (as of 2019), whereas mining production in that year was about 3,300 tons.

So about 45% of world gold demand is essentially from financial speculators. To figure out pricing you'd have to really get into the current mining economics for technological use...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264628/world-mine-produc...
https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-supply
Which is why fixed income products are now the go-to "store of value" for any corporation or high-net-worth individuals.

Few financially savvy entities keep gold as a store of value.
Ummm, I've seen a lot of movies and international wire transfers are not like that at all. Basically one click and they're instantaneous.

Well, almost -- they do always feature cool progress bars as the money is transferred.
> subsidize green energy infrastructure.

That doesn't matter really. It's just energy "wasted" with artificial challenges. The only purpose of digging for hashes is to blow energy... Bitcoin apologists ignore the fact that there are alternatives.

There is just no future in that. No energy source is carbon neutral, much less resource-neutral.

Western life is too wasteful, we all need to cut back. Bitcoin doesn't fit humanity's future.
Many assets start volatile and become more stable over time. As more money comes into bitcoin and the market cap goes up, it's reasonable to assume that volatility will go down.
>Even if Bitcoin is replaced by something 50, 100 years

How about 5 years?
try emailing postmaster@
Bitcoin is useful too. It's impossible to quickly and reliably transfer money between many places (e.g. Africa and Europe, USA and Africa, USA and EU) by any other way than Bitcoin.

African banks will steal your money if they have a chance to claim it was lost in transport. Transfers between EU and USA take so much paper and gasoline (to travel to banks) that Bitcoin must be more ecological.

And transfers between many country pairs are totally impossible without Bitcoin.
Does the SEPA network use >1.0 Argentina worth of electricity to operate?
Why not "--single-branch" when cloning? Couldn't it speed up cloning if there are many branches?
Animal rights activists regularly target both. They even go as far as doing sit ins in slaughter facilities to show how gruesome and cruel they are to the animals.
Mobile Apps: QA-Pricing
Yes, Microstrategy or Tesla have no interest in daytrading.
How to Bounce Back from a Pitch Deck Meltdown
Alchemy: A structured task distribution for meta-reinforcement learning
Exactly. Miners will decide to continue mining. Probably in just the right amount such that inflation/deflation is controlled enough to create sustained profits for them. Thus basically acting like a central bank.
There is $8 trillion held in gold. Whether you believe that qualifies as a store of value or not, if Bitcoin reaches the same level, each Bitcoin will be valued at $500,000
Did you read the article? Because it’s not arguing this. Quite the opposite (the need to be clear about what was originally a part of the quote).
https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms...
Gold's market cap isn't driven by industrial use.
Businesses don't operate on a "zoomed out" timeline. Volatility in the short term causes cashflow driven liquidity bankruptcy.
+1, lots of things have been manufactured with gold in the past and would go back to gold if it got any cheaper.
you can be a proponent of bitcoin without stating such blatant lies...
If you consider the amount of investment dollars parked in gold and metals relative to the amount of total investment dollars/flows in other financialized assets, isn't the answer kind of self evident? Sure, there are worse stores of value but there are better, more stable (and modern) ones that are more prevalent in actual practice. Much of the total interest in gold is emotional or speculative too.
I would not call that a 100% efficiency. The efficiency of a heatpump is expressed in Watt per Watt, ie, how many watts of thermal energy are moved per watt of electric energy.

The reason is that simply a heat pump does not convert electrical to thermal energy, so it has no comparable efficiency in that process.
No. I don't use BTC as a speculative asset. I use it for two things:

1. when it is expensive or difficult to send money to places like Vietnam, post-soviet countries, Iran.
2. some saving in case the shit hits the fan and I will have to survive for a couple of months without TransferWise, Revolut.
Indeed. The "Coinbase" mining reward (currently 6.25 BTC per block mined) halves every 4 years. The theory is that the proportion of fees (currently only 10%-20% of the total reward miners make) will increase and make up for the reduction in coinbase.

Currently, a successful block makes 6.25 BTC * 45000 BTCUSD = 280k USD in Coinbase, or around 100 USD per transaction, plus a 10-20 USD fee per transaction.

As Coinbase drops (or BTCUSD drops), users will have to pay around 100+ USD per transaction in fees, or the rewards to miners will drop and some will go offline, resulting in a reduction in difficulty and less energy wasted.
I understand what you're saying from an ideological point of view - personal responsibility, freedom for companies to ban who they want. That all makes sense for unusual things and small companies, but real life humans don't take personal responsibility and do need protection from the law. Look at some other examples which you surely agree with:

Personal safety requirements, such as compulsory seat belt wearing in cars.

Scammers are breaking the law by tricking people to give up their money even though the victims could just refuse to give money to whoever asks for it if they didn't want to get scammed.

Tenancy and employment law, at least in my country, doesn't allow people to contract out of certain rights. That's because some poor sucker would end up shooting himself in the foot by accepting a raw deal out of desperation.

Some companies like utilities are required to not arbitrarily ban customers, even though they're not the only choice - you can still install solar panels if you don't like the power company but it's nowhere near as convenient.

Consumer protection laws.

Restrictions on gambling.

Anti-spam laws. Email is not the only option but it has market dominance and network effects meaning normal life is harder without it.

McDonald's isn't like this because it has nowhere near the market dominance or network effects that Facebook does. It would still be a problem but a smaller one which I think doesn't outweigh the rights of the owner to ban whoever he wants or responsibility of customers to organize their groups better.
Uh, there wasn't really anyone talking about environment issues in the 1940's, which is when the system was created, and global warming wasn't established as a firm concern until the 1980's by which time Bretton Woods was dead.
That’s just silly. Most tools are spelled lowercase and just get capitalized in proper English when required. Facebook is not capitalized in the logo, for example.

It’s just being awkward for the sake of it.
Gold isn't the best store of value if stability of value is the only concern.

In places like India, gold jewelry has a prominent cultural value (a part of most wedding rituals, for example). So its desired and even required no matter its price - though demand is, I imagine, pretty elastic. The volatility of gold prices competes with 8% inflation,

Even if gold is volatile, it competes favorably in an investment environment where
1) cash inflates at 8% a year
2) private banks can often be risky, with many going bankrupt over the years
3) the average person has no access to US T-bills
4) gold can be melted any time to make jewelry anew, so one can always be fashionable (keeping the use-value of the material fresh)
5) gold can be pawned in emergencies, in practically every town
6) where access to digital banking may be spotty, transporting jewelry is an easy way to transport wealth

A store of value has many attributes that make it a good store of value - ubiquity, tradability, use-value, transportability, its value relative to the other options in the investment environment.
Quick point of note regarding TV resolution requirements:

I've got an old Samsung 45" screen that's only 1080p. Usually films and other media look great on it and I was pretty convinced I didn't need a higher resolution.

Last night I tried playing back some filmed-in 4k drone footage which ended up looking impressively awful. It was sharp, but lots of pixel level brightness noise changing from frame to frame, which looked grainy and was extremely distracting.

I can only assume it's the way VLC or my graphics card are downsampling to display it at 1080, but it was annoying enough I'm now thinking of a new 4k TV at some point in the future.

TLDR: Your source media might make a big difference.
If the goal is to educate the public on the scale of power involved, a comparison with a commonly used service would help a lot IMHO.
Something like 'Bitcoin consumes 14 times the energy of Google and half (according rough estimates) that of Youtube' would make things easier to grasp before hitting the reader with country comparisons.

FWIW here is my list of 'if a service were a country':

Google Guatemala

Bitcoin Argentina

Youtube South Africa (unreliable data)

[Edit] whoops - no references

https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+total+power+cons...

https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+total+power+cons...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
> You have met all the requirements but this password is already in use.
Why import A from B, and not
from B import A, like in python instead ?
Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Vietnam, Iran
The only way to out compete bitcoin now is on features. Which if successful in an altcoin can easily be integrated into bitcoin.
That would suggest with the naked eye you could look at the moon and pick out features about 20km wide

https://skyandtelescope.org/observing/how-to-see-lunar-crate...

"At 0.8′ (arcminutes) across, the crater alone hovers at the naked-eye limit"

Which seems to back the the c. 1/60th idea.

Judging the resolution of an eye is a subjective process, not least beacuse of the relative sensititivty and density of rods and cones at different parts of the eye.
I find it insane that there are otherwise-smart people in the world that want to abolish time zones. For example, this NY Times article. [1]

In includes the most bizarre history:

> A century and a half ago, time zones didn’t exist. They were a consequence of the invention of railroads.

... and goes on to describe that it's suddenly so confusing and laughable that when it was 7:00 in New York, it would now be 8:00 in Chicago and 5:00 in San Francisco.

But what on Earth did the writer think the time was in San Francisco before there were time zones?

Before there were time zones, everyone synchronized to local noon. The result was much more fine-grained "time zones." What time zones did was to actually flatten those difference, leading to fewer time zones, because now suddenly the time in Maine was the same as the time in Michigan, despite being at completely different longitudes.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/opinion/sunday/time-to-du...
Amazon and Microsoft are building internal teams to work on the compiler, so the budget of the foundation is not necessarily representative of the total financial investment by these companies.
I'm not sure if it was that first video or i saw/read about this approach somewhere else (i'm almost certain that i heard about it years before that video though), but my reaction was pretty much the same as Jon Blow's (though not so long winded :-P): aren't you just working around the borrow checker and making your own allocator with its own faux pointers via indices? Sure, it wont crash the game if your index is invalid, but you'll still access the wrong data - which can end up with hard or weird bugs and corrupted state (e.g. in savegames and/or editor).
Agreed! I had a recent experience with no internet and was running around my house yanking coax cables, checking my electrical cupboard and whacking the router.

Turns out, there was a line issue outside my house :P
Does apt use tls by default today?
>"Some detail of the explanation are slightly wrong. If you start with a setup like in this experiment with water over a layer of sugar, after some time you will get the gradient to make the experiment. But if you wait too much the diffusion will mix everything evenly, and the light will not blend.

It's not caused by the difference of density, but the difference of density will help to maintain the gradient for some time anyway."

Agreed completely -- there is an effect not related to density going on.

But, I at this point in time -- can't wrap my mind around it, nor speculate as to exactly what that effect might be and how it might work and why it might work...

It needs (at least to me, in the future) -- more study.

That's why I post a lot of the videos I do; I don't have a lab; I don't have any esoteric equipment or materials to experiment with (in the above case, while I have the sugar and water(!) (who doesn't? <g>), I lack the prerequisite laser pointer, how lame is that? <g> (I chose intentional poverty so I can have TIME to work on the things I want to work on, mostly related to writing and programming at this point in time...)), and so I post a majority of the videos I post on HN as "Future To-Do List Items", that is, "These would be interesting areas to revisit -- when more resources are present..."

But, agreed -- The effect is not caused by the difference of density...
In case you were wondering, the term for “causer of birth defect” is teratogen.
https://charts.woobull.com/bitcoin-volatility/
Very hypnotic indeed. Gets you right into dream mode :)
> irreversibly

People think that's a feature until they don't.
The Fuggerei: The oldest social housing project in the world
"The Fuggerei is the world's oldest social housing complex still in use. It is a walled enclave within the city of Augsburg, Bavaria. It takes its name from the Fugger family and was founded in 1516 by Jakob Fugger the Younger (known as 'Jakob Fugger the Rich') as a place where the needy citizens of Augsburg could be housed. By 1523, 52 houses had been built, and in the coming years the area expanded with various streets, small squares and a church. The gates were locked at night, so the Fuggerei was, in its own right, very similar to a small independent medieval town. It is still inhabited today, affording it the status of being the oldest social housing project in the world."
It's not inaccurate, in the same way that "buy low, sell high" is not incorrect stock trading advice.
Hosting Provider Shuts Down for Good Following a Cyberattack
>which just links to one of your own comments on HN!

I found this bit hilarious. I guess he's banking on people not actually clicking the source links? Medium journalism at its finest.
Researchers: These were not the stem cells you were looking for
It won't work in JS because arrays are compared by reference, so it would always fail to match (I think immutable data structures, at proposal stage 2, would provide one potential fix for this, otherwise need a workaround such as bitmasking the array before performing a match). It not working isn't simply that pattern matching isn't present in the language, per se.