skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Though that's 10 pages and short for a paper, I'll give a shot at a simpler explanation.

Compilers are expected to optimize your code, and the primary way to optimize code is through rearranging your statements.

Consider the following:

int i=0;
i++;
sleep(1); // Yeah, sleep isn't a proper memory barrier.
i++;
sleep(1); // But in my experience, beginners understand sleep. So shoot me.
i++;
sleep(1);
i++;
sleep(1);
i++;
sleep(1);

The compiler will often "rearrange" these ++ statements to all happen on the same line, ultimately as follows:

int i=0; i++; i++; i++; i++; i++;
sleep(1);
sleep(1);
sleep(1);
sleep(1);
sleep(1);

Then

int i=5;
sleep(5);

Simple enough. Except... what if Thread#2 had the following:

while(i<2); // Infinite loop waiting for i to equal 2
foo();

Then in Thread#3:

while(i<3); // Infinite loop waiting for i to become 3
bar();

Then in Thread#4:

while(i<4); // Infinite loop waiting for i to become 4
baz();

Then in Thread#5:

while(i<5); // Infinite loop waiting for i to become 5
foobar();

As we can see here, "i" is a synchronization variable. We only know this fact if we know how another thread works. Now that i no longer steps from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 to 5, your threads no longer synchronize and the code gains a race condition (all threads might execute at once, since i starts off as 5).

-----------

For better or worse, modern programmers must think about the messages passed between threads. After all, semaphores are often i++ and i-- statements at the lowest level (maybe with a touch of atomic_swap or maybe a lock-statement depending on your architecture).

Modern code must note when a variable is important to inter-thread synchronization, to selectively disable the Compilers optimizer (funny enough: it also is needed to strongly order the L1 cache, as well as the Out-of-order core of modern processors).

As such, proper threading requires a top-to-bottom language-level memory model.

The "knowledge" that the i++ cannot be optimized / combined beyond the sleep statements.

---------

This is no longer an issue on modern platforms. Today, we have C++11's memory model which strongly defines where and when optimizations can occur, with "seq_cst" memory ordering.

There is also a faster, but slightly harder to understand, memory model of acquire and release. This acquire / release memory model is useful on more relaxed systems like ARM / POWER9.

Your mutex_lock() and mutex_unlock() statements will have these memory-barriers which tell the compiler, CPU, and L1 cache to order the code in ways the programmer expects. No optimizations are allowed "over" the mutex_lock() or mutex_unlock() statements, thanks to the memory model.

But back in 2004, before the memory model was formalized, it was impossible to write a truly portable posix-thread implementation. (Fortunately, compilers at the time recognized the issue and solved it in their own ways. Windows had Interlock_Exchange calls, GCC had its own memory model. But the details were non-standard and non-portable).
Nvidia’s US$40B deal to buy Arm is all but dead
I mentioned that in other comments, and can repeat again, there were 2 choices: a) add initial pattern matching to reference Python implementation; b) throw all the work into /dev/null and get back to dark ages where pattern matching is implemented in hacky ways by disparate libs and macros. Common sense won, and a) was chosen. Pattern matching will be definitely elaborated further.

> This feature was quite controversial on the various python mailing lists

I'm also on various Python lists, and what I saw that various details were controversial, not pattern matching itself. Mostly, people wanted pattern matching to be better right from the start, just like many people here. 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.
The energy-per-transaction ratio is only relevant if the utility of Bitcoin is to compete with Visa to process transactions.

However, if the ultimate utility of Bitcoin is to store trillions of dollars of value, transmit it into the future, across borders, quickly, pseudonymously, and without capital controls from coercive and corrupt governments, then energy-per-transaction is an inappropriate metric.

Bitcoin is the only asset with these properties, and it doesn't need many transactions to do what it does best.

If you find you're angry about Bitcoin's energy usage but you're not even more angry about the energy wasted by industries and technologies that have much less social utility, then maybe it's not the wasted energy that you're angry about after all.
There are 3.4 billion internet users.

It takes about 30 W to watch video in a browser [1].

Assuming every internet user watches 85 minutes of video per day [2] (517 hr/year), video consumption is 52 TWh per year. Or less than half of than the bitcoin network.

Google uses 12 TWh per year [3]. Assuming Google is entirely focused on serving the world's video (it likely could), that still is ~half of the bitcoin network.

(France consumes about 480 TWh per year [4])

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/05/microsoft-internet-explore...

[2] https://www.marketingcharts.com/digital/video-110520

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbryce/2020/10/21/googles-...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France
Solar power satellites without all that tedious beaming of microwaves back to Earth. It might actually work.

The book The Case for Space Solar Power runs through detailed engineering costs for modern solar power sats, and came up with a cost of $15/kWh at scale. That was before SpaceX. I plugged in Starship costs and it came to 4 cents/kWh.

Of that, the ground station was 0.7 cents/kWh, and of course another big chunk was the microwave emitter. Remove both and you're at least down to 3 cents/kWh for 24/7 power, which is pretty competitive with anything on Earth.

However, if Bitcoin ASICs continue to improve, this wouldn't work, since you'd have to keep replacing the sats' mining equipment.

Also, while it might be possible for SpaceX to make money this way, just being competitive wouldn't make Bitcoin clean; they'd have to decisively outcompete all the other miners, and if Bitcoin is all run by a single miner then we might as well replace it with a SQL database and be done with it.
What is fairness? In voting, we usually consider a system which permits those with more money to vote more times to be unfair. PoW is fair only if wealth is distributed fairly.
I think bitcoin is a classic "worse is better" disruptive innovation. There are arguably better blockchain/blockdag implementations now, but it has a huge first-mover advantage and name recognition, which are important economic features of Bitcoin.

As a value store it is arguably a hedge against M2 inflation, which is wildly out of control right now. All sources of perceived growth are absorbing funds like mad in an attempt to outrace the growth of the money supply.

So: is there a "better" option -- depends on the dimensions along which "better" has utility. I think there's a value in trustless value exchange, there's a value in the brand of Bitcoin, and a value in trying to hedge central bank M2 inflation.

I am a big believer in blockchain/blockdag smart contracts as a future implementation of the capital allocation function of government, especially if the implementation includes a national currency. Built-in taxation through demurrage, funding of proposals voted on and executed automatically as a smart contract, fully auditable and transparent operations -- there are a lot of technical, societal benefits.

I agree that energy consumption is largely a moot point.
This seems like really fun project. For some reason it makes me happy that someone has good reason to run their own servers and networking, rather than rent everything from cloud providers.
Unfortunately, when you sell or use Bitcoin to buy anything, you trigger capital gains tax on it.
The power usage is the same if you transfer $100 worth of BTC or $100 billion.
Money spent by interested parties only indicates that there is money to be made. It doesn't mean anything about the usefulness of bitcoin.
SiPhox (YC S20) 2020 restrospective
I have often wondered why 10 days after the shortest day was chosen to start the year (Jan 1). Does anyone know why they chose that?
Given how the likes of Facebook are investing into mind reading tech... Not far enough.
I dislike Electron as much as the next guy, but that description of what's "native" is IMHO quite arbitrary. Anything using a cross-platform UI toolkit doesn't fit that description, e.g. Qt apps definitely don't look like they are native outside KDE, GTK outside GTK based DEs/WMs, Java apps don't look native anywhere, nor does Tk, etc. while an Electron app that used native-like UI elements could.
Just want to quickly say congrats and awesome idea. Will definitely use in future
Bitcoin transaction value has nothing to do with it's energy consumption. So moving a cent or a million both cost the same.
umm speaking from personal experience (comparing garmin reading with hospital oximeter), garmin is waaaay inaccurate sometimes! Maybe it is because I always shower with it, or maybe it just loses accuracy over time. Didnt give it a second thought and just disabled the sensor.
I work with people in many time zones. We are on do not disturb mode outside work hours. That way I can send Slack messages that are non-urgent and not bother them. And in the extremely unusual case I want them to know, I can override the do not disturb anyway.

Isn't this setup basically the Slack default? Regardless, it's extremely easy to setup.
Let's pick apart that documentation and the actual behavior, shall we?

By the documentation "EST", "EDT" and "America/Los_Angeles" are not valid TZ environment variable values, as none of them matches any of the formats. offset doesn't seem to be optional, and within offset hours are not optional.

Ok, maybe it is too pedantic, a permissive implementation can interpret no offset as 0, right? But that's not what happens here. The implementation looks up the timezone by the provided name somewhere, and only when it doesn't find it it falls back to 0 as an offset.

This lookup behavior doesn't seem to be documented on that page. It's not described in the GNU date man page either even though it uses TZ='America/Los_Angeles' as an example.
Why would you cash out into a currency you just witnessed can be easily devalued??
On the one hand it looks ridiculous, on the other hand I've been thinking for quite a while that I would like something like that exact product for my headphones. Decisions decisions...
> until people got fed up with its many idiosyncrasies.

Many of us still prefer Maven.

Having to deal with other people's artistic Gradle files works wonders when it comes to understanding the goodness of standards.
yup, most retrofitted cars get way less mileage than regular EVs (150 miles or less).
Hell, just consider that it's a store of value that costs $12B+ / year to secure.
In voting, we consider voting more than once to be a criminal offense.

(For values of "we" denoting various constitutional democracies of the so-called free world.)
Elon Musk Issued Serious Bitcoin Warning over Price Boosting Tweets
The problem with the simplistic analysis of "fiat currency maintains its value by the threat of military force" is that actual evidence rather undercuts the theory. The Somali shilling broadly maintained its value for 15 years despite the complete collapse of any effective government, which is precisely the opposite of what Economics 101 would suggest.
> As for your wikipedia point, I don't get it. The domain name 'wikipedia.org' has value, and not owning the domain does not get you the value of the domain. Obviously.

That's the point, the domain Wikipedia has value, and that value is nontransferable even if someone else copies and puts the whole data somewhere else, because its the traffic which comes to it.

Similarly, if a museum in Atlanta purchases Mona Lisa, they know that they will get the traffic coming for Mona Lisa at Louvre, to this museum in Georgia. This means sale of tickets, and other revenue. SO the price of real Mona Lisa carries that value appreciation with it.

Now I can answer this question:
> Turn that on its head, would you be unwilling to buy the Mona Lisa after it has been teleported once (by a transporter from Star Trek)?

It would depend, would people be willing to pay to see that Mona Lisa? If yes then the answer to your question is similar.

Finally, the most important thing most people don't understand. With the NFT (in almost all the cases) people are purchasing the licensing rights of an object too.

Buy the NFT [1] of Andrew Jones' "Dharma Dragon"[2] and get the licensing rights to all prints, and other usage of the image.

1. https://superrare.co/artwork-v2/dharma-dragon-14834

2. https://androidjones-obtain.com/products/dharma-dragon
Things are going to get really weird in the next decade or two. Right now AI is able to "communicate" with us mostly via text, and indirectly via algorithms.

With human-like agents that have human-like voices, appearances, and mannerisms, they'll be able to communicate with millions of average Joes, and all in a way particular to that specific Joe. AI being able to do infinite amounts of "ambient work" and expose us to the results via human-like entities makes for a very different world of possibilities.

And right now the big AIs that most people directly interface with are clumsy and abstract, but they're also tied in the backend to large pools of closed data owned by mostly well-meaning entities. But how will things change when and if the AI Joe interacts with isn't directed and contained by wealthy US-based corporations?
Good point. You also don't have to pay attention to the Bitcoin transaction the entire time like you do the road. I'm more just commenting on how Bitcoin transactions are anything but "instant".
It's repulsing that this kind of thing happens. It's because of the greed and sleaziness of companies like that that we end up needing regulation.
I am upvoting this to make a meta-comment, even if the core subject matter may be highly questionable to people.

I tried to go view this thread as a normal person interested in what "the other side" had to say, if ONLY to understand how to rebut it. I had no idea we were at the point that to even READ this subject matter, one has to register an email.

There's no slippery slope here, we're already there. This is a chilling effect on, forget speech, free questioning and investigation. I get a very clear message when I see this, "we think this information is so problematic that we want to keep track of anyone who is aware of it."

This is legitimately scary to me. I have not gotten involved in this debate in other threads, and have been very silent on this issue in the context of covid because of fear for how any misconstrued viewpoint may impact my professional life down the line, but I have to make some sort of cry into the void for where this seems to be going.
I get that, but cars have gas tanks, back seats, and trunks, too. Also, the actual electric engine is very small, leaving a lot of room in engine compartments themselves. The only reason we would need very large batteries is to have a very long range, which would not be necessary if we could have removable, modular batteries that are easy to replace at (what was formerly) a gas station.
People forget that we (the US) actually had year-round DST once - in 1974.

But a couple of kids got hit by buses in the morning, and there went that experiment:

https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/10/30/the-year-daylight-sav...

Edit: got the year wrong!
I wish you the best of luck and see a short-term need, but as someone deeply entangled into gastronomic subculture I would hate to see the experience of being hosted by a gastronomer and gastronomic team fade away. Going to your favourite restaurant or to a new, "fancy" place is just as much an experience in hospitality as it is in culinary.
This thread has so far been busting my balls about what I think.

My question for you, is what do you believe should the be the rules here? I'm not against consumer protections -- if you want to compose a user bill of rights that applies to all companies online and off I might be for that depending on what you really want.
As long as it stops a few people in the world controlling the money supply, that's a big win from my perspective.
Yeah, of course a Big Tech company would rather employ a developer and allow them to contribute to Rust (and influence its development in the direction of the company they work for) than donate money to the foundation so that it can pay developers. Silly me...
The US has not fought wars to prop up the dollar. Instead, the strong dollar has enabled the US has been able to pay for its wars by inflation. Had the government been forced to directly tax its citizens to pay for the wars, the wars would not have appeared "cost-free" to the citizens and would have been opposed more.

As bitcoin becomes more popular and stable, it's "appreciation" relative the fiat currencies will reveal how much value governments are secretly stealing through inflation.
And still people won’t vendor their dependencies, so changes to dependencies are never reviewed.

To paraphrase family guy: you’re making this harder than it needs to be.
> Ah, the “everything is subjective” rabbit hole

“Everything is subjective” is a (reasonable) epistemological argument about all access to data about the world being through subjective lenses, and thus all conclusions about the world being grounded in subjectivity. But that's not the sense in which value specifically is subjective.

Value specifically is subjective because value is dependent on the subjective utility functions of people who have (or who might seek to acquire) the good and it's competing/alternative goods.

> This provides us some objective goals

That's about the value of a monetary system not the value of money, but both the specific goals, and more particularly how they are weighted against each other, remain subjective and the source of considerable disagreement.
Data science is shrinking while data engineering is exploding
For logs, fine. But you do deviate more and more from what the world is using (as of 2017, TAI is exactly 37 seconds ahead of UTC, according to Wikipedia)
Rather than a case, how about a framework to evaluate going forward: the market. Given enough time, I'm pretty sure the market will root out the "real value" of bitcoin and keep assessing the "real value" of gaming.

Let's watch for 5-10 years. If you're right about bitcoin, I bet its price will be much lower and you can gloat. If you're wrong, I bet its price will be much higher (because I agree with the basic assessment that gaming "feels" much bigger today). Luckily, we can both place our bets based on our best assessments of the future.

How confident are you that you can present a substantive case against bitcoin that matches the diligence that Ross Stevens has done for years? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lczPTYf_tvA
C offers direct, low-level control over memory, and C can be used to implement anything which can be implemented in C++. Maybe C++ has certain advantages which made this problem a lot easier to solve for Mozilla, and I'm certainly happy to have C++ in the language landscape, but another team with other processes may have been able to use C to achieve similar goals.

Assembly offers direct, low-level control over memory, and assembly can be used to implement anything which can be implemented in C++. Maybe C++ has certain advantages which made this problem a lot easier to solve for Mozilla, and I'm certainly happy to have C++ in the language landscape, but another team with other processes may have been able to use assembly to achieve similar goals.
Exactly! This is the best resource on SwiftUI I have found yet!
I'm sure this is great content, but the usage of Comic Sans for the slides really brings that first impression down.
I have a feeling that there is a chance that this comment has made some anonymous subtitle transcriber with a sense of humour very happy.
I think that's the same issue that every new technology related to network effects has had. Like Napster, Myspace, facebook, etc
It's amazing how much quicker a company responds when they hear something from their legal department rather than some form that they're dumping into the void.

To that last quote, you can often intuit when someone has taken this strategy as the Goliath in the situation will start using terms like "proper channels" and "cowards".
The Hopes That Rose and Fell with GameStop
American politics in favor of revolutionary new currency? Wild.
This is definitely an area of B2B sales that often gets overlooked; glad to see innovation in this space! Great looking product, too.

Congrats on the seed round!
And fundamentally commuting by car, often with a single person in a single car, is a woefully resource intensive and inefficient way of transporting people.

Versus other forms of transportation cars are bad for the environment whether they're electric or ICE period.
The block mining algorithm doesn't change, right? So I don't see how it will move to POS. That will require some sort of buy in from the users. Every time something new is introduced in Bitcoin the legacy remains and the new ideas fork the chain into their own thing. Usually these alternatives either die or ignored.
Trapping Light:A Brief Overview of Silicon Microring Optical Biosensors (YC-S20)
I disagree. They are for congress writing detailed laws for every environmental issue.

They need to show that congress is capable of that.
I feel like this is a positive for Paw. While I dislike the electronification of everything, I will admit that MacOS is roughly the only desktop operating system with a native UI framework where I prefer applications be written in it; native Windows apps are almost universally horrible, and native Linux (GTK?) apps can be pretty good, but generally aren't (which may be less due to GTK/KDE and more due to the lack of investment on the developer, but the product is the same).

Paw has been a dead project for about three years now. Just as one example, the community has been begging for some kind of structured GraphQL support in the entire timeframe GraphQL went from a "new thing" (when its reasonable to wait and see) to today when its everywhere (when its now insane that an API prototyping client wouldn't have first-class support). They keep it working and going, looks like M1 support came out today as well, but feature-wise its far from a "done" product, yet the developers have treated it like one.

Hopefully this acquisition helps funnel resources into actually building it out rather than letting it languish while still collecting those $50 purchase fees.
The YT automatic captions are marked as such and are usually easily distinguishable because the subtitles appear word-by-word instead of whole lines at once.

My guess is that those are manual.
Previous Threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16466768 (2018) - 58 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7083151 (2014) - 124 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=201373 (2008) - 310 comments
‘I get better sleep’: the people who quit social media
Moreover, anyone who can stake their tokens to produce blocks will never sell you enough tokens that you'll be able to compete with them for future block rewards. Put another way, the value of a staker's token-minting stake is at least equal to the expected ROI over its lifetime (much like how the value of a stock is worth its expected dividends over time). PoS is a digital manifestation of a hereditary aristocracy -- you can almost never buy your way in; you have to be a first mover.
Having a trustless global currency directly benefits society imo.

The link between BTC and carbon emissions is absolutely not crystal clear. A significant amount of BTC is mined with renewables.

The problem is a dirty grid, not Bitcoin. Green up the grid and how exactly will BTC contribute to CO2 emissions?