skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would agree with your first point, but increasing power consumption to accelerate green transition makes no sense to me.

Green energy is a better solution to energy shortage, it's not something you'd want if there was no need for extra energy. The green energy industry captures financial investments, generates waste and contributes to global warming.

To go ad absurdum, wouldn't increasing CO2 emissions also accelerate the green transition?

Of course if Bitcoin can provide a substantial benefit world-wide then it's energy footprint can be deemed acceptable. I don't have enough experience with it to make such claim but I'm worried about increased fees and transaction times.
Ok, I have to admit that I am one of those people who knew about BTC very, very early but never bought any. Now, of course I should have mined at least 100 back in the days, but anyways.

The reason I have never mined nor bought into it is that I still, to this day struggle to come up with a real reason to do so.

Am I getting too old? Do I not see the "huge potential" what it may become? Don't I want to get freaking rich? I simply can't answer what BTCs and other crypto coins are actually good for. Can someone help me out here?
I feel this pain.

And whats always shocking every time I need to contact a large company via some fast response required, its never available.. Phone calls are passed around department to dept that cant deal with significant situations, email support takes far too long, live chat rarely exists.

It's mind blowing how such large companies don't have these services but at the end of the day it's a numbers game for them.

There just are more people that don't complain and their bottom like is still fine.

Really really frustrating as there is no even recommended customer service requirements for companies. I'm sure in the above case there is money lost for this action by the competitor. Will the OP be reimbursed ? Of course not.
Money is a technology, that's all. A technology can be developed and maintained to serve a specific purpose. It happens that major government money systems have been managed to serve purposes such as: Temporary store of value, convenient medium of exchange, and instrument of economic policy.

Like any technology, it works or it doesn't, and people will use the one that works the best for them if they have a choice. For instance people in some countries use their local currency for daily purchases, but store their wealth in instruments that are valued in dollars, euro's, etc. Some people will break the laws of their own countries to lay their hands on those dollars or euro's.

Money is speculative inasmuch as its value is still relative to other things such as stocks, gold, and bitcoins. Holding dollars instead of gold on any given day is a speculation. In a relatively free economy, there's no such thing as opting out of speculation.

Bitcoins are unique inasmuch as they are designed to exist without any deliberate purpose being imposed on them. The only way a government can manipulate the value of bitcoins, that I can think of, is to subsidize the electricity for bitcoin mining.
I hope this blog post gets archived properly. I havent seen such a perfect representation of cancel culture era content creation in a while. Its all here guys!
The question is, will people run to it as a safe haven in the event of a huge stock market crash, or away from it? Nobody knows for sure. It's a game of chicken - not having the heritage of gold, I don't think it'd take much for people to get scared and realise that all they have are a load of strings of characters (scarce or not) and want to dump it. After all, it's crashed before.

Until then, it's potentially a great investment in today's climate (especially if you don't care about the climate).
A gas oven is not 100% efficient. If yours says it is, it's a lie sold to you by gas oven manufacturers. It's 100% efficient compared to some previous oven sold.

Simple proof by example; if the exhaust air of your gas oven is warmer than ambient energy, it cannot be 100% efficient. (A few other laws of thermodynamics also play in here)

A gas turbine has the advantage that it can use higher temperature gradients within, as well as high speeds and other mechanisms to take advantage of larger burnoffs of gas.

A gas turbine is 60% efficient at base load and largely will be able to maintain 60% efficiency while being maintained at this load. A gas oven has a rough efficiency of around 70-90 % in AFUE. AFUE does not measure actual thermal efficiency, you can usually subtract between 10-35% depending on your boiler system, which ends you between... 40-60% just like a gas turbine in a worst case. The better cases of 60-80% are unlikely to be a steady state efficiency and more likely to be achieved if you have a boiler with great heat capacity that can hold onto the heat for longer. The efficiency here is ruined by ignition each time the furnace has to start running.

Turns out you can't cheat thermodynamics, but you can certainly market like you did.
I have to build some CSS libraries that sadly use npm for building. The way I approach this is through rubber gloves: I create custom docker containers with npm and a specific set of dependencies, frozen in time. This way I can at least get reproducible and reliable builds.

This doesn't mean I'm not vulnerable to dependency attacks, but it at least limits the window, because I update these dependencies very, very rarely.
Ray Dalio – What I Think of Bitcoin
How do we determine how much/little energy usage is acceptable though? Is it okay for Google to use about as much energy as Tunisia? Maybe Bitcoin provides more economical value than Argentina? How much energy has and is being expended during the mining of all the gold that is just being used as store of value?

(Mostly playing devil's advocate here. I would personally be for strong carbon taxes on electricity.)
Can't such a blockchain structure exist where there's no transfer of wealth from weighted from the later adopters to the earlier adopters?
I coined the nickname "Deep Crack" for the of EFF's DES cracker that John Gilmore developed (which was agitprop intended to expose a deep crack in the US government's export control policies, with a nod to Deep Blue and Deep Thought):

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

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/humor/deep-crack.txt

When somebody finally makes a quantum computer encryption cracker, I hope they call it "Deep Crackpot"!
The problem is that you need to "fiddle with the clocks" in a coordinated way. Schools can't shift around starting times asynchronously with the many businesses where parents work for example.
It’s good for telling other people to buy more and checking price daily.
The fundamental problem is that with PoS it's possible to dispose of your holdings yet still retain voting power (in the past, from the blockchain's perspective), whereas the same can't be done with PoW's mining equipment.
> Bitcoin is mostly mined in areas overflowing with excess green energy

I thought it’s mostly mined in China?
> a software company isn't immune to software bugs

This was not the problem though. The problem was that they released the game regardless of those issues, and publishing a game that was not finished.
> Bitcoin is mostly mined in areas overflowing with excess green energy

Source? I thought it’s mostly mined in China?
Can't wait for the (American/Chinese/Russian) secret 4000 qubit computer to make a mockery of that ledger and all the culty idiots who bought into it.

There's a 0.9+ correlation between Tesla and BTC. If we're not near the end of the bubble, we're definitely not more than a few cycles away.
because gold is useful, bitcoin only has speculative value
Hmmmm, is this is a man bashing theme ?

Anyone can post images and text, I think we need more proof this isn't a hit job . . . .
Even with drip coffee (that's what I drink mostly) you can vary a lot how strong you make it.

I didn't mean my observation as some sort of criticism. It is just an observation. Every person should just drink it how they like it.
I mean the only reason you own a house is because the government tracks the transaction.
> no single holder owns more than 1% of ETH

You mean no single wallet?
I can only agree. Compared to other languages I find Python increasingly difficult to reason about, mainly due to its dynamicity. If the language complexity increases as well from now on I don't think I will use Python unless absolutely necessary.

Meanwhile, Julia supports pattern matching due to macros: https://github.com/kmsquire/Match.jl
It is crypto 1.0. And it can be overtaken.

The problem is (and I have been involved - most often unsuccessfully) that building anything in this ecosystem requires a lot of understanding of digital signatures, distributed system, economics, game theory, security & quality, trustless ecosystems, incentives, possibilities of players with big budgets (PoS - 51% bought by some government)/great developers (bots frontrunning hacking of ERC20 contracts)/criminals (you have strong encryption, but still can be blackmailed/beaten).

Bitcoin is one of a few currencies that deliver what it promises. It doesn't promise a lot, but what it promises, it does. Others promise a lot but underdeliver and later abandon it. At this moment, I think Bitcoin delivers 100% of what I expect from it. Monero is potentially better, but underdelivers. Ethereum is potentially better, but underdelivers. Others are either just copycats or completely fail.
The counter-counter-argument is that it's volatile because it's still in its infancy. Gold used to be that volatile too, when wars were commonplace and new sources were found quite often. It can still swing significantly.

I've come around to the idea. I don't hold any bitcoin anymore, and the best chance to get rich is gone, but I can see a future where something digital (hence fundamentally ethereal) acts as dense and largely unregulated store of value, for the people who need it. In the same way the drug trade currently uses artworks and commodities when it needs to move value across national boundaries, they can use hashes or something like that. Transaction costs to convert those from/to cash are actually higher and slower than bitcoin will likely ever be (i.e. a week or two, and several hundrend USDs, will still be acceptable).

We'll never pay taxes or coffees with bitcoin, or hold savings accounts, but it will still act as a commodity.
I'm not sure I follow (and this week, timezones and time handling are really important for my job, so I really want to understand)!

If a user provides a time of 11/7/2021 1:50 AM America/New_York, how does the library determine if it's a -5 or -4 offset given that's when daylight savings time ends? I believe that's the ambiguity GP is referring to.

I'm trying to align time across a few systems I work with. One provides a GMT time with an offset (clean and useful), another system reports timezones and local time, and yet another system has no idea when it moves between time zones, but reports time based on a single timezone consistently.

Not dealing with multiple timezones in the past, it reminds me of Tom Scott's video on handling time and timezones, summarized at the end as roughly "Go find someone who built a library for handling times, thank them profusely, use their open source code, give them credit, and never worry about it again."

https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY
>realize the massive net benefits it offers to society

Surely you can list some of them.
Tesla tested the waters with Elon's tweets and it shook the Bitcoin and sent it to all time highs, then Tesla bought large amount of Bitcoin and now the market exploded even further. It is a marketing gimmick, true, but it is making Bitcoin more volatile and unstable, while Tesla hoards more money from Bitcoin!
What Makes Excel's Lambda Functions so great (and what doesn't)?
This was my first thought as well, I would not be happy if people started to use my business name in similar-looking domains. Also, you have to defend your trademark.
No, I know. I just wonder, if this one is the last.

I am following bitcoin for 11 years now. The hype seems to have vanished, it's still not useful much apart from speculation and pump and dump... But now, we also really, really need to think about climate change and wasting energy no matter the source, doesn't appear sensible to me.

I think this bubble may go still a lot higher, but I am skeptical, if it will ever recover after the next crash. This is important, because it has implications for those buying in high(-ish). I think this crash could be very different. Different psychology, different positions exiting.
What is the question? Huawei is a great tech company no matter if there's any truth in the accusations levelled upon them by the US. They are are pretty big user of Rust and are even co-organizer of Rust Events, like Rust China Conf. I see it as a good thing that it isn't the usual FAANG being behind it.
If they find time changes disruptive, changing schedules instead of time is going to be equally disruptive.
She actually makes over $3 million now. https://www.zdnet.com/article/endangered-firefox-the-state-o...
It could, but why? The two things that BTC grants are trustlessness and the inability to enact fiscal policy. If BTC just becomes the backing for institutions, trustlessness is gone. So then it is a question of whether a backing unit that supports fiscal policy is better than one that doesn't. I think I know what institutions would prefer.
Snapchat urges users to remove unwanted connections
Ask HN: What annoys you the most about the content of job postings?
My understanding is that there's a surplus of hydroelectric dams, that were built far from any reasonable amount of electricity demand, which is why there's excess green energy in (parts of) China.
> What incentive will there be for the community to continue verifying transactions after all the bitcoins are mined?

How are these questions still being asked, and more amazingly, still being upvoted? First off, there will not be a time when "all the bitcoins are mined". Mining rewards are on a geometric curve that approaches 21 million but never touches it. Second, transaction fees also go to miners, so even when mining emissions are negligible, transaction fees will keep the miners incentivized to keep mining.

This is all pretty much in the intro of the whitepaper, and the first thing you should learn if you spend 5 minutes looking into this technology.
The economical and political power of the US is the reason for that. And the military might is what backs up the political power.

The same pattern repeats itself in history: those with the biggest army popularize their culture, language and coin. The Roman Empire is a good example.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemony
From a thermodynamic standpoint, yes, but nobody with an honest face will claim that makes measuring wasted energy as efficiency a bad measurement.

In cases of heating, resistive is 100% efficient as you loose none of the energy put in to waste heat, only effective heat, while a gas oven or heater will loose heat to it's exhaust gases, thereby being less efficient.

I wouldn't say this is "high school level" circumstances. The waste heat in the wires of your house feeding into the heater will also heat up, no?

The only energy lost is outside the system we're trying to measure, hence, not relevant.
It's completely meaningless because GWh aren't interchangeable. A hydro o thermal energy source too far from inhabited places could be used for bitcoin mining and its CO2 footprint would be near zero.

I'm not saying you are wrong but this requires a far more exhaustive analysis.
Announcing Remotion – a framework for making videos in React
> If civilization collapses then I'm pretty sure bitcoins would be worthless

If all civilisations collapse, yes. But if your civilisation collapses, a neutral store of value is easier to own than e.g. a portfolio of foreign bonds in a handful of offshore accounts.
The sutdio Catherine West worked for stopped using Rust and went back to C++ fyi.

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/atyzz4/halley_...
A solution is to require that the DMCA notice contains proof of ownership of the copyright (or proof that you are acting as an agent of the verified copyright holder).
Looking at the transaction amounts isn’t very informative, as one is primarily used as a speculative asset, the other two are actual payment methods. A better comparison would be looking at daily trading volume on the stock market.

To help put the difference more in scope, Visa and MasterCard each did over 100 billion payment transactions (nearly 300B combined) in 2019[0], yet Bitcoin still is over 3 orders of magnitude lower at around ~130 million (350k daily average x 365 days). The key distinction is the fact that the average Bitcoin transaction (currently ~$100k) is far higher than the average credit card transaction.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/261327/number-of-per-car...
We've already destroyed the planet through greed (let's be real, we're not going to fix climate change). If you were a writer you would be writing history, not speculative fiction.
I came to this thread exactly because I wondered if it could be the frito lay contest from Real Genius. I've seen that movie more than any other.
I haven't received my official enthusiast talking points memo, but the obvious solution was proposed years ago: off chain transaction that use smart contracts for settlement on the public ledger. I vaguely remember "store of value" being used for what would more accurately be described as "trust anchor" or "root authority".
> But you can achieve similar results in vim/emacs with more research, fiddling with config and manually installing deps.

And some people find this fun and enjoyable, and that’s okay. Others find it tedious and obnoxious and that’s okay too. Thankfully there is something for everybody.
'easily' seems quite an assumption. It would depend on the change. Some changes would require giant rewrites.
> Why does Amazon not have any decent phone support or a dedicated representative that could help with issues like this? If you call, you’re going to talk to someone overseas who has no authority to help in any way, a complete waste of time.

This sounds an awful lot like the experience of the Terraria developer banned from Google earlier this week.
Determining fully decentralized consensus between arbitrary participants (or at least one of the best approximations of that). In Bitcoin that consensus is limited to transactions, in Ethereum with smart contracts it can be used for much more (though that might require additional layers of incentivation to work properly, depending on the use case).
I think that you miss the tradeoff. By using so much electricity, we have:

1) It's not being stored (where they do). In some places they pump water or use other methods, which help to aliviate demand/offer tension when needed.

2) It's actually pushing prices up in the demand side, which means it's making everything else more expensive.

3) If Bitcoin really becomes widely adopted, this problem will increase by who knows how much.

In a setting where we're worried about the impact of our energy pipeline, the use of bitcoins goes the other way around.
When I Woke Up to ₹ 28,000 Bill from Google Cloud Not Knowing Why
A story about the morning when I woke up to find that I was charged ₹ 28,000 by Google Cloud, with no prior memory of having used anything on Google Cloud, except some firebase projects which were years old.
Exactly! Seems like your knowledge about Chinese electricity might be outdated.
Loud yelling or singing has been one of the most effective ways to spread the virus indoors.
Parklink Development Limited | Full Stack Developer (PHP/Python) | REMOTE

Parklink's flagship product "Rebadge" is a patented RFID duplication system built for locksmiths and security professionals.

We're "real-world" fullstack: We've designed, manufactured and distributed thousands of machines world-wide. Hundreds of thousands of people rely on Rebadge to make copies of their badges, and the number increases every day.

Working for us means you'll be able to flex your development muscles, and you'll have a real impact on a real product that exists in the real-world, used by thousands of people every day. It's an exciting possibility.

We're looking for a fully-remote Full Stack Developer specialised in PHP (for our backend services) and Python (for the embedded devices).

We're looking in the EU timezone: GMT+0 / GMT+3.

Full information here: https://jobs.github.com/positions/794188b6-25ba-4432-80ad-e6...
Rust isn't some US-only gathering. If only one time-zone should be used it logically should be GMT.
One thing I don’t understand is how will gold retain its value during a societal collapse when most of the industrial demand - and the trading/insuring/transporting infrastructure around it - disappears? It doesn’t really make sense as a post-apocalyptic currency since most people won’t have any and it’s utility to help you survive is limited.
CEO Anjali Sud is reinventing Vimeo
How do you know there isn't a russian doll scenario of sock puppets all the way down, and some other hedge fund isn't going to profit in a few months from all of this on a trade we never heard about? After all, the hedge fund industry as a whole does better, not worse, when there is lots of churn, even when that churn means places with names like Melvin every now and then go under. I admit this scenario is not likely, but still, the should statements can be misleading, and I don't recommend them.
Ah, it doesn't work on my Firefox :(

> WebGL warning: <Create>: AllowWebgl2:false restricts context creation on this system

Works fine on Chrome though, looks cool - couple of things;

- I found the the scroll to move very strange to use, click and drag would be nicer

- When I changed the blur intensity, it took over the mouse movements and used that to move the image rather than scroll - until I clicked on the image again
What's the practical difference?
To put this in a slightly larger context, here are three articles that look at the history of open source foundations and compare them:

https://opensource.com/business/16/2/bright-lines

https://towardsdatascience.com/the-unsung-heroes-of-modern-s...

https://livablesoftware.com/study-open-source-foundations/
Thank you for the thorough feedback!

Ultimately, most of this comes down to your risk tolerance - how much is quality covid protection worth to you? I agree that looks are more likely to be the barrier there than $85, which as you mentioned is high relative to cheap disposable masks but low relative to how bad covid is. Regarding looking weird, I can only point to our product reviews where users consistently find that they are, to their surprise, not treated like aliens: https://narwallmask.com/products/narwall-mask#reviews

Re; filtration, we link to a test data sheet showing that the filter material is tested by Nelson Labs, a major lab testing company. I'm not sure where you get the 0.4um or 1um numbers from - the particle size we test to is 0.1um, and the viruses used in Nelson Labs' VFE testing are much smaller than that (google "Nelson Labs VFE").

Back in the 70s or so, they thought 0.3um was the most difficult size particle to filter, which is why the standards test for that; since then, studies have shown that 0.1um is actually slightly more difficult, but everything in that range is near the bottom of the parabolas and tends to be very close.

I can try to link to some papers on this later but I'm on mobile right now.

Our size guide is next to the size selector on our website; I'll try to make that easier to find.
99% of everyone does exactly this, though. Partly because nobody has any fucking idea what they are doing, and because this is what all the documentation everywhere tells you to do, so that's what the guy who gets tasked with setting up the CI build does...
The government's of the world seem concerningly content underplaying this.

I'm glad I don't have kids.