skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A Barcode Scanner App with Millions of Downloads Goes Rogue
Forcing Foreign Money Out Is Academic’s Fix for Canadian Housing
Most colleges are degree mills at this point. One of the fruits of our toxically optimistic western culture is an industry which caters to children who believe they won't fail, so long as they "work hard". That's an excellent attitude for extracting money, but hardly realistic enough for generating value.

It's time to acknowledge that not all degrees are equally useful, and neither are all people. Watering down standards to throw graduate degrees at everybody won't solve any of society's problems - you're just flailing vainly against the normal-like distribution of intelligence.
True, but the rest of us can switch blockchains.
I like the fun-facts on this page: "The amount of electricity consumed every year by always-on but inactive home devices in the USA alone could power the Bitcoin network for 1.8 years"
Where is the discussion about the smart home devices using that much energy? This is horrible, thats twice as the Bitcoin network and this is just the USA.
I would really like if someone estimate the energy usage (with all trucks and cars and people and companies and buildings and so on) of other things than just whole countries, maybe the "normal" financial system, or plastic bottles or something everyone is using (like idle smart devices).

I think most people missing the main point: Energy is to cheap. Most miners are in China, an they seem to pay nearly nothing for the energy (else they would'nt do it). This would mean they waste Energy on EVERYTHING, not only Bitcoin mining. In Germany I would never even think about mining Bitcoin, since I have to pay 0,35€ per kWh. But if I would buy thousends of miners and waste 5MW of energy, I would have to pay roughtly 0,15€ (maybe even just 0,05€). So wasting energy is profitable, is'nt this strange?
But here's the thing: This article didn't say anything bad about Bitcoin's energy usage. It's simply quantifying it.

If quantifying the energy usage of Bitcoin makes you angry, you should probably self-reflect a bit.

This is a very unbiased source, and nothing they have published is untrue.
The problem is that Bitcoin doesn't need to use this much energy. We've now discovered distributed consensus algorithms that don't rely on Proof of Work, so it's really quite terrible we still waste so much by using an outdated consensus algorithm.
> or fail noisily if it's not aware of that offset code.

But it is aware of it! You just told it, using the TZ variable, what EDT is. It's a timezone called EDT, with no offset from UTC!

If you wanted an offset, you should have written `TZ=EDT+4 date`
How can they be held accountable if people can't record what they do?

For mostly-good reasons, in any court case judges and juries will tend to believe what a police officer tells them happened. So in any situation where a police officer and an ordinary citizen are one-on-one, if the ordinary citizen thinks the police officer is, or might be, acting wrongly then recording the events may be their only hope of getting justice if that happens.

If there are multiple police officers and one civilian, you might hope that one police officer would report on another's misdeeds. Unfortunately, there's an awful lot of reason to think that that doesn't generally happen, and that what actually happens is that one police officer backs up another against civilians, even if they have to lie to do it.

A police officer interacting with a private citizen is (supposed to be) acting on behalf of The People, to uphold The Law. What possible reason could there be not to record what they do in that capacity?
Most people cannot agree on even simple and straightforward issues due to any number of reasons ranging from capacity for change, political alignment, or what their favorite news anchor told them to do.

And that seems obvious enough that it really does just sound like you're wanting deregulation.

And if not, then it sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it too.
Oh, see, I saw that book after watching dozens of dot-com companies re-implemting common patterns (poorly). Basically under-engineering heck. So, once we had the book we could shift the conversation and use common terminology.

The discipline is, of course, knowing which spells to cast and when. And it's super useful to see the scroll of common spells.
Fortunately, no one is forcing anyone to adopt Bitcoin, if the features are undesirable.

> Deflationary currencies are dangerous. Inflation is a feature, not a bug.

You may be right, but we can't stop a community from choosing something deflationary as their preferred currency.

> I can have those transactions reversed. No such luck with Bitcoin

I'd argue this is a feature in Bitcoin for many people.

> I can’t remember the last time my bank got DoSed.

You're fortunate. Last time I went to a bank (right after COVID hit), I was denied cash withdrawals due to liquidity issues. That's what happens when your money is in custody of someone else. Once you look outside first world countries, you'll see the demerits of centralised systems handling critical resources like money.

> Bitcoin’s value fluctuates wildly, making it a poor medium of exchange.

I'll agree with this point. Perhaps it's because of the nature of the market itself. Bitcoin trades globally, 24x7 and 365 days a year, without circuit breakers when there's extreme volatility. It's not appropriate for buying candies from a store, but maybe a good option for a Tesla?

> I like that my country can adjust monetary policy in response to world events like pandemics.

On the contrary, people holding Bitcoin during the pandemic were relatively well off in 2020. The stimulus package had negative impacts too, like asset inflation. But more concretely, Bitcoin is the first true alternative to central banking, and many people are happy to adopt it because it solves important problems for them.
You can stop looking for googleapis in your site’s analytics
> " He then denounced the Caltech stunt, calling it "in complete contradiction of the American standards of fairplay and sportsmanship."

Funny how I view this quite differently. You find a way to tilt the odds in your favor by being astute and aware of your surroundings + applying math and reasoning: that seems like American ingenuity to me.

Also, we're talking about a massive corporation running a sweepstakes - there's nobody really being harmed in all this.
A lot of it depends on the scope of the foundation, and what it's expected to do. In many projects the foundation exists mainly to own and protect IP, rather than actually fund any development. Stewardship doesn't necessarily mean taking an active role; it could just mean ensuring the right people are in the groups that make the decisions.
Maybe its a reference to Maxwell's Demon[0], a thermodynamics thought experiment?

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon
Yes - nowadays I think pretty much everything that uses a lot of energy comes under scrutiny, and, in particular people look to see if the same outcome can't be achieved with less energy
Yes, I agree. This is why I described it as a tragedy in the commons.
Hey now, you’re an all-star
Many would see that as an upside. Irreversible transactions are not very desirable to a lot of folks, particularly where it comes to the consumer side of things.
> could this become a future reason for governments to criminalise the trading / use of Bitcoin because of negative environmental effects?

The whole point of Bitcoin is resistance to adversity. Bitcoin value is directly correlated to its resistance against governments/agencies/bankers/regulation or anything else that wants to shut it down. If you can wrap your head around that, you'll understand why making bitcoin more eco-friendly from a centralized government or organization will suddenly make it less valuable.
lol, so nothing even close to an off chain network - but somehow the "same value". Well, except for the real time cryptographically secure stuff - but nobody wanted those values anyway.

10+ years is a pretty long con, that satoshi is one patient fraudster.
Nice launch, how does notification work when task is completed. Do all team members see the progress of other members ?
Electric aircraft maker Archer to go public in $3.8B deal
The Apple bashing is in the title and in the text, calling this a "def-facto ban" by Apple. No it's not, it's giving the option to the users. The fact that users generally abhor and detest this sort of tracking and want nothing to do with it is hardly Apple's fault.
Can you provide some concrete examples?

I.e. pattern X was recommended for a scenario Y, but ended up in over-engineering hell for Z.
The pressures for electricity demand has helped drive research and innovation in renewable energies. In some way, the quest for bitcoin has helped renewables get off the ground.

I personally don't mind this extra demand on our electric production, as I believe it will help get us to a renewable energy sources even sooner.
Analytics tools like Amplitude give you vastly more and more-useful information than just sessions and events. Sure, it's one thing to capture events, but fast and easy search and segmentation of those events? Building ad-hoc funnels and visualizing behavior of cohorts over those funnels? This is real and significant value.

There's a reason that there are profitable companies dedicated to building stuff like this. It's really hard to get right in a scalable way.

Unless you're already a multi-billion dollar corp (and how did you get that big without analytics), it's a no-brainer - this is something to buy, not to build.
People are asking a pretty basic question on a supposedly technological forum. It would be like me asking what's the point of Linux, the OS problem was solved by (D)OS(X), or something similar. I'll admit the reply is heavy handed but there is a reason Bitcoin exists and people are using it so when do these questions stop?
I don't know for certain, of course; I just very strongly suspect it.
Well that would be double, as you have to set up and tear down the lightning channel with a transaction for each operation...
Nobody ever said that Bitcoin was a efficient system. It has other qualities that worth it.
There are also situations where you cannot get a C++ compiler to emit optimal code without resorting to intrinsics or inline Assembly.
99% of Rust and C++ code performs well without going that deep.
I mean it's just a standard economic argument concerning the use of scarce resources. All your examples have a higher impact on the real economy vs. Bitcoin. As in, these industries employ large numbers of people and sustain economic growth to some degree, in contrast Bitcoin services a comparatively limited population engaged in limited productive activity relative to its energy use.

People are free to be judgmental about anything they like.
Whatever happened with the MIT cough analyzer? That seemed like really promising tech that just kind of fell off the news feeds and was never mentioned again. I thought they were trying to apply for an FDA approval. Latest info is 47 days old: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54780460?fbclid=IwAR1bGR...
The problem is peoples fascination with the S in the timezones, if you remove the S and the timezone equates to the proper, daylight savings adjusted +/- timezone according to the tz db. So instead of EST,CST,PST, use ET,CT,PT. For example ET equating to America/New_York, or as I prefer, US/Eastern. Traditional posix such as EST5EDT can have data gaps which cause issues that the tz db make up for, so in general:

Just use UTC for most things.

As with all things time, I'm no expert, and could be wrong about something. If you are, please correct me!
Good luck with that too.
AWS Lambda function that dynamically schedules its next runtime
Government regulation should focus on how electricity is produced, not how electricity is used. If Bitcoin created pollution or dumped toxic chemicals, I would agree with you. But Bitcoin doesn't do either of those things, the power plants do those things.

So save your regulations for the power plants and let the market figure out how to spend the electricity. If you wouldn't be in favor of the government regulating how much money can be spent on beef, or how much money can be spent on TVs, you shouldn't be in favor of the government regulating how much can be spent on Bitcoin's electricity bills.
> If you think congress is incapable of oversight ...

I think the burden of proof is on you to show why you think congress is capable of oversight.

Selection bias, etc, but when I reflect on this I can think (and quickly find) dozens of instances, large and small, where congress has demonstrated "oversight incompetence".
Silicon Valley losing it's throne of being the centre of innovation and capital and culture for the tech world is probably a good thing.

As a tech worker outside of California, I'm tired of companies following whatever hip new startup culture fad that they're doing in Silicon Valley. Or expecting Silicon Valley live at the office work ethic and devotion to a startup while offering nothing resembling the same levels of compensation.
I've been running my own email infrastructure since 1993, starting off with a UUCP feed to an Amiga over a 9600 baud modem. After that, I think I went Smail -> Sendmail -> Qmail -> Postfix on a variety of platforms (Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD.)
Does it count if they're all three?
A maximum of 178 things on the planet consume >= to the electricity of Bitcoin.

99.44%/0.56% = ~178 according to their estimate. So if you want to compare, the premise is that there are no more than 178 things on Earth more valuable per watt, no more than 178 things to compare to... That is absurd.
Well, it is irreversible to the extent giving any physical papers to another person is irreversible.

However, the upside of driving your Tesla with a case full of bills is that there's no immutable world-wide distributed record of your transaction making it irreversible.
Kubernetes 101 series retrospective, and a new book
I believe that everyone who thinks Bitcoin is important to the future of the global financial system is wrong about that particular point. (They might be fine people in other ways, or have other reasons to like Bitcoin, sure).
> Crypto mining is largely powered by renewables (40% according to one source in Sep 2020).

That’s one source and less than half does not mean “largely” in standard English usage. More importantly, almost nobody uses Bitcoin so a key question would be how that’d change if usage could be scaled up to, say, even 0.1% of daily transactions.
I’ve been getting ads from my power company about “energy vampires” reminding me to turn off or unplug unwanted devices for decades. There is an outrage about that wasted power; you’ve just missed it.

Oh, and we’re getting more efficient about household energy usage every single day. Those always on lights used to be 60W incandescent bulbs, now they’re 6-7W LEDs. The same cannot be said about the Bitcoin network, which is growing in energy consumption.
Same as Harley Davidson bikes, the weirdest way to transform gasoline into noise: it is all about marketing and nothing about the products.
Right. The difficult thing is determining the difference between the written law, the actual law, and mere custom.

For example, the custom is that the Queen will appoint whoever she believes to be most likely to hold the confidence of parliament as the prime minister. Obviously the best candidate is usually the leader of the majority party or a collation that has a majority.

De Jure, however, she may appoint anyone (besides herself?) at any time for any reason. She would be stupid to do anything other than what is customary, but if she did, I am pretty certain the consensus would be that doing was was legal if unwise. After all, this has already happened in a form by way of the Governor General in Australia infamously dismissing the prime minister to enable Supply to be passed, and new elections held, which clearly violates the custom.

The selecting prime minister case is also interesting as it is one of the few where the custom is not based on the advice of Her Majesty's Government because of the obvious conflict of interest there.

On the other hand, while all Royal Prerogatives are de jure the Queen's, many of them arguably can only be exercised by the State/Government, which is clearly a distinct entity from the Queen, despite the laws constantly identifying the two as one and the same (the laws identify both the hereditary office of the Monarchy and the executive organ of the state as the Crown, despite those obviously being distinct things in reality). For example, If the Queen tried to seize control of the Armed Forces away from her Government/MoD, this might be deemed unlawful despite control of the the armed forces being a reserve power, and her being the nominal commander in chief.

One of the nice things about a good written constitution is that it helps to differentiate what is merely custom vs what is the actual law. Of course, the actual law and the written law can still differ, but it does help to avoid assuming what is merely a custom is the de jure law.
I mean it's correct, it's just so vague and/or obvious that it's not useful to say it.
I get that it's cool to ridicule Apple, but maybe pick something they've actually demonstrated a tendency to do in the past? In the case of health features on their Watch they've been pretty consistent about just making it available if the Watch has the right sensors (so older watches don't get all the new features because they lack some of the necessary sensors).
Imagine we navigated the web using a command line tool called “goto” which works exactly like a package manager. If I want to open my bank’s site, I type “goto mybank” .

I could easily find myself in trouble, because:

- There’s no autocomplete or bookmarks, so typos are easy.

- If “mybank” is a name provided by my company’s name server, I could find myself redirected to the public “mybank” entry because Mr. Not-A-Hacker says his name entry is more up to date (or because I forgot to tell ‘goto’ to check the company name server.)

- There’s no “green padlock” to check while I’m actively using the destination site. (Though at this point it’s too late because a few moments after I hit enter the destination site had the same access to my machine & network that I do from my current terminal.)

- A trusted site may later become malicious, which is bad due to the level of unrestricted and unmonitored access to my PC the site can have.

- Using scripting tricks, regular sandboxed browser websites can manipulate my clipboard so I paste something into ‘goto’ that I didn’t realize would be in my clipboard, making me navigate to some malicious site and giving it full access to my machine (if ‘sudo’ as added to the front).

This is just a few cases off the top of my head. If ‘goto’ was a real thing, we’d laugh it into being replaced by something more trustable.

How have current package managers not had these vulnerabilities fixed yet? I don’t understand.
> Here is the most obvious one - true sovereignty over your capital. When you have bitcoin, you have have physical ownership of a digitally transferable asset. Not legal ownership where a custodian ultimately decides whether you can access it.

This isn't really true though. At the end of the day, you're always subject to the powers that be who will come knocking on your door with guns if you stop paying your taxes. If they criminalize BTC, stick you in jail, it won't really matter that you have "physical ownership of a digitally transferable asset". Ultimately there's always a custodian who decides whether you can access it.

It might currently have some small benefits over traditional currency (in terms of not needing to operate via the banking system) but that doesn't mean it's somehow outside the boundaries of traditional society.
I will agree with "letting the market decide" on the energy expended in Bitcoin when there is an effective and globally enforced carbon emissions tax that adequately compensates the potential damage caused by these emissions.

Other industries and activities, such gold mining, automotives, food production, tourism, etc., must of course also be covered by said carbon tax. However, what makes Bitcoin particularly noxious compared to them is that it intrinsically carries a financial incentive to expend more energy as time moves on.
That is not necessarily a downside.
You could do single window screenshots and then use GIMP with some drop shadows.
A Shadow Army of Ghost Kitchens Took over America’s Restaurants
It seems that as you age, for optimal healthy, you should increasingly adopt a primarily vegan based diet.

I still think meat and animal by products, specifically dairy and eggs are efficient ways to get the nutrition young, developing bodies need. However once fully developed, physically and mentally, it seems the cons slowly begin to outweigh the pros.

I am not a vegan or a vegetarian, though I have been trying to decrease my meat consumption as I feel the evidence is pretty solid at this point that it is optimal for health.
Yep! This is called Schneier's Law.
What would happen if the install hooks weren't there? You'd still have client code calling into the compromised package. Would it be possible to handle those calls without knowing the symbol names used by the internal package?
Lambda expression proposed for the C programming language [pdf]
Other related proposals are listed in:

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n2638.pdf
> Electricity is one of those things most of society has deemed an essential good, and as such has subsidized it for the poorest among us.

Sounds like an argument for giving subsidies to the poor instead of anyone using electricity.
Instead of attempting to contact google perhaps your time is better spent contacting the anti-trust folks at the doj.
If all crypto was mined with renewable energy, would it be a huge environmental issue?
Most of it is renewable energy.

edit: 39% of it, as in a lot of it and that number should go up as the world is phasing out dirty energy for cleaner energy sources.
Interesting Facts That Will Blow Your Mind-Part 2
Great video here about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4VHfmiwuv4&list=PLWzKfs3icb...

The summary is that yes they pollute a lot for what they are, but compared to almost any other major polluting industry (travel, freight, construction, etc) it's barely anything and won't be much of a problem for a long time.
Because Bitcoin is not important to our future finance system. It does not solve any problem that any meaningful fraction of people cares about.
The problem with biofuels derived from crops in that era is that people were actually starving to death on a regular basis.
And this is not surprising. Cryptocurrency is designed to be anti-efficient. "Proof of work" is just a synonym for "having wasted tons of energy."

This is my main beef with these systems. Gaining fundamental value from the act of wasting energy and being the one to accelerate the (local) heat death by the most is not a sensible basis for a 21st century technology.
Also, lets say in the near(-ish) future we get "unlimited", very, very cheap energy. Something like fusion power. Wouldn't that mean the Bitcoin network would incentivize a burn rate until some resource scarcity is reached again, inherently? Couldn't energy even become so cheap, other resources will become the limit and therefore completely cripple humanity's prosperity?
CD Projekt Red Hackers Allegedly Already Auctioning Leaked Source Files
Different use case: here you can have someone with covid with no perceptible symptoms but low blood o2 tells doctors it is an emergency.

Whereas presumably you had some symptoms that were ignored?