skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
why did society collapse? It is hard to come up with something realistic. There are a lot of shocks that will make things bad for a few weeks, but society will recover - or at least the survivors will.

I can think of two, but perhaps you can think of more.

First is the local society collapse because of war. Could happen to everyone, and while your armies might win in the long run, you might be forced to flee. At that point gold is useful because it is small enough to hide on your person, thus meaning you have a chance to get it out to a safer area. You might not be able to prove you own foreign bonds (or maybe you can, but it takes years of paperwork). Gold still has value to the rest of the world in this, so if you can get out with it that is a good thing.

A nuclear nation decides to end it all and shoot randomly targeted ICBMs everywhere. In this case the few percent of the world that survives by luck will need to start over. It is just your village, you can't travel far because of the wastelands surrounding you. Gold is useful because it can be formed into tools. Iron is better, but harder to form, and you may not have fuel to spare to heat it (proper heat treatment of steel is one of the things that makes iron useful). Gold also is pretty and so there will still be the jewelry aspects.

Neither of the above require the gold be currency, though it is a good choice for currency in general in the latter case when starting over. (not the only good choice) Scarcity is part of what has always made gold useful. You could get it in enough quantities that most travelers could carry their wealth around in that form (when not in the form of trade goods - traveler implies trader in those historical days)

Both of the above are long shots. I don't personally invest in gold because I find the risks of the above low enough that I don't bother to insurance against them.
Even renewable energy has externalities. They're not as bad as burning fossil fuels but we still want to avoid wasting energy on inefficient things.
> Definitionally, money’s value is not supposed to be subjective.

Not only is that not true, but if to was it would just render “money” a non-concept, because definitionally value (in general, not just of money) is subjective.
Giveaway: Acknowledging Tuvalu’s announcement to use the Bitcoin SV blockchain
Yes, this is illegal in the UK.

We're all criminals now. Such are the '20s.

With the trajectory our political system is on, a few more months of this and the outcome where the guy with the gun pulls the trigger may well be preferable.

The main escape valve at the moment is that the regulations aren't being enforced.
They're completely ignoring the concept of magnitude, and realistically their claim is "we use energy for other stuff, so there's nothing wrong with using massive amounts of energy for X". They're making an implicit premise that using large amounts of energy, which causes harm to humans, is okay. If you accept that premise, okay fine, but I don't.

As another poster here shared, a single transaction uses upwards of hundreds of kwh. That kind of energy that moves thousands of pounds hundreds of miles, or power a typical US household for almost an entire month.
The issue is whether there's any real competitive value to Bitcoin et al - or if it's simply driven by its financial incentive structure, MLM scheme - and if there's a better option, where it isn't financial gain that leads to alignment/consensus, but instead actual consensus - arguably a blockchain structured and decided by democratically elected governments, designing in whatever failsafes are necessary, save regulatory capture for those who want to unnecessarily and unreasonably transfer wealth to themselves from the greater society they're currently attempting to lead into adopting the status quo incumbent(s); the energy consumption is a arguably moot point and a distraction from the important conversation(s) to be having.
I mean, that’s been pretty standard in every country I’ve dealt with outside the USA for a long long time.

If anything, I’d say that’s more a reflection of the poor state of the USA banking sector than its currency.
POW only ruins the planet if you're using non-renewables / non-nuclear. It's not intrinsic.
How much do CEOs of other similarly sized companies in this sector make?
Well, we currently have the special menus because it's a high end product. But the demand for nice dinners should be way higher so we can launch our own 'model 3' as we scale.
That article actually states the opposite: 74% of miners use some renewable energy. Only 39% of energy used comes from renewable sources, and most of it is hydroelectric, which is limited so miners demand for it is likely crowding out other users from it. The remainder mostly consists of coal and natural gas (there's a popular idea that miners use or can use the excess energy usage which occasionally comes from wind or solar, but the cost of the hardware they use prevents it: they will run the hardware 100% of the time to pay for it, so they represent a strong base load on the system, not a convenient energy sink for excess renewable generation).
Oh single points of failure, where art thou...

I hope everyone realises that Let's Encrypt is by now an essential part of the Internet, somewhat like DNS is, just massively centralised.
Why don't we decouple climate/sustainability expenses from the economic system?
It makes no sense to constrain ourselves in creating a sustainable humanity and stopping irreversible climate change by our human-made economical system. This is a truly global challenge, and everyone who is reasonable and believes in science wants the same (namely don't ruin our planet), so why do we not provide unlimited funds to projects towards stopping climate change?
So not a "Classic Ponzi scheme", but the opposite - where Charles Ponzi is the victim of "people who have latched on". That is twice now that you've claimed something based on a bizarre redefinition. Even if there were some kind of campaign of revolving pyramid schemes over all these YEARS, bitcoin is net positive... while pyramid schemes operate at a deficit all the way up to the point where they go to zero.
Apparently, out of a 19.08 trillion M3 USD supply [1], 2.04 trillion is in notes [2].

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MABMM301USM189S
[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12773.htm
M3 more info https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/m3.asp
By "just as much right", I mean to say that we as humans scarcely have a "right" to this land either. So what gives us the "right" to assert our dominance over other creatures to the point of extreme detriment? When does it stop being simple predatory domination and become something sinister and wicked?
You're right. Calculating the intrinsic value of something is hard if not impossible. However, I would argue that global network that enables P2P transfer of a scarce asset is quite valuable. Is it more valuable than gold? Maybe. Only time will tell.
I use this project weekly! Thank you for building this, it makes it 1000x easier to estimate and plan projects.
If, as you say, the preference of users is obvious and predictable, and Apple gives an option to users with a completely predictable outcome that will prevent analytics SDKs from being viable, then I think it's fair to say that this is a de facto ban.

Whether that's good or bad is a subject for separate debate. But the main question of the article is whether developers can still use these SDKs, and the author speculates that it will no longer be possible for developers to use them. That sounds like a de facto ban to me. Again, I'm not even commenting whether that's good or bad.

If you read other comments here, some people would be very happy with an outright explicit ban. Are they "Apple bashing"? No, of course not. I still don't see how talking about a de facto ban is bashing, it's just a natural consequence of the iOS changes, at least according to the article author.
The problem is not that bureaucrats are writing these laws (at some level this needs to happen), but the immoral relationship between these agencies and private interests. Everyone knows about the revolving doors between industry and government. This needs to be stopped by congress.
I'm guessing India - it's where I grew up and it was the network of choice for teens until we moved to Facebook
You should also check out his PhD thesis from VT.
TestGorrila, masquerading as a hiring miracle, collecting personal data
As part of my Job interview, I was sent a link to complete this 'assessment test'. I would have preferred a 15-min zoom call, but ok. For once in my life, I read the TOS... and of course it's sketchy.

THIS IS A SERVICE THE JOB APPLICANT IS INCLINED REGISTER TO AND GIVE YOUR SOUL TO FOR AT LEAST 5 YEARS!

I'm fortunate to have other offers.

Here was my response:

----

Hello,

And thank you for considering me.

Unfortunately I'm not able to use that platform as I do no consent to their TOS.

Here are some tidbits of it.

"If we sell or otherwise transfer part or the whole of TestGorilla or our assets to another organization (e.g., in the course of a transaction like a merger, acquisition, bankruptcy, dissolution, liquidation), your information and any other information collected through the Platform may be among the items sold or transferred."

"The retention period for test-taker data that is available to customers (e.g. name, email address, and test scores) is 5 years. "

https://www.testgorilla.com/terms/privacy-policy/

I apologize for any inconvenience. I'm happy to do a quick call to discuss my experience and background.

Thank you.
I'd love to see some kind of metric on crates.io to designate the quality of a crate. I appreciate that creating such a metric could lead to freak economics, so this is obviously not a trivial task, and the metric(s) may have to be mixed up every now and then to avoid to much gaming. Also it might be useful if such metrics are a geometric mean of the crates own score and all its dependencies.
If you think this creates a financial system that's much more transparent and solid than the current one which is completely broken, than that energy usage is worth it. Also you shouldn't look at it in terms of energy/transaction, the energy consumption isn't a function of transactions.
vs the rise of Venmo and Square Cash?
Seriously tempting... However I feel like I will only get what I am looking for out of it if I have one or two people to share the experience with. Have you ever gone off like that before?
Cars may sit unused for 90-95% of the day, but does the density of its usage change how many miles it will drive over its life?
Any language can be used to implement a program written in any other language, and there is a simple proof for that - every program is a finite automaton and every finite automaton can be implemented using while and switch constructs.
You can keep arguing until you are blue in the face, but Bitcoin will continue to be a boondoggle that should never have happened. For the life of me I cannot understand the attitude that because someone somewhere did something worse we should stop caring and stop working on solutions. We're on a sinking ship with leaks everywhere. Plug some leaks instead of arguing about it! But you'll come back with "oh we need to allocate resources in the most impactful way possible", which we argue about for decades and never do anything. Meanwhile, new leaks are springing up every second.
yes, both are bad, we agree
Fresh [PDF from MSFT mentioning nuget](https://azure.microsoft.com/mediahandler/files/resourcefiles...)
Except that there is a maximum number of transactions per block. Across the entire network, by design, there can never be more than 5 transactions per second. This is stupidly small. If people received their biweekly paychecks in bitcoin, only 6 million people could be paid without going over that transaction limit, assuming that absolutely nothing else is done using bitcoin.

The marginal energy usage being zero is another way of saying that Bitcoin wastes the tremendous amount of energy that it does even if nobody is using it at the time.
Yep. It takes a sample every few hours, but you can also get a HRV measurement on demand by running a session in the Breathe app on the watch.

It doesn't tell you anything about HRV in the Breathe app or that it took a new sample for you, but you'll find a new entry in the Health app if you go look right afterward.
> all they have are a load of strings of characters

Most things valuable nowadays are strings of characters. It's not the byte sequence that's valuable, it's what it represents. Bitcoin is, conceptually speaking, an asset that is orders of magnitude better than most existing financial instruments and commodities. The fact that it's implemented using bits instead of atoms is completely irrelevant.

I really don't understand this urge of breaking down anything digital into its fundamental units to try and diminish its value. It's the equivalent of evaluating anything in the physical world as "just a bunch of atoms".
It seems that development of a many new games leads to development of new game engines.

With Valve it got even more out of hand with Steam.
First off, "healthy" is subjective, and open to the interpretation of the builder. Second, why would someone work to build unhealthy incentives? Seems counterproductive.
How many people go speak to a bank teller to transfer funds? My bank can give me a mortgage for my home. The banking system is doing way way way more than counting how much people own and shifting that around.

If the concern is the cost of brick and mortar banks then we can solve that with technology much more effectively than btc.
Spreuerhofstraße
It’s a nice idea but if you have scientists as just advisors, separate from policymaking, the science will simply be muted altogether.
Modern electronics is very reliable. Yes its failure mode typically is all-or-nothing, you could not fix failed EFI control block with epoxy putty and ducktape, only with another block, but it is dead simple — reattach several connectors, and it's all. I'm traveling on motorcycles long distance, and I'm happy, that I could have box size of cigarette pack which will fix my problems with EFI/ECU on the road. But, really, I'm paranoid, I don't need one. And I've owned carburetor motorcycle — problems with carburetor were NORMAL situation, not exception like "lightning hit my motorcycle and fried up all electronics".

Exact sizes and moving parts ARE problem.

Yes, EFIs from 80s (35+ years) are deteriorating due do deteriorating of conformal coating and soldered joints. But how much times jets and membranes of actively-used carburetor should be replaced in 35+ life span? Especially, if gasoline is only so-so? Why replacing parts of carburetor is Ok and replacing EFI control box is not?

You could not buy new EFI, but could buy repair kit for carburetor? It is sad, but it is not problem of technology per se and, again, is not about simplicity, but about vendor lock-in. It is another (but valid!) argument.

And I have opposite experience with modern electronics: I'm still using my first (!) smartphone. As main one, not as backup. I'm using my workstation around the clock for 6+ years (I'm not turn off it for nigh, it works, really, 95% if these 6 years non-stop), my home NAS is built on platform which is 7+ years old (yes, HDDs are much newer, but HDDs are MECHANICAL!). My LCD monitor is 11+ years old (!) and still in perfect condition, and my PREVIOUS monitor is still used by my wife without problems...

It is all anecdotal evidences, but I've replaced a lot of sprocket and chains on my bicycle over last 6 years. I need to replace sprockets and chain on my motorcycle each season.

Yes, if only one transistor on my MoBo dies, I'll need to replace MoBo (and CPU, as it is old and you can not buy MoBo for it now) as one piece, I could not replace transistor as chain or brake pads (grr, really, I can, but it is not very common), but still my computer is much more reliable than my (expensive? almost top-of-the-line) bicycle and my motorcycle, and my EFI-equipped motorcycle is more reliable than previous one, with complex carburetor with many fine passages, calibrated jets, special membrane & stuff.

(Edit: typos and grammar).
> What does it mean for a system to be distributed? There are two aspects:
> 1. They run on multiple servers. The number of servers in a cluster can vary from as few as three servers to a few thousand servers.
> 2. They manage data. So these are inherently 'stateful' systems.

It's a pity that they don't get to the crux of distributed systems because it's very well defined and described for ~40 years now. Instead they describe the key characteristics of a distributed system in a very hand-wavy manner.

The two fundamental ways in which distributed computing differs from single-server/machine computing are.

1. No shared memory.
2. No shared clock.

Almost every problem faced in distributed systems could be traced to one of these aspects.

Because there's no shared memory it's impossible for any one server to know the global state. And so you need consensus algorithms.

And due to lack of shared clock it's impossible to order the events. To overcome this software logical clock has to be overlaid on top of distributed systems.

Added to this is the failure modes that are peculiar to distributed systems, be it transient/permanent link failures and transient/permaent server failures.

This[1] is a decent description of what I've just described here.

I also recommend to read up on some key impossibility results in distributed system. The most famous one being the impossibility of achiving common knowledge.

I'm surprised that someone as reputed as Thoughtworks don't describe the topic in more precise terms.

[1] https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/limitation-of-distributed-syst...
This is for Raw transaction App person. What is bitcoin useful for? Laundering money out of China I give you. Do cartels accept bitcoin yet?

Genuinely curious, what it is useful for?
It's a well-known fact that burning coal releases more radioactive materials into the atmosphere than mining, refining, reacting, and disposing of actual nuclear fuels. By several orders of magnitude.
Not disagreeing with your original point, just adding that if you were controlling for environmental factors (everyone has equivalent environment), then you'd see more contribution to variance in phenotypes from genetics than environment. So for homosexuality, I'd bet the reason genetics don't contribute as much is because of the heterogeneous environmental conditions (just think about where you grow up and what religion you are for example).

Edit: a good example of this in action is handedness, because different societies historically have different advantages to using different hands

> Second, the samples used to estimate the handedness heritability were from different places, different years or different centuries and were not always representative of the general population. Heritability is not an intrinsic property of a trait: it varies with phenotypic and additive genetic variances and thus can vary across populations and across generations

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41437-019-0274-3
methane isn't carbon neutral, what are you talking about

also it's much much much much worse than carbon dioxide by itself at the greenhouse effect
I could've sworn that a lot of Stanford iOS courses were already on iTunes U.
Ok, interesting... I think your general point is valid, which is that, transacting in USD with a bank is, under certain circumstances, simpler and faster than transacting in bitcoin on-chain.

But you always have to rely on a third party, transactions can be reversed, your funds can be locked etc... It's completely different from say, transferring actual bank notes, or actual gold bars or any kind of transaction where a third party is not needed, you can't be censored and it can't be reversed.

And again, everything you do with USD, you could do eventually do with bitcoin. If banks decide to hold bitcoin, they'll let you send bitcoin wires with all the issues associated with fiat wire. Bitcoin wires don't exist but they could. Permissionless, uncensorable, irreversible, under 1-hour USD transactions don't exist and they never will.
2021 Chip Shortage: Supply Limited, Car Prices Increasing
At some point, every game development project becomes engine development :-)
I would say the tax evasion is far from a guarantee. Like the other commenter said, IRS can and has asked companies for data on their customers using cryptocurrencies before. Like take Coinbase, for an example.

However, a lot of people suddenly made a pretty penny on bitcoin this year, so giving them an opportunity to buy their cars easily with it (let's just assume they are paying taxes on it), that alone could foster a lot of good will and make people want to support the company by buying Teslas. I've already started seeing threads on Reddit saying 'Should we replace the Lambo (it was a meme that when Bitcoin went to the moon everyone would buy Lamborghinis) with a Tesla?'
Bitcoin probably is not fixable, but other designs are much better at supporting cheap transactions. There is nothing inherently expensive in maintaining the block chain.
> That simply increases the ranges so that it becomes a 3600 mile trip. Or 1800 mile roundtrip.

It would still be 3600 miles round trip. A round trip is just a two-way trip; the driving distance is still the same.
Show HN: useEffect.dev, an interactive course about React hooks
Can't wait to see all the same apps popping up on GitHub.
It's 1 block every 10 minutes.

The difficulty adjustment goes both ways, if blocks start taking longer than 10 minutes to be mined (for example if some large miner stops mining for some reason) the difficulty goes down, which likely means less energy is used.

You're correct that the actual adjustment is on the number of computations, so the correlation to energy use isn't direct, different machines can be more or less efficient at making those calculations.
> if it serves a legitimate law enforcement purpose

What legitimate law enforcement purpose is being served here?
IANAL

I think if this goes to court, there's a very real chance that officer's doing this is ruled unconstitutional on 1st Amendment grounds, or the DMCA is required to be reworked.

In Matthew Green et al vs US Department of Justice, it was the court's opinion that the DMCA only requires intermediate scrutiny, because it's abridgement of the 1st Amendment was a "content-neutral regime". Intermediate scrutiny basically just requires that the law isn't arbitrary. It's not a terribly high bar.

I think there's a valid case to be made here that this officer's actions indicate usage of the DMCA in a "content-based regime", whereby the government is selectively forcing lawful 1st Amendment speech into this process based on it's content. It is the court's opinion that that would trigger strict scrutiny “which requires the Government to prove that the restriction furthers a compelling interest and is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest.” Arizona Free Enter. Club’s Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett, 564 U.S.
721, 734 (2011)

I think the government's "compelling interest" is undisputed (protection of innovation via copyright), but it could be argued that the DMCA is not "narrowly tailored" to achieve that purpose. Someone publishing a video of police abuse wherein one of the officers plays "Santeria" is not going to stop Sublime from making more music, nor is it likely to deprive them of any revenue. Furthermore, the structure of penalties wherein platforms can be penalized encourages overly broad suppression of speech; even speech that should be protected because it doesn't infringe. Platforms can be penalized for attempting to protect what they believe to be lawful speech.

Here's that opinion from Matthew Green et al vs US DoJ as well. The whole thing is worth a read because of the parallels, but page 38 and on are where most of this came from. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6188576-2019-06-27-2...
Show HN: I built an URL shortener to share Clubhouse events