skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's not often if you're driving around country Australia you see swagmen these days. Imagine spending more than half of your life walking. Grant Cadoret decided one day to pack up his life into a backpack and start walking.

I do similar stuff on and off, though not at that scale (trips lasting up to a year when I was young but now they're more like 2-4 months max with a year or more break in between).

what I know from personal experience is that it's incredibly difficult to stop. the routine somehow becomes all consuming and takes over your life.

a farmer once told me after losing his cow that timing for finding it is critical because leaving them isolated from the herd they will get used to it and then have problems fitting in from that point onward. they lose their ability to be part of the group and do no longer need the herd. perhaps there is a similar thing with humans.

If you successfully cover 1000 miles across a terrain alone, and found a way to not "just survive" but "thrive" it can be hard to stop (especially if there are no kids or family to return to). Why not make it 2000 miles? Why stop at all and instead break a rekord? Getting off my butt and go traveling is IMO a lot harder than stopping yourself. The isolation changes you so much you will come home crazy (you will need some way to reintegrate yourself into civilization. but there is also a beauty in not being understood since nobody can take it and the memory and experience is your treasure. there is no point of sharing it too much. even if you tried explaining it people wouldn't get it. they might get what you have seen but not how it changed you. so just enjoy it as something that belongs only to you and that only you can enjoy).

damn, now I wrote myself into a state of mind where I want to pack my rucksack and leave at once. perhaps a pandemic is a good chance to disappear for a couple of months. Europe is still too cold for now but perhaps in a month is a good time ...
It's certainly true for most of us but not the names the op mentioned.

I would argue the real ego resistance is in not accepting such people exist.
The Unknown Comic on The Gong Show, with a paper lunch bag over his head.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BBZVQ4zBcU&ab_channel=RBArc...
See also:

Robyn Davidson (born 6 September 1950) is an Australian writer best known for her 1980 book Tracks, about her 2,700 km (1,700 miles) trek across the deserts of Western Australia using camels. Her career of travelling and writing about her travels has spanned 40 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robyn_Davidson
I just happen to be working on JSON parsing today. What a mess. People don't even follow what is already there. I've seen several 'JSON' data files like this:

{<object>}
{<object>}

That isn't valid JSON, is it? The Qt JSON parser doesn't handle it.
> Making the proof of work do “useful” things would lower the cost of said work thus lowering the barrier of entry to an attack.

How does this follow? If the work is so universally useful that it lowers the cost of the work, it lowers the cost for everyone. Not just "attackers", but "defenders" as well.

As it happens, Bitcoin miners mine not out of the goodness of their hearts but for financial profit. Bitcoin POW is "useful" to them: It gives them more money than they put in. They do it precisely because the cost of said work is lower than the returns.
It seems easy in hindsight.
JSON is a data format. You actually want strict formalism in a data format, because the integrity of the data matters more than flexibility.

Comments would only serve to make humans edit the file by hand more than they do now, and to maintain it like a snowflake. You should not be maintaining your data in JSON, it should only be a momentary stop along the way to a more robust data storage system [with a schema].

Optional end commas would only encourage people to use shitty hacks to try to craft JSON without a real parser or encoder, which would 1000% end up with broken JSON all the time, which would then force vendors to support shitty broken JSON.

There's a reason it's designed like it is. Cutting corners is not going to result in better outcomes.
So there are 34B outstanding USDT right now. In the documents I see talk about some 850M USD is missing. Are all the other ≈ 33B USDT backed?

Will we only know that on the first report they obliged to do each quarter? Will those reports be made public?

I'm confused what to make of this.
(for anything "doable") learn by doing. Practice is the best teacher.
Are humans not part of nature?
NASA’s Martian helicopter runs Linux
You need to be able to run your system
> But if everyone had one, then stuck in traffic again.

Not if the lanes, or the rules for existing lanes, change somewhat.

I love these small cars and see them all around where I live, some even smaller than the modern tuk tuks that we get from China.

I have looked online at some cool designs I've seen and most are in the $1000-$1500 range new. That sure beats a 2000+ lbs hunk of metal that is so prohibitively expensive to buy, maintain, refuel, and store that only 1/3 of Americans actually own a car, while living in the land of highways and sprawl.
Launch HN: Abacum (YC W21) – Easy collaboration and reporting for finance teams
Hi HN!

We're Jorge and Julio, cofounders of Abacum (https://www.abacum.io/). We're not sure how many fintech geeks like us are on HN but we're very excited to launch to you guys anyway!

Abacum makes it easier for Finance teams to access real-time data, collaborate and generate reports. Think of having all the operational and financial data modeled in one place, and of the Finance team easily sharing and collecting information for other teams to make faster, better decisions.

Scale ups have unique finance needs. First, they have spent the last years growing unnaturally fast, held together by a mixture of google sheets, csv files, a disconnected tech stack and a lot of copy paste. Second, growing 4x a year means that historical data is out of date within 3 months. Finally, with so many channels to stay connected, it's impossible to find where the Tech Lead shared that key assumption for the board forecast. Both Jorge and I have lived these experiences - we've spent too many long nights and days in number-crunching, without the proper time to analyze the data and to provide insights, becoming the key business partner we wanted. So yes, in the middle of the lockdown with 3 children each decided to leave everything to build the product we wish we had!

Abacum can now connect to any data source, update a business plan automatically and give you finance specific tools to help you do what you need to. Think performance and pivot tables, cohort and waterfall graphs, and ways to easily collaborate. Our engine provides the flexibility of excel while minimizing human errors, reducing fears of breaking "the model" and scaling up to and past IPO size.

We're big believers that collaboration, and not the business model, needs to be placed at the center of the product. Everything we built in Abacum is easily shareable and built to be easily understood by non-finance professionals. Ask (or remind) others in your company to collaborate, be it for updating forecasts or commenting on reporting decks, right where the needed context is. We've also set up different workflows for customers to easily gather the data bottom-up from different teams.

We are constantly looking to improve Abacum, so we'd love to hear any feedback, questions or wisdom you have to share with us! We'd love to show you (or anybody that you think may be interested) a 10' demo of our product - please let us know and we'll reach out. Thanks so much, HN!
>All of us are replaceable

This sounds more like a reason to unionize than a reason to celebrate a firing.
Meanwhile, a group of hackers claim to have penetrated Bitfinex/Tether's bank Deltec:

https://deltecexposed.medium.com/deltec-bank-trust-and-their...

Grab some popcorn, the show is only getting started.
Nuclear on a scale needed to replace fossil fuels is also a technology that is not mature. In particular, it would require such an expansion that a full breeding cycle would soon be necessary.

The deepest flaw of nuclear is that it has failed to show good experience effects. This alone marks it as a doomed technology, when it is facing competition with strong experience effects. Unless this changes, things will only get worse for nuclear, not better.
wait.. this seems contradictory to this -- https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/95207/bitfinex-tether-ne...
Same here. Happy user of self hosted nextcloud through the nextcloudpi project. It's been so care free I don't remember the setup details any more :)
HN hug of death?

https://web.archive.org/web/20210222123752/https://nextcloud...
تحميل برنامج هابي مود 2021 Happy Mod الأصلي لتنزيل الالعاب مجانا
MongoDB Sharding and Replication 101 – Tutorial
There have also been plans to do this in Finland, but most of what I can find is either marketing material or news articles discussing plans [1, 2] rather than actual achievements, so I'm not sure what actually became of it.

There's a brochure from the national innovation fund that mentions a town actually covering about half of its heating needs with heat from a data center, though. [3]

Swedish telco Telia also has had similar plans for a data center in Helsinki, Finland, and their website says their "goal is to recover and reuse all the heat produced" [4], but I'm not sure how much weight to give that since proclaiming a goal only costs a few words. It would be nicer if they said what they're actually doing at the moment even if it were much less than "all of it".

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/from-deep-underground-data-cen...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/20/helsinki...

[3] https://www.sitra.fi/en/cases/district-heating-from-data-cen...

[4] https://www.telia.fi/business/telia-helsinki-data-center
My god - what a privileged twat.

"100$ in RAM" - maybe learn what its like to live on most of the planet instead of your tiny walled garden.

There is a way to limit this, and also to provide feedback to the user about what is going on such that the system never swaps or freezes. Instead we get lazy intellectual excuses from the likes of such as yourself.
Did you mean lld ?
I'm not really sure why Musk is promoting it though.

Profit. Look up "pump and dump".
I always read the comments here before the article. Usually the comments tell me everything I need to know and are more interesting. Most of the time I never end up clicking on the actual article because I've gotten enough info from the comments.
Stocks are liquid assets by definition.
This is the most important part of the essay:

Uncertainty remains, research sometimes conflicts and biological pathways aren’t always clear. There are competing theories about whether the sperm count decline is real and what might cause it and about why girls appear to be reaching puberty earlier, and it’s sometimes unclear whether an increase in male genital abnormalities reflects actual rising numbers or just better reporting.

You should maintain a very low prior probability of this being true without more information. Remember correlation usually != causation

https://www.gwern.net/Causality

There are a lot of other possible causes for all the these declines. (obesity and lower physical activity being only the most likely-seeming to me)
no evidence. looks like some random post.
The price of bitcoin dropped substantially yesterday.

I wonder who was trading on this information before release...
My dad called this an American screwdriver.
Don't heat pumps work like a fridge/AC but backwards? That is, compressing the air inside to generate heat, then decompressing it outside where it gets extremely cold and is warmed up by the relatively hotter outside air?

If so I fail to see how cryptomining features in there.
Cell phones need high resolution to render crisp text, not for games
Honestly, this is kind of a nothingburger. The press release seems to merely reinforce what was an open secret in the cryptocurrency world, which is that Bitfinex and Tether have played fast and loose with whatever reserves they received for their Tether issuance. Which is, of course, utterly unremarkable to anyone who knows anything about how financial sausage is really made.

Bitfinex and Tether are shady. Caveat emptor, and carry on hodling.
I for one believe that the weight/power/size/speed tradeoffs have a lot more to do with:

- the need to have place for kids with safety seats in the back

- the need to have place for a stroller/a snowboard/a few suitcases/something else in the trunk

- the need to use the car to travel at highway speeds and dynamics at least occasionally.

I don't see any of this being changed by having an EV. Even as a second car. Especially the last point.
The article suggests otherwise.

A total of 34 SNES games used the SA-1 “Super Accelerator” chip, which features much faster clock speeds and RAM

and

Each conversion, Vilela says, takes over a hundred hours of work reverse-engineering existing code, remapping RAM, and adjusting the game to make sure it doesn’t run too quickly on the SA-1. In this case, Vilela estimates they touched some 90% of the game’s code.
I literally saw this 2 days ago when watching a new series on Netflix called 'Behind her eyes'. Maybe you will like it!
The problem is that AI etichs research is an esetoric academic field that has little real value in indistry. I will explain.

Take the famous paper the article mentions. I read the paper. It's full of nonsense. It talks about environmental costs of training huge models. Give me a break. Then the problem with the biased datasets. Yes, everyone knows if you train on racist text you gonna get a racist LM. AI researchers are not stupid. They don't need etichs research to figure this out. The paper even gives an example of an Arab guy who got arrested because the Israeli police used an MT system that made a mistake in translation. The problem is not AI, the problem is the stupidity of the Israeli police who didn't verify the translation before arresting someone (he got released of course). Image recognition is another issue AI etichs like to bring up. "A black man was falsy identified!!". But when Yann Lecun said it's a training data problem the AI etichs researchers exploded. "No! AI models are racist!!". Etc.

Now, if you have to work with a biased dataset, then ethics/fairness research might have some value in guiding you on how to build more fair models. But in industry and esp companies like Google, cannot take chances and almost always resort to data as the solution.
If I'm reading the settlement correctly, Bitfinex will now have even less USD to back Tethers, since they'll have to wire an $18,500,000 transfer to the State of New York.
> Edit: more to the point, until Victorian times, Muslims were most commonly referred to as Mohammedans because the English-speaking world just assumed Islam is to Muhammad as Christianity is to Jesus Christ.

People might have thought that way about Muslims (I'm actually quite sure that they did), but the term alone doesn't support that at all: Christian reformation movements that wouldn't dare to consider their namesake a prophet, much less something more deic (is that even a word?) are routinely referred to by the name of some person who is connected with the theological delta from where they split off. Lutherans surely didn't extend the trinity into a quad for example.
The NYAG investigation is about what happened up to 2019 or so. What has happened since (which includes printing 33 of those 34 billion) is a separate matter, and NYAG is basically saying it's irrelevant because nobody in NY should be able to use Tether/Bitfinex anymore.
Then what is your distribution then?

Those exceptional individuals are incredibly rare, like one or two in a generation. So you need to be Shannon-likes to be not replaced by some middle manager in a big corporate? Emm, if someone were this accomplished, why would they care about one employment? That is the wrong question to ask.

Truth is, if Google thought they were not replaceable, it would not fire them this easily.
Meanwhile, daily Tether volume is $170B. The entire crypto ecosystem is reliant upon the Tether scam.
It matters because it leads you to overestimate the energy needed. It does not take 1 J of renewable energh to replace 1 J of coal.

And it's not just the electricity sector where this matters. A battery vehicle uses much less energy that a gasoline vehicle, because the latter has maybe 25% average thermal efficiency (that varies with details, of course). It applies to any industrial process using anything below arc furnace level heat: heat can be generated by heat pumps (compress argon to the desired temperature, extract the heat, then expand the cooled argon maintaining its temperature with low grade waste heat to recover some of the work.)

About the only place it doesn't apply is if the electricity is used to make synfuels (aviation fuel, for example) or in chemical processes where the fossil fuels were used directly (hydrogen for ammonia synthesis).
Books recommended by the world's top investors, entrepreneurs, and thinkers
Feels like the NYAG preferred to take an easy win over fully exposing the fraudulent scheme. But I guess in the grand scheme of things it's better to get $18M for state coffers now than be another bag holder when Tether inevitably combusts.
The article is a good overview, but I don't think saying that Gebru was fired is accurate. This fact is commonly repeated, but I believe she resigned.
I just don't get the logic behind going for PoW for Siacoin than going PoS. If people have to invest in hardware already, then why make them invest in even more unrelated hardware.
If A and B made the same discovery independently, that is evidence that A was replaceable, but that C built on D is not evidence that C was replaceable.
After Blackout, Questions Emerge on Future Greening of Texas’s Grid
Interesting thesis. Is it me or does the author compare Gebru to Einstein?
Cryptocurrency isn’t the only way to escape USD inflation. Investors have been investing to avoid inflation long before Bitcoin was invented.

Investing in virtually any asset other than cash will, almost by definition, shield you from inflation. Inflation is an increase in asset prices, resulted in reduced buying power. You only need to invest in assets (stocks for example) and minimize holdings in cash if your goal is simply to avoid losing buying power of your cash. Cryptocurrency currently functions as a speculative instrument, not a stable store of value.

Cryptocurrency in general is only deflationary if we pretend only a single cryptocurrency exists and ignore all of the increasingly brazen financial instruments offered by exchanges. As it stands, the ever expanding list of crypto currencies, NFTs, crypto lending products, and new crypto currencies represents a general inflation in the cryptocurrency space.
The linked webpage is from the New York Attorney General's office and the quote you quoted is from one of BitFenix's lawyers.
Replace FTL with witchcraft and the argument would be identical.
DNS – The weak link in your “secured” network
Looks to me more like Reddit hug of death: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/lpusc7/nextcloud_is_n...
In fact, nobody seems to have read the first page, which has a note that the definition of "proof of useful work" in that paper is trivial. An updated version is available here:

https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/559
There are a couple of important things to note here that I haven’t seen get much discussion.

First, assuming that residential customers can understand the pricing dynamics that are going on is a really bad assumption. It is very complex because there is an interplay between their natural gas service and their electric service, both of which are buying gas from the market on the customer’s behalf. The agents for each company are contractually obligated to supply energy to their customers at any cost - and this is a real problem in this type of situation. In effect, the customer is bidding against themselves via the gas & electric companies. Even in some ideal world where the consumers have full real-time price transparency, it would be extremely difficult for the customer to understand the costs of their actions and the best balance between the two services.

Second, it should be noted that the astronomical gas and electric prices in those markets did not really accomplish anything. They brought on very marginal amounts of additional energy (beyond about 10x average prices there is almost no meaningful additional capacity that can come online because nobody in their right mind would invest in infrastructure that could only operate at those prices). Those prices also did not provide useful information that residential customers could evaluate and act on on the demand side (price sensitive industrial and large commercial customers would shut down at far lower prices than was seen).

Ultimately, what occurred was an emergency situation and disaster. Pricing and consumption controls should have been initiated when energy emergency alerts were declared in the gas and electric markets, as the market structure is not setup to operate effectively during these situations. It was a total failure. The only things that worked were the reliability plans that grid operators have in place to disconnect customers in order to prevent complete failure of the electric grid.

Ultimately, in an emergency/disaster situation there should be a different set of rules that determines who gets the energy and caps the cost.

Note that the winterization discussions going on elsewhere are also extremely important, but those problems are already being covered well.
Something to note: they only had data from 2017 to 2019. Tether printed the majority of their coins in 2020/2021.
immunity or not, a lot of people are going to stop caring about it altogether
We are talking about an anecdote here, not giving general advice based on scientific literature.

That said. If I lived in a village that was attacked by tigers regularly for 6 months, and I installed a tiger filter which stopped the attacks, I would gladly pay 30 bucks for that ($30 is what a faucet water filter costs).

Disclaimer: I don't own a water filter or a tiger filter.
“Person inefficiently wastes gratuitous amounts of energy perpetuating imaginary currency, tries to pass it off as if it’s all ok because their house gets warmer as a side effect”
Oral history is well known to be unreliable and changes a bit with each retelling.

I didn't say they didn't have a gift culture before - those exist in other places as well. I suggested that at the time we were able to observe them there were a lot more gifts than normal, and had been for a hundred years or so - just long enough to seem like normal, but not really normal. Before and after the disruption there would be gifts - many people like to give gifts and it is a way to show your love for someone which is important. However in normal times there is a large scarcity limit to how many gifts you can give that doesn't apply.
>AI etichs is an esoteric academic research field.

I don't agree in general but I do think these two researchers, and this whole saga have just hurt the AI ethics field.
Obesity being a correlation might mean it is also a symptom. We already know from a couple studies that people with the same activity level and calorie intake are significantly more overweight than in the 80s. One leading hypothesis is endocrine disruptors.
TSL is still massively overvalued in any possible relation to its fundamentals.
Google AI would only implode when Google, or the corporate world finding that AI can't deliver the financial promise that was hyped.

And it is happening regardless of the drama, from the perspective of job market.
Not pointless. It we obviously aren’t in “lockdown”. Go to a restaurant and you’ll see dozens of people eating indoors without masks on.
Cue vegans saying: "Are we the baddies?"
Oh yeah the "good old days" where one ran eval on the response to and XmlHTTPRequest.