skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An easy thing to say when you're young and have familial wealth to fall back on or some other means of support while try to find some calling or whatever. I never found something I like doing that people will pay me money for, so I ended up doing the pragmatic thing and finding the job I have to put the least amount of effort into for a reasonable amount of money. I'm kinda sick of entitled people talk about finding your passion and similar advice like this.
The answer is simple mechanically (let economics work by pricing in externalities) but it’s politically tricky because an established industry has significant lobbying and propaganda clout.

There are success stories such as the sharp reduction of CFCs and acid rain contributors, or the reduction in coal pollution once it cost more than alternatives, but we can see the opposite in, for example, the way the oil industry successfully captured a significant fraction of a major American political party and got enough people to believe climate change wasn’t real to avoid a carbon tax for decades we could have used to transform the economy less sharply than will now be needed.
Could you provide some links for these:

> Bitcoin is mostly mined using excess energy, or "cheap" energy, which improves the efficiency and costs of energy production, making it surprisingly "green".

> Bitcoin requires less energy on a per-store-of-value basis than Gold and Silver.

As for

> Bitcoin requires less energy on a per-store-of-value basis than credit cards and the banking system in general.

Bitcoin supports at many orders of magnitude less transactions on the ledger than the banking systems [1] and needs 10 minutes to add a new block to the ledger [2] and ETH about 10-15 seconds[2]. In contrast, according to this [3], in 2019 there were on average 100M visa transactions in the US alone, per day, so around 5 orders of magnitude more transactions in just the States, excluding MasterCard, paypal and every other system.

Now, there are better alternatives, ETH uses proof of stake, there are also papers on proof of space [4]. Personally I'd like to move to something decentralised and away from the banks as much as possible.

[1] https://charts.bitcoin.com/btc/chart/transactions-per-block#...

[2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/block-time-cryptocurren...

[3] https://www.cardrates.com/advice/number-of-credit-card-trans...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_space
It might be a shallow conclusion but the level of absurdity of 2000s life is getting to me. Everything good that was free is now ~offered as paid services to compensate for all the subtle toxicity of the average mainstream life.

I just came back from a very free (for now) walk in the woods.
I went to the top-ranked state school in Scotland and this absolutely happened to my friends - it’s not limited to private institutions. It was obvious that they were gaming the system at the expense of the pupils even then.
When you use the word valid, you're making a judgement call. You have no right to decide what's valid or not.

On the broader point, you're making a strong assertion. Facebook is probably the most popular consumer product in the history of the world (apart from maybe Coke). You brush off what they do as just providing services that others had provided before Facebook "gobbled" them up, or providing some services that no one really needs or can be trivially replicated.

It's a big claim and there's a huge payoff if you're right. There are thousands of companies trying to pick away at facebooks services, but despite that Facebook usage and engagement grows every quarter.

You can speak up and make your prediction and hope it comes true. But it looks like wishful thinking at this point and it's underlying premise is wrong IMO. Trying to challenge Facebook or encourage others to do so with that framework won't work.
if it costs $1 go buy then it is worth spending $0.99 on mining it. the more expensive it becomes the more it consumes. its basically a paperclip maximiser.

I am pro digital currencies in general, but we can do much better than bitcoin.

That said we should avoid moral panic, it only brings division. Ultimately we are all on the same side.
Enabling Support for MathML in Chrome
Given that “Whataboutism” really means “hypocrisy in a geopolitical context” I think the entire definition should be updated to reflect it as a very valid observation, instead of the assumption that it is a weak argument because in my experience it usually isnt, even during the height of the cold war the Soviet Union’s observations about the US were accurate.
What if rather than taxing bitcoin, we just tax carbon usage?
Yeah, imagine if this applied to trucks. No one could use one for non truck bed usage. Ford disables ignition if it detects the bed is empty after X concurrent uses or miles.

Trucks generally are often wasted (from a green perspective) because people like them not for their intended design utility.

Same for single passenger SUV usage etc...

(I drive an SUV - not trolling those that do)
It is true that the climate is used frequently as a convenient weapon against things people don't like politically, but this is a real issue.

I'm a huge proponent of crypto currencies. I rail against the abuses from central banks like the Fed, and the evils of using a currency to engineer control over free people. I point this out so you know I think crypto currencies like Bitcoin are super important.

But if we destroy our climate/environment, crypto currencies aren't going to feel like a big deal. We have to care about it.

There are alternative models. One of the reasons I got into Eth was the work on proof-of-stake over proof-of-work they were undertaking.

As proponents of bitcoin I think we do ourselves (and bitcoin) a disservice by dismissing climate-based criticisms. Sure the messenger may not be sincere and with the best of intentions, but lets take the argument seriously regardless. If there are problems with the argument, let's address those rather than question the credibility of the messenger.
No system is free from this. Human beings will corrupt any system they're a part of. The trick is to overthrow the system every now and then.
Do you need math to get started with machine learning?
Isn't it interesting that all the people we call "essential workers" make very low wages? What does that say about us as a society?
Most people wouldn’t knowingly poison babies they know, or babies of people they know.

The root of cause of disregard for a group of people is anonymity, which in turn is a consequence of large and dense groups of humans. Unknown "others" just aren't real.

We feel attracted to huge and dense cities/provinces/nations, and the result becomes more and more ugly.
Aren't pandemics another consequence of those?

Hollywood glorifies what sells (attracts many). Many feel, more or less consciously, surrounded by the masses, threatened by it, and react thru nihilism/Machiavellianism/...
In my experience, startups produce enough tech debt very early in their existence, that if candidates knew about it, they would simply opt out of the hiring process and focus on something else.

So what they do is lure engineers with greenfield projects or projects that are relatively healthy and have a good architecture, and are currently growing. Once these projects have been developed or expanded to a point where the engineers in charge (new hires among them) can also work on other stuff, the shift to "firefighting tasks" and legacy maintenance can be quite fast.

To be fair, for a backend engineer it's not that brutal, our stuff is relatively homogenous (our legacy stuff also sucks, but not that much). When it comes to frontend development though, I have seen coworkers transition from clean Vue codebases to massive jQuery spaghetti balls in just a few days.
That doesn't seem that unreasonable compared to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_holder - and those are somewhat above atmospheric pressure.
Canada is barely a real country anyway. There’s no such thing as Canadian culture (it’s racist to imply there should be). All that’s left holding the people together is an economy that isn’t working for anyone who doesn’t already own a house. I can’t imagine it staying intact for the rest of the century
That's an interesting counter-argument but I don't think it works very well. In fact that's pretty much how I expect things with nuclear to go.

Where you have strong central government control -- there you can have comprehensive plans. Where you don't, you can't.

Which is why Covid-19 is a clusterfuck in the US -- because the US doesn't have strong enough central control (and heck, Trump didn't care anyway). Even with Biden at the helm his power is limited and he has to convince the various states to act, and Congress hangs in a very delicate balance.

Also, the fact that a country can do one thing doesn't mean it necessarily can do another. That you have centralized healthcare and can command a country-wide response to covid-19 doesn't mean you have centralized power generation and can command a country-wide decarbonization.

Sure, things can be restructured, laws can be passed, power generation can be nationalized, but none of that is quick nor easy and by no means guaranteed to happen even if it would result in the best outcomes.

Plus as far as the public is concerned, covid-19 is a lot more understandable and immediate of a concern. Climate change is more of a vague and slow moving threat, and that makes it much harder to do dramatic things in response.
And what about the front end? What's the best, most boring choice there?

I was on a project for a bit using React and although it felt like an obvious way to write things, I can't help but feel you can't create something that will last for a decade with it.
GPUs are not mechanical parts (well save for the fans but those can be replaced).
I would imagine thermal stress from heating and cooling would be the biggest issue - you don't get that under constant load.
Since most commercial projects have much at stake how would new technologies ever get a chance to become mainstream? For this to happen there has to be some risk-taking otherwise we'll be permanently stuck in the current situation where a bunch of scripting languages designed in the mid-90s for single processors are tasked with handling much bigger workloads on multi-core machines. Hence the current wave of bolted-on gradual typing.
> After all, if all these cards weren't used for mining but for gaming, wouldn't the environmental outcome be the same?

I would assume miners keep these cards pegged at 100% 24/7. By comparison very few games actually push graphics cards to 100% utilization, especially when you're talking about top of the line cards like the nVidia 3000 series, and on top of that very few people play games for more than a couple hours per day. A card in the hands of a gamer probably consumes only a small fraction of the power that same card would in the hands of miners.
Show HN: Mp3tag for Mac – universal tag editor now on the Mac
Bitcoin demonstrates the importance of first-mover advantage.

It's one of the worst and most inefficient cryptocurrencies in existence but because it was the first, it's the most valuable. The world would be much better off with a Proof of Stake cryptocurrency as the dominant cryptocurrency.

The rhetoric is extremely resilient. The price of Bitcoin has nothing to do with the underlying technology, it's all about the social network and infrastructure which exists around it.

The rhetoric concerning Bitcoin only using clean energy is BS... If Bitcoin didn't use that surplus electricity, some other useful project would have had access to even cheaper electricity.

But the same can be said about most of the big tech companies in existence today. Their dominance is all about social networks, infrastructure and rhetoric.
How do you think gaming streaming services work?
Hi there,

this is Florian, the developer of Mp3tag.

After many months in the makings, I've released Mp3tag for Mac to the Mac App Store.

It’s an all-new app that builds on the experience of 20+ years of development and support of its Windows companion.

It's a one-time purchase of $19.99 on the Mac App Store and there is a 7-day free trial available from the website — only days you're using the app are counted.

I hope you like Mp3tag for Mac and give it a spin!
You see; I am also confused by this. The author chooses to work for free, and yet complains about his pay relative to the amount of time he must spend doing cognitively taxing work.

In my 10 years as a professional software engineer I have seen this same thing happen time and time again. My colleagues devalue themselves constantly by working for free.

If you earn $80k a year as an engineer, you rate is roughly $38.46 per hour if you work 2080 hours in the year. Let's say you opt to work an extra 30 minutes a day (very often the case for many devs who work into their lunch break); that equates to an extra 130 hours of work per year for free. So what you're actually doing is earning $80k a year for 2210 hours, or $36.19 per hour. That's roughly ~6% less pay for your time for working an extra 30min a day. Now imagine what happens when you work those extra 30mins + a few weekends here and there. The total percentage of your salary drops significantly as a result.

Say no. Don't work for free.
The idea of cheap, “excess” energy that keeps Bitcoin mining operations running 24/7 is a myth.

Bitcoin is, and always will be, additive on top of the world’s energy consumption. Every Terawatt of energy that goes into Bitcoin is a Terawatt of energy that isn’t being put into the grid to send to homes or industries or other users. No one is choosing to build power plants in the middle of nowhere without a way to send that energy into the grid.

The grid is not perfectly efficient, but it’s still better to transfer that energy through the grid than to keep a coal plant running somewhere else because Bitcoin is (hypothetically) consuming the new renewable energy sources coming online.

The key is to remember that no one is waking up and wondering if they should run their Bitcoin miner or charge their Tesla. Both happen independently, and it’s not hard to see that miners run 24/7 regardless of energy demand fluctuations elsewhere.

This idea of unused, surplus energy that somehow can’t be connected to the grid is a myth perpetuated to whitewash the absolutely massive (country-scale) energy consumption of Bitcoin.

Not to mention, none of us can buy video cards right now because they’re all being consumed to mine other cryptocurrencies. Discussion forums are full of people swapping tips for mining with their GPUs to offset the cost.

There is no angle on this in which we can ignore the 120,000 Gigawatt energy consumption of Bitcoin and the additional energy consumption of all the other crypto currencies popping up in its wake.

Frankly, at this point it’s depressing to see this trope repeated so often on HN, where usually the users would have enough intellectual curiosity and engineering sense to read up on the basics of power transmission and marginal energy costs before repeating such an obviously flawed argument. I’m afraid everyone’s personal financial investment in cryptocurrency is clouding judgment on the topic when all of the facts are right in front of us.
TruffleSqueak CallTargetBrowser
Is this a thing you can do? If you're in a dispute with Coke, you can subpoena Pepsi to help back up your claims?
> Especially regarding the idea that it uses less energy than the current banking system.

I guess this one is pretty clear, OP was only comparing to gold/silver (I have no idea how it compares in practice).

To be comparable to banking, bitcoin should probably first reach the level where it can provide the same functionality (payment, fractional banking, etc.). (And then prorated as even if it were to provide the functionality, it would have to scale by several orders of magnitude to replace banking)
I knew my post had a 100% chance of a follow-up "aksually!". Thank you for the irrelevant information.
Dude, you can go home and play with any toy you want.
That's a completely ridiculous answer and makes it clear you have no idea what you're talking about. 1) Gold has nothing to do with banking transactions, I've lived my whole life without ever touching a spec of gold. 2) Is about the energy consumption of bank branches. My bank doesn't even have branches. You're comparing apples to... tires or something.
We have a global chip shortage. NVidia isn't magically pulling more GPUs out of their asses. Yes as they claim some chips might be defective in a way that makes them unsuitable for a graphics card but still work as a mining chip, but if you believe that they won't redirect perfectly fine chips into mining card production if demand permits it, just because they care so much about gamers and not their shareholders, I got bad news for you.
Show HN: Free speech Reddit clone (svelte)
>the more expensive it becomes the more it consumes. its basically a paperclip maximiser.

this is partly counter-balanced by the block subsidy halving every 4 years.
While being a student, I can’t. Also, if your intention is to move to Quebec you are technically not eligible for PR in Ontario. However, many folks these days opt of this path though - apply for PR in Ontario from outside Canada using Express Entry, land in Ontario and stay for 6 months and then move to Quebec.
Backend is in koa/node and mongodb.

https://github.com/profullstack/upvotocracy-api

Live instance: https://upvotocracy.com/
> Government work is the worst example for quality. A monopoly without accountability having terrible practices doesn't surprise me.

Exactly, the rules here are different and there is monopoly involved. Accountability is dispersed. However, if you freck up here and it shows, you are in the news tomorrow. Good luck finding job after that. On company level, you can be banned for years in entire gov sector.

The big problem with that stance is however, that government usually doesn't do that work, it typically outsources to private companies that work on behalf of mega corps like Oracle, IMB etc. And they produce that "worst example of quality".

So, its not about the type of company its much more complicated.

> In all the private companies I worked either software was maintained or the feature wasn't in use anymore or the entire engineering team was about to be fired or the company itself had 2 months of life.

I am sure this is not the norm either. You say it like there is some kind of sensor telling you when "feature wasn't in use anymore" - for some domains it can be easy, for majority its not however.

Its understandable that people minimize the complexity of things involved here but that doesn't reflect reality.

> I agree on your point regarding security, closing every vulnerability is impossible or not economically sound for many realities.

Indeed. People act here like I said 0 security but I didn't - every professional worth its salt should do common "best practices", but going more then that needs serious thought, budget, planning etc. and it all depends on type of thing you do.
Does this limitation also affect the use with hashcat or other software that uses OpenCL, for example?
Exercise is shoes and a trip out the door away.

It's really reflective of a (hopefully) near-endgame of marketing: turning over the last stones available. Well, I don't really believe that.

Again, a failure of economics. EVERYTHING shouldn't be monetized, that is truly a path to dystopia, where you pay for the air you breathe.
Forecast Your Climate Impact
I don't look at it that way. I have a very "wishy-washy" design approach. I call it "paving the bare spots"[0]. It's definitely not a "classic" approach, and it would not be something that I would recommend to anyone that is not extremely experienced.

The idea is that I am not actually aware of what the final product will look like, when I start, so I take a very careful approach. I spent 27 years, working for a "Waterfall-based" corporation, where the system had to be 100% designed up front, and the end result would "meet spec," while still sucking. I am not particularly thrilled with many agile approaches, either, as I see many of the same problems. It's really just shifting the tech debt around.

My approach actually results in my having to throw away a lot of really good, tested, code, but I still end up moving lightning fast, and coming out with good results. If you look at my portfolio, you will see a whole bunch of small, heavily-tested module projects. Many of these were things that I ripped out of other projects, but didn't want to throw away. Some of them are crazy useful, like the Persistent Prefs Utility[1], or the Generic Swift Toolbox utilities[2], which show up in most of my work. The fact that they are treated as independent projects, with heavy testing, means that I can reuse them with confidence.

The Spinner project[3] was an example of a UI I designed to be a central aspect of an app, then decided not to use it, as it deviated too much from the user workflow I had in mind. It will be back, but not until it's the best approach. Eye candy is nice, but it still needs to be usable.

That modular approach is not new at all. I think I may have been doing it since the early nineties.

True, there is flexibility, but that flexibility is implemented as a single-point hinge, not a bendable continuum. It's very clear where the flexibility goes, and that point is well-tested. I just got done refactoring the server, where I added a more flexible way of allowing users to implement security postures, and I'm really, really glad that I did things the way that I did. It was a pretty big job, adding personal tokens (the new functionality), but a lot of the work was making sure that I stuck with the "philosophical" domains of each layer, and testing the living bejeezus out of the code.

And each point of flexibility has a very clear domain. For example, the ANDISIOL layer is where the SQL turns into functions. You can rip out everything below that, and replace it with whatever you like, as long as the same functional API is presented to BASALT. That's a fairly classic pattern.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-travel...

[1] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#RV...

[2] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#to...

[3] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#RV...
I don't disagree, but I suppose the structure of my comment didn't convey the message correctly, that is, that NVDA is just maximizing profits while screwing over gamers because a) they can get away with it and b) they are an ever decreasing portion of their revenue.
But how big of an issue is that really in practice?
You still see 20+ years old machines chugging along just fine.
Yes. New business-models should not be accepted by default, especially if they are disruptive.
Sure, there has always been & always will be a tug-of-war, but I think the dominant social media institutions quite blatently engaging in political censorship certainly has to be a help to those tugging for the censorship side.

It's true without FB's actions, Museveni could've immediately started with "security reasons & dsinformation", but that would've been a far weaker answer.

> Even the developed and democratic world doesn't look to the US, still less US corporations, as an actual inspiration for its policies on speech.

The trend everywhere, it seems to me, is to look to China for inspiration on speech policies.
Living in Austin myself, I agree completely. A little bit of resiliency is better than large increases in power costs. As it is the mass-migration into Austin is driving costs up for low-income families and fixed-income elderlies here. Driving up their power costs further is another hit they don't need. I'd rather see the city spend some of the property tax windfall they are having helping low income get some resiliency and improving the cities ability to respond to the rare events.