skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That argument is similar to saying a nuclear power plant is ridiculously expensive because it started operating last week and is currently only connected to a single factory.

The energy usage of Bitcoin doesn't meaningfully go up with more transactions, so pretending that each transaction uses some specific amount of energy is just misleading.
Kubernetes, Pods, Kubernetes Pod Concepts
Ice Cube Said It, “Check Yo Self Before You Wreck Yo Self”
Twitter Won’t Suspend Accounts on Orders of Indian Govt Due to “Free Expression”
Its really not[1].

> However, the CCAF’s report specifies that the 76% refers to the share of hashers who use renewable energy at any point. It estimates that only 39% of hashing’s total energy consumption comes from renewables.

> Behind hydroelectricity, coal (38%) and natural gas (36%) are the energy sources hashers favour most.

[1]https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/36672/renewable-energy-....
A friend of mine runs opencage, which is a geocoder based on open streetmaps and a few other data sets. They got a lot more business when Google raised their prices a while back. Anyway, go give them some love if you need a geocoder because they are an awesome small company with a great service. Their freemium layer is also pretty generous.

Nominatim is the defactor open streetmaps geocoder but its weakness is that it relies on only that; so it is only as good as OSM is.

Geocoding is a surprisingly hard problem to solve with and without open data. Picking apart text strings into unambiguous addresses is just super hard with all the conventions for this around the world. One area open streetmaps is still inconsistent is house numbers and postal codes. Getting solid open data for that is just hard in some places.
I think the average person would find it easier to imagine the consumption of a country than that of a an internet service.

Both are basically unintelligible, but at least the country one is something that one can _imagine_ from their experience, if wrongly (my house consumption:country consumption = 1:population).

I bet few people on hackernews itself have any clue what the energy consumption of google might be, and have no way of relating to it.
It was a joke.

OTOH lightning is IMHO a joke as well, for many reasons. Funds need to be tied up, nodes generally need to be online, routing is a (mathematically) hard issue, and the channel open and close transactions (or 'add funds') would certainly become an issue on the main chain if lightning became popular.
> Being judgmental about how others use energy they pay for reeks of hypocrisy, virtue signaling and holier-than-thou attitude.

No, seeing a bunch of rich nerds wasting massive amounts of energy in a time of environmental crisis so they can make millions convincing people a store of value is actually a currency, and then getting mad about it, is not hypocritical.

> While not everybody agrees, this may be more important than countless other ways we use energy,

It's not. It's a massive waste. Stop killing the planet.
Working with Probabilistic Data Labels to Train a Classifier
Another discussion of the book on the BBC:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000r4tq

I used to think of "In Our Time" as the set of topics for which every educated person should have a basic understanding of the facts, hence hold an informed opinion, and be able to enter a meaningful discussion.

But now it is approaching ~900 episodes, so the subjects are necessarily becoming more obscure, but that also means there is occasionally a fascinating surprise.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl/episodes/player
I was expecting the last word of your post to be "public".
Please read. Nic Carter is a good place to start.
https://www.coindesk.com/what-bloomberg-gets-wrong-about-bit...

"First of all, Bitcoin and Visa are fundamentally different systems. Bitcoin is a complete, self-contained monetary settlement system; Visa transactions are non-final credit transactions that rely on external underlying settlement rails. Visa relies on ACH, Fedwire, SWIFT, the global correspondent banking system, the Federal Reserve and, of course, the military and diplomatic strength of the U.S. government to ensure all of the above are working smoothly.

Any energy comparison must take the above into account – including the externalities from the extraction of oil, which implicitly backs the dollar. As those who make this comparison inevitably fail to mention, the dollar’s ubiquity is partly due to a covert arrangement whereby the U.S. provides military support to countries like Saudi Arabia that agree to sell oil exclusively for dollars. It’s worth noting that the grossly oversized U.S. military, whose presence worldwide is necessary to backstop the international dollar system, is the largest single consumer of oil worldwide."
My preference is definitely to slant towards evening sunlight, so DST year round. (I actually live somewhere that should really be in the next timezone east anyway.) Though I'm at least somewhat sympathetic to people who don't want kids to be waiting for school buses or otherwise heading to school in pitch darkness in the winter.
So we'd build energy production away from where people live just to mine a digital currency?
Foreign ownership of property should be heavily taxed both at the transaction and in the form of an elevated property tax bracket for non-resident owners. In urban areas with cost of living problems, non-resident should probably be defined as someone not residing in the city or any corporation with >50% beneficial ownership not residing in the city. Otherwise non-resident could be defined as non-citizen.

I coined a term for this and similar things: "fiscal pollution." Fiscal pollution is essentially harmful investment or investment with strong negative externalities.
This is neat. Points for execution!

I did this for the first iteration of my side-project using my camera to "take a photo of a photo".

I did a side-by-side comparison of screenstab vs iphon6 taking pic of screen. original screenshot as control

Here: https://imgur.com/a/urRmG2S

WFH means we have time on our hands to do comparisons like this. LOL
Seems like it's a possibility at least. I'd be very very interested to know as well.
I think there's a really interesting topic here. What does it mean to understand? Many phenomena that humans can work with in practice are beyond individual understanding.

For instance, I doubt any single human fully groks the design and manufacture of modern CPUs, for instance, there are mathematical proofs that can only be verified by machine, etc.

We frequently say we understand some physical phenomenon when we have math that explains it. But complex systems seem difficult to describe in less than a simulation and all of those numeric details can't fit in one human head.

I suspect that as we explore complex phenomena like brains, ecosystems, economies and weather systems, that we'll have to get used to a 'proxy' understanding where we can work with them only through the use of models that don't quite fit in human brains.
I think that's exactly what 'keep[ing] building the native macOS application as a first-class citizen' means.
It occurs to me that there's a nice way to understand this from what's happened in Scala.

Scala has always had built-in syntax for pattern-matching, like:

foo match {
case bar => ...
case baz => ...
}

However, Scala also has a thing called `PartialFunction[InputType, OutputType]`, which is a function defined 'case by case' (it's "partial" because we're allowed to leave out some cases). This is essentially a re-usable set of cases, which we can apply to various values just like calling a function.

For example we can write:

val f: PartialFunction[A, B] = {
case bar => ...
case baz => ...
}

f(foo)

Scala also allows us to attach extra methods to certain types of value, via 'implicit classes' (which were added late on in Scala's history, although similar patterns were available before). As of Scala 2.13, the standard library attaches a method called `pipe` to values of every type. The `pipe` method simply takes a function and applies it to this/self. For example:

val f: PartialFunction[A, B] = {
case bar => ...
case baz => ...
}

foo.pipe(f)

However, now that we have these two things (`PartialFunction` and `pipe`), it turns out we don't need explicit syntax for `match` at all! We can always turn:

foo match {
case bar => ...
case baz => ...
}

Into:

foo.pipe({
case bar => ...
case baz => ...
})

Hence Scala, in a round-about way, has shown us that pattern-matching is essentially a function call.

When it comes to Python, it doesn't even need to be a discussion about block scope; it's equally valid to think of this as function scope (like Python already supports), where `case` acts like `lambda`, except we can define a single function as a combination of multiple `case`s (like in the Scala above).
Abolishing monarchy is OK, but stripping monarch their personal wealth and exiles them would be contrary to UK commitment to human rights.
>than getting every single person and company to adjust its schedule

but by using DST we are just pretending that we didn't ask people/companies to adjust their schedules. in reality they did, just the "clock" stayed the same.
HDR you want regardless and good luck getting anything less than 4k for cheaper than the 4k one anyways... but curved was always a joke. The curve was always overdone to the point it was worse distortion than a flat screen would produce unless you sat at an unrealistically close and precise location. Sit anywhere else and every pro of curved turns into a con. Even when you did sit in the right place manufacturing limitations meant it was only half curved anyways, the vertical was still flat.

Thankfully the curve fad is gone in TVs and the cheapest TVs come with 4k HDR anyways.
Again, valid useful discourse just gets downvoted nowadays. Not HN of past.

Usually constructive comments would get some actual criticism or disagreement rather than just downvotes.

I get it... BTC sour grapes just downvote. Same thing happened when I called out the GME fiasco when that was $300 a share.

But pro tip so you’re not sour grapes in the future. Put aside you’re egos, and instead of downvoting things here that scare you or you simply disagree with. Try using HN as a learning tool.

If you disagree with something.. comment first... then downvote. Discourse, discussion, debate. Those are the paths to learning and understanding.
ESP Deliverability Comparison
it's hard to believe there are people trying to justify otherwise too
Who is "he"? I lost who we are talking about here...
Maintain a Single Layer of Abstraction at a Time – OO Design Principles
Edit: not to mention that, unlike government agencies, Congress is extremely corrupt. What is to prevent polluters from simply buying off Congress?

Why would they be any less corrupt? What is the DEA's stance on cannabis again? No person or group is above being paid off, or acting in their own interests over those of the country. Which is why power should be spread out as much as possible, to mitigate the risk.
Facebook and Instagram No Longer Generate Link Previews (Only in Europe)
It’s crazy how obsessed people are with making excess consumption ‘green’.
The only fully functional crypto I know that could make Bitcoin obsolete is Nano. It does one thing, and does it well. Fast, feeless, green.
Ooo, seems we have a caching issue. Working on a fix...
That’s...what money does: evaluate supply vs demand, identifying the relationship of value between options, decided by those with a vested interest. Such a system inherently evaluates cost vs benefits in a holistic networked manner (vs wishful thinking by the uninvolved).
A key difference: replacing gas-powered cars with electric takes a carbon-emitting engine off the road, opting instead to potentially emit carbon at a centralized power plant (which is typically more efficient and emits less carbon per joule). Bitcoin increases electricity consumption without offsetting any carbon emissions elsewhere.
Advanced Kubernetes Pod Concepts Explained
Also to soak up all of that mining hardware -- oops, I mean the FSD ASICs -- and solar panels he has lying around :D
See this top level comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26087077
> So things that the majority don't like / understand should be illegal because they use resources?

If they produce a net negative for the majority and only benefit a small number of people, then yes.

We don't go around driving tanks, do we?

I love tanks, but there's a reason why we can't drive them to go to the mall.
Time calculation is deceptively hard.

Here's a fun one: are timezones a mathematical construct or a physical construct? By which I mean: is the core of the problem to get the math right or to account for the geography of the planet?

It's a trick question. Timezones are a political construct. If your software is using timezones, it needs to somehow(1) account for changes to law, internationally. Individual countries can choose, for example, to use or stop using daylight savings time. Some have even chosen to shift the longitudinal timezone they consider themselves to be in.

(1) practically speaking, relying on tzdata (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database) is a great solution to this problem for most use cases... But you need to keep your copy of it updated, because laws change.
I often wonder if the release of Zelle around 2017 (near instant, fee-free transactions between personal and business bank accounts between certain US banks) was motivated by a perceived crypto threat.
Sounds like https://www.ice.org/tiles/
> So things that the majority don't like / understand should be illegal because they use resources? You can't see the issue with that?

There is a difference between majority not liking and only like 0.2% of the world consuming more energy than _a whole country_. There are 5million bitcoin users, they are consuming more electricity than 44 million people's daily lives. Think about the scale of imbalance here.
satoshi obviously isn't part of the con. He would have sold a long time ago if that was the case.

It is the people who have latched on as "bitcoin evangelists" and are recruiting more people into the network to get the price to go up. Classic Ponzi scheme.
If I'm understanding the examples, it looks like (in general) commands such as `TZ=EST date` work as expected (i.e. you can set offset just using the offset code).

> But it is aware of it! You just told it

The user didn't intend to. Defining a new offset code should be explicit, not a silent fall-back when it's unable to find EDT.
> C++ offers direct, low-level control over memory, and C++ can be used to implement anything which can be implemented in Rust.

By this measure, anything that is higher level than manually flipping bits in a binary is an inferior language.
that's what half the blog posts are anyways a shallow attempt to promote something
> Asymmetric cryptography is a completely separate, much older technology that has nothing directly to do with cryptocurrencies.

It does, Bitcoin wouldn't work without it, the whole thing relies on cryptographic signatures.

> The "double spend" problem refers to a problem in distributed systems, not applied security.

Is it not both? It's a security issue present in distributed systems.
Hypothetically this could be amortized better by increasing the transactions per block. Just because Bitcoin was first doesn't mean it's the best wrt efficiency. PoW can be competitive with legacy infrastructure with good clearing design.
Explain Git with D3
I don't have a source, but the current block reward is $275,000 plus another 20% or so in transaction fees, and it stands to reason the energy cost of mining a block should converge to the block reward plus transaction fees.

You get about one block and 2000 transactions every ten minutes.
Is it illegal to go get tea with your mother somewhere? Today, Bitcoin is illegal to trade in some places.
Thanks for sharing, even though it's from 2017 it was an interesting read.
The python way makes autocomplete more practical
Note the "personal" qualifier in the comment.
Just because you are speculating doesn't mean other who also hold it are speculating. Personally, I hold it because I don't want my dollars to get perpetually diluted because of endless money printing, stimulus, bailouts, etc.

Also, Bitcoin has value and if you wanted, you unlock it and spend your money without even selling your asset, there was a discussion the other day about defi, highly recommend checking out MakerDAO if you want to have a practical use for your Bitcoins.
True, and honestly this can happen before they even get near the mining cap, since computational costs will likely be unsustainable before that.
I considered that, but I'm actually excited to learn macs and as the rest of the team uses macs, I don't want to be the sore thumb.
> This became a closely held secret in Facebook Ads leadership. We didn’t want to take any chance that word our this vulnerability could get back to Google.

Considering the tracking Google does with Chrome, I suspect they recognized the traffic still occurring over WebSQL and left it active for exactly this reason. It's highly unlikely that nobody at Google was able to recognize this. Alternatively, maybe Google didn't know about Facebook's reliance on it, but was aware of other services/corporations that still relied on it for some time, and waited until they had an alternative.
> Last time I tried to send significant funds from France to the UK, it took me a whole week of back and forth with the bank to complete all the AML/KYC paperwork.

How much time would it take to convert, transfer to a bank account AND withdraw that same amount of money from Bitcoin to plain FIAT?
Why are most commenters defending the stealing of trade secrets and classified information? Just focusing on the trade secret part, Would you be happy if you had a company and your employee helped their brother set up a competing company by giving them all your IP?
Some more useful links

Announce trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3F1vZYpH8c

Sample characters: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/learn/metahum...
The Lisperati1000: A Raspberry Pi Rig for Lisp Fans
A problem in a lot of cases is that for some people, the discipline is about casting spells as opposed to solving problems. It doesn't take a lot of these people to damage projects, but they exist independent of pattern books.

If I was going to complain about engineering hell, it'd be about how shallow we investigate these areas. We stop at the immediate technical events, or inappropriate technology choices, instead of getting to the motivations behind it. This gets into a qualitative area that HN readers tend to want to avoid, but these flaws are with the humans and their circumstances.
I don't understand what's this supposed to prove. Writing a softsynth with lots of voices isn't particularly demanding?
This comment will probably get buried but I wish someone would make something like coinmarketcap that showed how much energy was being used to secure each cryptocurrency.

If there were solid metrics, it'd help people who want to be more conscientious about where they put their money to actually do that.

Something like "coincarboncap".

A lot of cryptocurrencies don't use even a fraction of the energy bitcoin uses but there's no index to show that, so even if there were incentives for people to invest in energy efficient cryptocurrencies, how would they know which ones to go for?

The closest thing I can think of is whattomine. Maybe they'd be best equipped to build something like this, although I'm not sure if they'd have an interest in it.
Scale does not inherently excuse. Energy for gaming could be routed to feeding/warming the poor; should 100 die of starvation/hypothermia so that 1,000,000 can play Fortnite? do you really want to continue such reasoning?
Is everyone that uses USD complicit in the actions the US uses to ensure it’s the global default currency?

I don’t really think so, so I’m not sure how Bitcoin is functionally any different.
Is there a difference between package management for dynamic/static languages?
Because without this arbitrary distinction npm is pretty much around last place on a ranking between package managers.
Giving fine-grained permissions to sandboxed libraries is the way forward, and probably a really good use case for WASM.
This is basically how the WHOOP band works. Anyone with an Apple Watch curious to see can find your tracked HRV in the Health App on your iPhone.

However, looking at heart-rate (HR) itself will be misleading. Big swings in HR or high HR in general usually misinterpreted as having high HRV, when it's often the exact opposite. HRV is a measure of the variability of 1/(inter-beat time). So it's measuring the time-average of really small variations from a set point.

And counterintuitively, HRV is usually highest when the sympathetic (flight or fight) nervous tone and HR is lower. In those situations, the parasympathetic control dominates, and small wiggles caused by "noise on the wire" conducted directly to the heart's pacemaker via the vagus nerve increases HRV. Often times this is when HR is lower, and because higher HR or spikes in HR are often caused by increased sympathetic tone, this leads to a blunting of this "parasympathetic noise".

Source: https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/physiol.000...
This isn't exactly an rebuttal to your argument, but 74% of energy that Bitcoin used to power it's network was renewable energy [1], that's more than you can say for most countries. While the network itself is inefficient, I think the philosophy of "why bitcoin", is always amiss in these arguments. Everything can be made more efficient.

Edit: 39% of energy used is renewable, not really sure how that doesn't matter.

[1] https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/36672/renewable-energy-....
How come so few Silk Road market place vendors were arrested if it decreased privacy? Many people on the SR were just everyday users. I don't think the argument that it's a step down in privacy is valid at all.
There's a third motivation other than the speculation on a value rise that "make money" implies (and which, if the BTC price keeps rising, may well turn out to be wise): get customers.

Let's be honest: most people from the early Bitcoin days, or even those who entered at 1k or bought the dip after the crash three years ago, who have enough Bitcoin for a Tesla would have to pay a lot of taxes if they converted it to dollars. Buy a Tesla with them? No way for the IRS to notice that unless they audit you.

Tesla is offering people with an interest in tax cheating essentially an easy way to turn the 2k investment of four or five years ago to a luxury vehicle.
It's a simple rule: Default arguments are evaluated at function definition time (when the interpreter reaches the 'def' statement) not at the time the function is called.

It's not a "module-level dict", you can create functions inside other functions:

def foo():
def bar(a={}):
...
return bar

Each instance of bar gets its own dict when you run foo() and the "def bar(...): ..." statement gets executed. The dict is packaged up inside the function object (sort of like a closure except that the dict and it's name aren't from the enclosing scope of the function, and of course you can "shadow" it by passing in an argument for the parameter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(computer_programming) )
What's crazy about it?
that’s just a limitation of webpack