skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That serves a purpose, though. Relaxing after work is perfectly legitimate. Having an investment scheme where you issue numbered bank notes and agree to never use a bank note with a number higher than 21 million, then track on some forum who now owns which bank note, would work the same way as Bitcoin. So long as people keep buying, the price keeps increasing, as it does with Bitcoin. Except that Bitcoin also agrees to burn some Terrawatts for no added benefit.
One great thing you can do with gold without the rest of society is paint. A little gold leaf goes a long way. I think religious icons will be very popular in event of societal collapse. Or you can add a little gold leaf to the pages of your books to add some holiness to the message.

Of course, signalling your importance and status is also necessary in primitive society, and wearing a little gold does the trick.

EDIT oh found another cool one,
"Gold, with its malleability and incorruptibility, has also been used in dental work for over 3000 years. The Etruscans in the 7th century BCE used gold wire to fix in place substitute animal teeth."

https://www.ancient.eu/gold/
Presumably a defence lawyer could ask for demonstration of the technical details: prove that they have the ability to obtain such evidence and didn't just fabricate it.
Yes, if it subsidizes a total revolution in energy production that significantly improves the long-term sustainability of the human race.

Not gonna happen anyway, but fun to think about.
Yes, and the Switch OS is based on the 3DS OS.
The counter argument to this that I've seen and has me thinking about Bitcoin's value again is this one:

Right now Bitcoin is an additive to the financial system, and actually promotes more usage of fiat. So if you were to compare the manifold energy consumption to Bitcoin, you need to somewhere also calculate those other effects.

I can't find a reference, but there's a good phrase that talked about how for every new innovation that comes out and is going to "completely replace X", the actual equilibrium always turns into a hybrid of the legacy systems and the new systems. Much like we've seen with Bitcoin.

So at least at this point, I find your argument disingenuous, because it doesn't take into effect the interplay of the systems.
There are shortcuts shown on the bottom, and I thought that was all the shortcuts.

What surprised me is there are shortcuts like M-3 to comment/uncomment a line, or ^Q to search. These don't appear at the bottom.
Yup, it's a Unix thing.
We're leaving future generations with so much pollution, and now microplastics. Realistically this is a nightmare and it is unfortunate that the world we live in is so dystopian, so in need of wealth, that we're resorting to using garbage to build homes when there's a plethora of environmentally friendly materials we could use if only wealth wasn't centralized in so few hands.

But at least they get homes, I suppose. I know if I was in their position and needed a home I wouldn't care if it was made up of plastic bricks or not.
> Crystal is irrelevant as a comparison to Ruby, because there is no Rails.

I wouldn't say it's irrelevant, Crystal is already being used by ex-Rubyists and the ecosystem of crystal libraries are being built by them as well.

After 1.0 you would see more of this happening.

Lucky [0][1] by Thoughtbot is the closest to Rails in the Crystal world.

> The biggest downside of Ruby compared to other languages (besides speed, but like I said, that doesn't matter here), is lack of static typing. That may or may not be a problem depending on your usecase.

Then I shouldn't see any complaints about speed on Ruby if it doesn't matter, Crystal solves all of this built in, with the trade off of slower build times, but then again Rust also has slower build times as well.

But to each their own.

[0] https://luckyframework.org/

[1] https://github.com/luckyframework/lucky
> The reality is that if you scaled up the bitcoin system linearly so it provided as much transaction capacity as Visa (let alone the entire world economy), it would require a number of times more power than the entire world produces, and produce as much e-waste as the entire world put together.

It's fair to judge Bitcoin's energy use by its tps, but the above is not true. Energy use and tps are, as you then acknowledge, not related. It is possible to increase the number of tps by many multiples. The trade-off is centralization due to hardware requirements.
> it’s very satisfying to gradually see your emulator run

This does sound like fun. I feel like I’ve had a similar experience in porting and refactoring legacy code, and each successive step forward unlocks more and more cool stuff
> (including things like burning gasoline and jet fuel to move paper and metal for shredding/melting.)

In 2021, most transactions aren't made with paper cash and metal coins. It doesn't matter, though, because Bitcoin certainly isn't replacing traditional systems. The waste of Bitcoin is additive on top of any existing energy usage.

Recent estimates compare the energy cost of a single Bitcoin transaction to around 700,000 credit card transactions, all things considered. ( https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ )

Notably, traditional transactions only get more efficient as our datacenters become faster and more energy efficient.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin continues to consume ever-increasing amounts of energy while the number of supported transactions stays the same.
Thanks! I'm planning to make a "Show NH" post soon. Please let me know if you have any suggestions or any issues that I could address before that.

There were ~40 new accounts created from this thread. I didn't really expect that many. That's encouraging.

One thing I noticed is that all of the new users skipped the "Welcome" screen which asks users to enter three links they liked recently. So I will likely remove it before doing the "Shown NH".
> you just have to chalk it up to a learning experience

Everyone knew from the start this was a BS deal and never going to happen or make ANY sense. This was pure incompetence at a political level that was paid for by tax payers.
Fun fact: most unrecycled plastic waste (majority of plastic) from ends up in one of the two places: landfills or the oceans. It is already breaking down and leaching into the environment. I see this as an absolute win unless we stop using plastics altogether.
You only seem to be repeating the same two arguments with no variation, and without actually addressing what other people are saying in response to those arguments. That makes it seem to me that not only you're not actually open to discussing the matter, but also that we fundamentally disagree on what constitutes "making someone else waste time" so I guess I'll just say that I agree to disagree.

Have a good night!
Prince Hall, American Revolutionary
> incentives an ever increasing amount of waste that can only increase with time.

That is NOT true:

The Bitcoin block reward is cut in half every four years - an exponential decay! In the long-term it will be zero, miners will only earn transaction fees.

This means that there will be a supply vs demand market, where supply is the willingness of people to pay transaction fees, and demand is miners who consume them.

And there is only a finite willingness to pay fees! So the energy usage has a finite upper boundary through the limited supply of fees.
SCADA vendors have been way too caviler about collecting data from the "plant floor" for the "front office" with technologies that weren't designed with a threat model that even remotely approaches a run-of-the-mill LAN, let alone the Internet. Never mind protocols that have no provision for authentication or encryption-- we're talking about embedded devices that fall over and die when port-scanned or when they receive "too many" broadcasts. Network segmentation is usually difficult in these environments too. Inevitably, there's a piece of software and the associated devices it controls that have to layer 2-adjacent to "discover" each other and communicate. The SCADA vendor sets the expectation that a "front office" computer should be able to interface just fine with the "plant floor" and blames the meddling IT department with their subnets and default gateways and ACLs for things not working. (I may have some pent up frustration on this topic.)

Aside from the technical limitations of some of these platforms there's a cultural issue. Controls engineers aren't trained in Infosec. The software and device manufacturers are developing better products, but I don't feel like there's a "secure by default" initiative. It still takes skills on the part of the installer.

I still see a huge lack of consideration for security in the people actually installing gear (at least in the small-to-medium sized manufacturing companies and small municipalities I work around). The biggest concerns are making sure vendor's support personnel can troubleshoot remotely because frequently the on-site personnel have limited skills. That's how we end up with TeamViewer, VNC forwarded thru routers, etc.
"At fundamental level, Adtech is there to help people."

Haha. Adtech is not there to "help people". Back in the day, prior to television and radio, ads were there to provide information about a product, but those days are long since past. Ads now-a-days appeal to emotional and irrational wants/desires, this is common knowledge. Ads attempt to generate needless sales by marketing to irrational and emotional desires.

Adtech on the other hand, is there to drive irrational and unneeded consumerism and consumption just as well, it just happens to have some additional evil sprinkled on top. For example, adtech violates human privacy, adtech marginalizes the open web, and turns it into a creepy surveillance nightmare.

To say that "At fundamental level, Adtech is there to help people." is delusional and unintentionally hilarious. I am going to swing in the dark and say the GP must be an employee of facebook
Yes, yes, yes. In another discussion, I brought up that according to current energy consumption rates for average mining equipment, it took 2.4 million terrawatts to mine the $1.5 billion in Bitcoin Tesla bought recently. Does putting this much money in Bitcoin have a positive economic impact? Does it have any tangible value other than as a stopover for hedge fund and organized crime money?

I think not, despite all the chaff crypto-fanatics throw at you when you question their ideology. It would've been far better and make more sense if the $238 billion invested in Bitcoin today in the forms of CPU power, brains, and cash was put into actual economic activity rather than idling and burning resources in an attempt to fulfill the greater-fools theory.
Decisions and strategies worldwide do not make sense if you don't acknowledge that such things happen. That e.g. an oil country moving away from the dollar is something the US would do nasty things to avoid - and the reasons for that fall in the category of "conspiracy theory", but that is the case because no official tale makes sense. You know it is not about the weapons of mass destruction, because these were proven lies, and you know they did not tell these lies to "save the people from a despotic regime" after decades of "we don't care", because there are other examples of despotic regimes (including KSA) the US does not bother or has friendly relationships with.

So, what would you think is the reason the US invaded Iraq?
So what's your response? That spending an ever-increasing amount of energy and generating a significant quantity of non-reusable electronics waste on a Red Queen's race is Good, Actually? And if so: why?
Source for electricity cost of $1.5 billion in bitcoin? I've seen a whole lot of anecdote, but no credible calculations, references, or studies.
S.F. school board strips Lowell High of its merit-based admissions system
Accordingly, is anyone who saves fiat money also economically irrational?
To be fair, I come to HN because most posters here are in fact smarter than I am. One person’s toxin is another’s tonic.
Starlink Is Open for Business
> The electricity cost of processing a bitcoin transaction on a dedicated ASIC mining rig is, at the moment, 308 kwh.

Source?
Once they increase it, which they won’t for philosophical reasons, I’ll update my assessment. Until then it’s strictly fair and accurate.

It’s representative of the world in which we live today not some hypothetical world that could exist in the future - that the team has promised and failed to deliver for a decade. I can make up numbers for visa that match too.

After all climate change doesn’t care about hypotheticals.
I suppose it's because Crystal isn't Ruby, and it's also a statically-typed ahead-of-time compiled language. Which, despite having similar syntax (and a lot of other positive aspects), make it very different from Ruby.

I'm not sure "Ruby but faster" is the point. I'd argue that it's more "cool new language that should be comfortable for anyone already familiar with Ruby".
I dare you to comment constructively instead of downvoting.
Would love a link to one/some/all of your books!
Why are you downvoting this?

It's right in the source code, this is not just a personal opinion!
I feel this. Just imagine all that effort and all those resources put in more noble causes like sustainable energy solutions, or anything similar that comes to mind.

But it seems all about lambo money.
Interesting post, thank you for sharing.
First Look at the Gvido Dual Screen Sheet Music Reader
>Some company just expecting free work comes closer to the definition of "entitlement", in my opinion.

If you want a job, you have to put in work. That's just how it is. I too wish companies would just throw job offers at me without me having to put in any effort to get them, but I acknowledge that this just isn't realistic. There is a reasonable upper limit on how much work a company can expect from a candidate, but I do not think a 1 hour presentation is past that limit (and it depends on the job - if I'm interviewing for a warehouse worker job, then no it's not worth preparing a presentation for. but if it's a good job at a good company, then I begrudgingly accept that I've going to have to put in some extra effort). If the OP disagreed, they were free to decline to prepare the presentation and not continue the process. But if you read the OP, they weren't concerned about this "free work" and they actually said they were excited to give the presentation.

I also disagree with the idea in this thread that the company is trying to get "free work" out of the candidate in any way. It's not like the company is going to take your presentation on your random side project and go use it to try and sell services to customers or something. That's fantasy land. After your presentation, your PPT file is going into the recycle bin whether or not you got hired. Trust me, they don't want to sit through your random throwaway presentation either. They just want you to do it to see if you're a worthwhile hire, and then they want it to end. They aren't doing it for "the work".

> the fact that there was a recruiter involved makes it seem to me that they contacted him

Recruiters are involved in all hiring at the companies I've been at, even ones where the candidate applied. "Recruiter" is just the generic term for "HR person who is the point of contact for the candidate during the interview process".
> Can you actually point out the misinformation?

Yes. I submit to you this article. Consider the framing of bitcoin's utility and the immovability of the status quo.

> This article is not proposing to 'waste energy' on folding proteins.

No, that accompanies the handwringing about POW - you can substitute an number of other silly suggestions: SETI, fusion reactor modeling, etc.

> This article points out that other systems may also consume a lot of energy, but they give our societies a ton of value in return.

Have you maybe considered the possibility that, I dunno, bitcoin replaces the fiat currency - as intended from the outset of the entire endeavor?
Network adaptive streaming with SK Telecom's Hwangsaeul
> So people want those 7 hours to be when it's most convenient for them.

In theory. Going by the normal justification for daylight savings, the convenient hours to have sun are the afternoon. But if that was it, then you'd expect the clock to be pushed even further in the winter.
It's an expansion of an existing fab
>I announced the (extremely) early-access edition of the book on Reddit last week and received a lot of positive feedback.
Idea validated. Funding secured.

This is extremely extremely extremely naive. In reality, it's very easy to get praise and encouragement from a random stranger on the Internet, but it's extremely hard to get a single dollar of actual commitment from them. The original Reddit thread has 85 comments. Optimistically assuming that every single one of them donated the asking 10€, it's 850€ for multiple months of work.

In reality, the donation ratio would be the same order of magnitude as the conversion rate for ad clicks to downloads, that is about 1-5%. So, it's 8.5-42.5€ for multiple months of work.

Sorry to be brutal, but making money off something is a craft that is not easier than software development itself. That involves market analysis, lead acquisition, feature prioritization, price research, and a magnitude of other factors. Having a bunch of positive Reddit feedback is a marketing equivalent of downloading a "Hello, World in Java Script" tutorial and managing to run it in the browser. It's very far from the final product.
This may be too political for Hacker News, but...

Hope that the Governor of Wisconsin stayed a Republican? Now, that's not to say Democrats can't engage in grift, but, the deal was started under a Republican Governor in a notoriously corrupt state where the promise of Foxconn jobs was lauded by legislators, the governor, and the former President as a win for the people of the state, for our country, and a blow to China (that we were taking jobs back).

Foxconn's incentives seemed aligned with promising the moon and if those people were reelected, well, wouldn't compensating Foxconn for those promises and their outcome (the election outcome, not the factories) be fair?
I have worked on a considerable amount of Go code over the last 5 years and I diametrically disagree with almost every single one of your points here. Just wanted to share. Basically take any bullet from that list of what you think about Go and I have the exact opposite opinion, not sure what that means in the end but I found it interesting:

- Go is easy to read

- Go is much less error prone and encourages good testing habits

- You can build complex things with very simple primitives without relying on magic.

- The fmt library just works
Have children with someone that liked dinosaurs when they were a child.
The modern equivalent is using copyright material/music in a video and then putting "I make no claim on the copyright of the music in these videos" in the description thinking that's a pass
Some other resources for funding open source work:

https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources
I use it for help/teach my students, mentoring and for code reviews/Technical Interviews.

It's been very useful for me.
How can you say "if you scaled up the bitcoin system" and "this is not how bitcoin scales" in the same argument?

Bitcoin could handle arbitrary scaling with little power-usage increase had it not been intentionally hamstrung by (for lack of a better term) "small-blockers". This is because the primary power usage of bitcoin (mining) does not scale linearly with transactions/block. The transactions to include are usually considered once by the miners who then make iterated attempts at solving by modifying the block nonce, not the included transactions.
If facebook is having a hard time censoring anti-vaxxers, imagine when the term "land reform" starts making the rounds.
Ironic, because your initial comment was just repeating the same argument that someone made before you with no variation. If you wanted a different response, you should have tried coming up with a novel thought rather than one that was already stated two comments above.

Good night.
What is this UI framework? Very neat.
I love the extra hour of daylight in summer evenings and anytime I'm anywhere where it gets darker early in the summer I feel like I'm giving up part of the fun of my life.
The entire issue with DS&A interviews is that they test skills that insignificantly correlate with performance. It takes months of time to reach the level of remembering how and when to use every foreseeable DS&A topic within a few minutes. The rest of the time is needed for clarifying questions and writing it all out. It only adds more randomness and stress to an already very random and stressful event.

His interview would be better than a DS&A interview except there is a presentation to an audience instead of a 1-on-1 conversation. This would make sense for a sales or upper-management position, but not a line SWE position. The reason for rejection is also suspect as that should have been caught in resume reviews. My guess is that he wasn't picked for whatever reason and they gave him a general rejection. Either way, I would much rather my career rest on my actual work experience than my ability to solve DS&A trivia on a clock.
That's a big problem then. That means once the block mining reward turns to zero most miners will have to cease their operation to keep themselves in the black. If that happens, the cost of a 50% attack significantly decreases.
Pedro Domingos – Ethics and Cancel Culture in AI Community
BOINC has many projects, several of which are geared towards solving open questions in mathematics

https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php
When that changes I’ll update my math. Until then it doesn’t matter. Its less efficient on a per transaction basis by falsification. It is fundamentally thermodynamically impossible for it to be more efficient today on a per transaction basis. It’s been 14 years. Time to look in the mirror and stop making excuses for its devastating waste.

The case I am making is that it is not possible for Visa to use as much power as Bitcoin on a per transaction basis based on today's energy usage, factoring in all exernalities - because the world would be out of power.

I am simply countering Nic's trivially incorrect position.
It is neither reliably hot nor reliably dry. The only think I think you can say about “consistency” regarding Austin’s weather is that it is hot in the summer and doesn’t snow very often.
"if you scaled up the bitcoin system linearly so it provided as much transaction capacity as Visa ... it would require a number of times more power than the entire world produces"

This is a complete fantasy - power consumption is driven by the desire to secure the network, it is not related to transaction volume.

There is an argument that power consumption would have to be significant because attacking the network has to be cost- prohibitive, and there are people working on POS and similar approaches.

Etherium is actually attempting to scale, their talks are very interesting .
> And what is there to show for all this waste?

The safest safe haven asset: a global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms.

Essentially the author posits Earth’s ecosystems don't have room for another Argentina. But they arguably don't even have room for half of the current human population. Particularly a human population that exploits nature to the tune of millions of acres of clearcut forests and billions of animals per year — the latter almost entirely for their value to our taste buds alone.

Perhaps it’s time one of these systems came to an end.