skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a rehash of a previous post of mine regarding electricity consumption. Just wanted to repost this to get more eyeballs and critiques:

Back in the days where all our electricity came from fossil fuels, I completely agree that marginal electricity usage was bad for the environment. However I think that thought has persisted with us even though it is no longer true 100% of the time. With renewables sometimes the marginal cost of electricity to our environment is near 0 or even negative (eg, during periods of higher winds and lower demand.)

I predict that in the future as bitcoin mining becomes more and more of an efficiency game that you will see bitcoin mining be kind of a load balancer the grid, effectively turning off during peak demand (or low supply) times and contributing to the base load during regular times.

For example, it may even help the economics of building new wind plants. Eg, currently it may not be profitable to build a new wind plant because base load is too low that the excess power generated would need to be sold off at 0 or even negative prices. However if bitcoin mining could be turned on during these times and off during periods of high demand, there will need to be fewer peaker plants in operation and it would positively affect the economics of opening a new wind plant.

Bitcoin mining only cares about the cost of electricity at a given time, it is not like most other electricity demands that are very time based. With the large variance of electricity generation by renewables, I think bitcoin can in the future help smooth demand according to the real supply/demand curve.

It's kind of like a different implementation of the Tesla utility grid batteries. Instead of deploying power, you force the grid to build more renewable capacity (that the miners are paying for) that you use except in peak periods, where you turn off and effectively provide the grid with more power.

Here are 2 articles of a bitcoin mining company doing just this:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-01/bitcoin-m...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2020/05/21/ho...
Aren't there lots of NP problems that have this property?
How Etcd works and tips to keep in mind
We were talking about the well connected nodes, they need funds tied up in many channels. That's what makes them well connected. And effectively institutions. If it takes off don't be surprised if such entities start charging fees.
>There are multiple separate things being conflated here in incorrect ways.

Only by you. Read more carefully.
Sad to see that we won't be getting type parameters on methods. I hope they fix the issues with it and can get that working in a future proposal.
Hi HackerNews, I don't typically post but seeing as this involves what I do daily, thought my input might be warranted.

1)Bitcoin mining by nature is a competitive game, people have flocked to cheapest power sources (unused hydro, solar, etc.) where the power costs are super low as that is the only recurring production cost.

2)There are no batteries that are power plant sized..... other than Bitcoin. Bitcoin allows opportunities for unused power to generate instant profit for the producers.

3)Because Bitcoin prices are currently soaring, it has opened up the profitability to mining in many areas with reasonably cheap power as essentially the global hashrate density can not catch up to adoption fast enough. In the long term, more and more efficient equipment will be manufactured and as the hashrate grows exponentially past the pace of mainstream adoption, the power usage again will need to be next to nothing to be competitive as the cost to produce 1 Bitcoin becomes harder and harder with increased competition and lower block rewards. *Please understand that via Moore's law continuance this is inevitable that hashrate will explode past the correlation to BTC prices due to more efficient chip technology increasing exponentially, and block rewards decreasing*

4)In the future, Bitcoin will only be mined in places where electricity is nearly free as the rewards ($/TH) will be shrunk to next to nothing. That is the end goal. We are at an asymmetric point at the moment where the mining is behind adoption. But just as the internet took time to be adopted, so will Bitcoin. But adoption curves must always end, and at the terminal equilibrium the incentives to only use waste energy for mining will be restored.

5)We are witnessing the birth of something A-M-A-Z-I-N-G that will completely change how banking and finance work on this planet forever. Of course there will be some growing pains along the way, but the future envisioned by Bitcoin is one of digital freedom, empowerment, and privacy. At the end of the day, you can't fight this tidal wave, all you can try to do is steer the technology towards your desired outcome.

So it is written, so it shall be.

All Hail Satoshi
> Also 95/98/Me were woefully insecure.

Who could forget the login bypass "hack": https://i.imgur.com/rG0p0b2.gif
Same, especially when there are competing companies well under way.
I love the angle these attacks on BTC has been taking lately, it really seems somebody is getting desparate for it not to succeed.

This however seems a particularly bad attack on BTC, because we are not (spoilers) going to be able to to solve global warming, or even to mitigate it much. That ship has sailed, if it ever existed at all.
A fall in the price of a product (say, as a consequence of efficiency gains in the production process that shift the supply curve) increases the quantity demanded for that product. The end result of the efficiency gain is an increased consumption at a lower cost.
It's not like this is a required class. You still have to take the required set of theory classes. This is just an optional elective for students to take if they want to learn iOS development.

At the end of the day the day if you want to create a startup or even just get a job out college, taking practical courses like iOS development will put you in a much better position than spending all of your time taking theory classes.
Building Resilient GraphQL Apps and Scaling Them to 1M Subscriptions
> Well, I also want Linux version 234536464576.3.1-final-forever, but instead run 5.4.0 currently, and install new versions from time to time. The same is essentially with Python too.

Just one thing, if mainline Linux would work like Python in respect to stability of APIs and features, you could start to debug and re-write your system after minor kernel upgrades. Linux does not break APIs, and this is possible because people are very careful what they implement - they will need to support it for an indefinite future.

Of course you can make patched branches and experimental releases of the kernel, these exist, but few people will use them, for good reasons.
That is certainly a problem. I intentionally applied to companies I had some knowledge or interest in, but I definitely had to bullshit more when I knew less about the company. I tried to take the approach of putting my cards on the table; ex: I have a strong interest in security, automation, and devsecops, hopefully there is some intersection! Sometimes that worked, but I still ran into cases where I felt like I checked 9 out of 12 boxes, and by missing those 3 boxes they weren't interested, or they had someone who checked more then 9.

Either way, I have major respect for anyone looking for a new job right now. I wish you the best of luck, and I empathize with how exhausting it can be.
I had a few Windows CE devices; a Cassiopeia, an HP of some stripe, and an HTC Trinity phone. All of them were extremely capable, and could do a ton of things early iPhones could not do.

The problem came down to the interface: it was fundamentally still Windows, you had to use a pen for everything, it was slow to respond and a little unpredictable, crashes were commonplace. Fingernail would work, but fingertips would not. Every feature felt half-implemented; there was a browser but barely any pages worked at all, there was bluetooth a2dp headphone support but I only ever had much luck with 96kbit WMA files, and so forth.

Ultimately it felt like nobody at MS cared about the phone use case; the devices were better suited for embedded purposes where they live on to this day, in smart barcode scanning devices, transit card readers, etc.

MS could easily have had this market if they had been able to convince themselves to care about it and to approach it, say, the way they approached Xbox.
> It's interesting how it's easier to change time than to change the hours in which we work. I wonder if there's any country where the government has enough control over working hours to shift those around instead. Instead of shifting the clock one hour, we could shift the time we start and end work.

Iran used to do that. But for some reason they abandoned it and now use "normal" daylight saving time.
Companies shouldn't be able to control other people's projects just because they pay developers to work on it. The project's vision can't be corrupted to serve any one company's interests. I'd even say this should also hold true for every company's own products.

Realistically, it all comes down to leverage and power. Who needs the other the most?
Visa is literally money created by issuing credit just like all the other money in the economy. No one spends specie.
> How can they be making and enforcing laws?

The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_Procedure_Act...
I don't think anyone would disagree with the statement that hiring is terribly, atrociously, and disastrously broken. It's been talked about ad nauseum. But I don't think I've ever seen (nor do I personally have) any practical solutions to improve it.

Hiring is a two-way hard problem. On the company's side, they have conflicting interests where they want to hire someone as quickly and cheaply (cheap as in not spending hundreds of man hours interviewing just to fill a role), but also want to do due diligence so that they hire the right person. On the candidate's side, they also have conflicting interests where they just want a job and don't want to spend multiple entire days doing interviews, but they also need to do their due diligence to make sure the job is actually something they want.

This almost necessitates spending a decent chunk of time with each other, but not too much. The balance that most big tech company's seem to go with is 6-7 hours total in interviews for each candidate (and then ~10+ additional hours for both the candidate and the company doing preparation/debriefs). I really don't know why or how this was the number arrived at, though. From my perspective as a candidate, even after 6-7 hours of interviews I often come away still knowing very little about what the job actually is. And from my perspective as an interviewer, I know that requiring so much time from internal employees serving as interviewers is draining and stressful. It seems like it ultimately comes out to a lose-lose, but for some reason it's still what big tech sticks with.
> Once generics are implemented, I can imagine people requesting for the next "missing" thing.

Perhaps. But there is (currently) no other feature that people have been whining about nearly as much as they have been whining about generics. So I think it's going to be a while before another need is felt to the same degree.
More likely to be coincidence than malice, but after crypto got some positive attention through tweets and dogecoin, I wonder if these negative stories are a push against it in order to suppress their value.
There are a lot of tactics in use today.

For logged in users, it's trivial to match users across sites with an email address or a phone number.

If you're clicking between sites, there may be a unique ID appended to the outbound URL (on Google there's a gclid URL parameter). This ID will be logged on the destination site and can be continuously passed around to identify the same user on multiple sites.

If they don't need perfect matching, they'll use IP addresses, user agents, and other fingerprinting techniques for fuzzy matches.
For these sites, I crawl using a JS powered engine, and just save the relevant page content to disk.

Then I can craft my regex/selectors/etc., once I have the data stored locally.

This helps if you get caught and shut down - it won't turn off your development effort, and you can create a separate task to proxy requests.
Yep, seemed weird to me how (a form of) generics existed, but was exclusive to the stdlib/language.

If generics were unnecessary, why did the stdlib/language need them? Couldn't they just have lived with, e.g., make_map, make_slice, make_chan, etc?
I use Firefox Focus on iOS 11 for Facebook. It worked OK until a few days ago. Now, I cannot see my messages unless I request for a desktop version of the website. Even when that option is turned on, I noticed that the site kicks me out after a couple of minutes, 10 min or so.
Maybe not uncorrelated but I mostly agree. A presentation is a performance. And there are people who can be very good at performing who are not especially into introducing themselves to strangers one on one.
I'm building something to help for this on the hiring manager side! I think that all hiring software is focused on the recruiting funnel side of things rather than optimizing the actual interview/panel interview process to ensure fair data collection and execution overall.

After having done a lot of hiring interviews (100s) over the years, I can say that my own methodologies have improved substantially in terms of asking the right questions and being as objective as possible, but ultimately 1) members of my panel might not have that many experiences to hone their skills and 2) the data capture and evaluation process is a "clunky spreadsheet" exercise at best.

EDIT: The book "Who: The A Method for Hiring" is a great resource for this.
That's also a separate issue, it _also_ requires trusted 3rd parties to broker small, everyday transactions, which has it's own costs (energy and otherwise) and fundamentally requires some centralization and/or escrow, which kind of defeats the purpose.
I'm not saying ether is a ghost town, I'm saying good luck making bitcoin an irrelevance to the point its energy use drops.
It also depends on activity. Most people cannot focus on programming more than 20-30 hours per week. At the same time, all of the chores have became so efficient that they don't take up that much time. Granted, you also need to devote time to some physical activity, but that still leaves you plenty of time left. So, what do you do with it? If you have small children, they can occupy pretty much any amount of time, but otherwise, what is there to do but refresh Hacker News or rewatch old shows?

I feel that people in the earlier days worked much longer but not as intensely as coders (who basically are always facing new problems and can never go on autopilot), so they were able to fill out their days with productive activities better than us.
It's possible to install programs like this (for example there's one by Snapchat) which take the feed of one video source, and outputs a virtual webcam source. Early in the lockdown last year my manager was very amused he could be a potato in meetings.
The book Game Engine Architecture by Jason Gregory might be more detailed than you'd like, but it still covers a lot of those issues (for both 2D and 3D). As a programmer-but-not-a-game-programmer, I was fascinated to read about the different modules within a game and how they interact. Before reading, if I ever did write a game, I probably would have ignored the "don't write your own engine" advice. Maybe I still would. :-) But at least I have a taste of the awesome amount an engine gives you.
yubikey-agent uses PIV. It's just all contained in the agent, not requiring loading crusty shared libraries into your SSH client.
I suppose, but it's very strange to say "Assigning to a variable is classified as mutating the variable in some languages but not others, even though the underlying mechanism works exactly the same way."

Shouldn't terms like this be cross-language?
> it's hard to make an actually fun game

A zillion years ago I used to do hobby games as a solo dev, and it took me a long time to understand this. I was always interested in game engine elements (sprites, tilemaps, input, menus, audio, pathfinding, etc), and I could put those elements together to make halfway decent games (usually by copying existing genres). But assembling those elements is a skill of its own, and this is easy to overlook if you're a programmer who thinks programming is the only challenge to making a game (or making anything :)).

I didn't truly appreciate game design as a skill until I worked with a separate game designer on a project. He made decisions on things that would have never crossed my mind. From that point on, I started seeing game design everywhere. Notably, I started seeing it in older games, ones I had played many times and that inspired me to get into game dev in the first place. I hadn't realized how well thought out the classics were.
Agree with you in principle. I think the point I'm trying to make (and I could be communicating it poorly) is that these tools allow for building a summarized, retrospective, and opinionated view of data. This often doesn't meet business team needs as it does ops teams. Sample of 1, but in my 15y of industry experience dashboard usage doesn't often make it past middle management.
> Again: if a BitCoin miner generates 1 TWh/yr of their own electricity, how does that reduce the burning of fossil fuels?

Simple, during times where peaker plants need to run (because electricity demand is higher than supply), these miners can shut off, giving the grid more green power. Now these peaker plants (which generally burn coal/natural gas) don't need to exist or run anymore.
A lot of these straight up just exist so the creator has a sign to tap (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DRYYGcWV4AAF2E4.jpg) when people try to file bug reports for unsupported oddball configurations.
Microsoft now have branding around "hardware that ships with vanilla Windows" to try and mitigate the problem; likewise you can download a USB key image and use it to reset to a blank Windows install.

This sort of crapware feeds off the folks who aren't aware of the options, or comfortable performing them.
> Safes and transportation equipment have to be built too.

Because gold will be worthless and useless if it is not possible to continue using as much energy as Argentina on a daily basis to build and maintain safes and Securicor vans?

> Meaning we could be using a lot of renewable resources that would otherwise be wasted to create and exchange value.

Because the world is famously short of use cases and storage media for electrical power? As I already pointed out, none of the energy used to mine new gold is essential (or even remotely helpful) to securing and transacting with the existing gold supply, gold mining being energy use is something of a moot point when considering possible advantages of holding gold instead.

> I don't and you took what I said out of context Of course aesthetic properties are important. But quartz is arguably "prettier" than gold in most cultures. Gold is scarcer. That's why only considering the aesthetics is laughable.

At no point have I even hinted at considering only the aesthetics, and no good faith reading of my arguments would conclude I did. I did, after all, include the clause "price is the interaction of supply and demand" in my opening post.

I noted that aesthetics were a factor creating demand for gold independently from its perceived resale value. You summarily dismissed this as "laughable". There was nothing substantive for me to "take out of context", but I'm glad you now agree that the intrinsic aesthetic properties of gold are important.

> Gold necklaces of a certain brand. Not any custom designed necklace. It's an important distinction

Yes. I am aware that brands exist. Sometimes brands even produce limited editions so "we'll know exactly how many [necklaces] are in circulation 10 minutes, 10 days, 10 or even 100 years from now", but even this doesn't guarantee their gold necklaces retain their value. The fact that scarcity of particular designs often does not make them more useful as a store of value than the less scarce raw material supports my argument not yours. Second hand necklace preferences are fickle, and financial instrument preferences even more so.

> You seem to be unaware of how many people hold Bitcoin just because they like doing so (think GME and WSB)

How's GME performed as a store of value since WSB pumped? It's just as scarce as it was 10 days ago, but apparently not guaranteed to go up after all...

And come to think of it, the "terms of it being an instrument against totalitarianism and governments in general" are not independent from BTCs potential for future exchange use. Certainly neither as independent from future use nor as widespread as people taking pleasure from things' intrinsic shininess.
The way supply chains go, everyone is hurt if Taiwan (chips, EMS) or South Korea (chips, dram) goes offline for longer periods.
I saw a journalist tweet that he had spoken with him and that he was enjoying the reaction.
Yes this is known as Jevon's paradox and is not unique to these situations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

We can't simply just rely on improvements in efficiency to solve these problems.
There is an inherent bias in looking at paperclips like that. I'm sure that if you spend some time in the paperclip community you will find that they value their individuality; each paperclip has slightly different characteristics (one might be bent a few arcseconds more than the next one).
It's quite different: the energy represents the market cost of securing the network. The value of the network supports that cost otherwise nobody would be performing mining.

If this were taxpayer supported I could understand the objection, but the people buying the energy to run the system are doing so as a commercial activity to make a profit. How is this commercial use of energy inherently worse than other commercial activities?
Yes, that is what we are trying to do! And maybe even more - we are pretty excited about what using a DSL can unlock. Far in the future, we actually imagine being beyond JS ecosystem and offering a choice of languages to use, especially on the backend.
In my experience, it's caused by a reactive, rather than proactive, response to being short staffed. Interviews happen at least a year after those in the trenches have realized, and signaled, that staffing is short. By the time of the interview, something negative has already happened (dates slipped, etc), with that being the trigger that caused management to approve a hire. Add some delay to actually finding the candidates and you're well into fire fighting, and hiring someone with direct experience, with a minimal ramp up time, is a huge plus.