skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Investing involves spending money with the intent to make financial returns on your investment.

Buying assets "as a hobby" that depreciate or generate no income, is just that, buying for a hobby, not investing.
As someone with experience running a GPU mining farm for ~2 years, my anecdote: I had about 5% of cards break down during that time, and the majority of those were just fan failures.
This may look true from the perspective of a single sale, but in the long term this just doesn't hold up. NVIDIA builds a strong and long-held reputation with gamers, and are a well renowned name in the field. If they made cards for miners at the detriment of gamers, they risk losing that valuable market position.
I sort of agree with this. I'm not a lisp fan, I don't think lisp is bad, it's just not how my brain works so I struggle. But I understand lisp enough to agree with you and I think that is what John was trying to do.
Users were given at least 6 years to switch over.

That's not ripping the carpet from under them, that is lifting the carpet 50 times until users were standing at the very edge of the carpet, then removing the carpet gently.
A Famous Black Hole Gets an Update
Based on the alternate links provided in other comments, the submitted link is an interview with Alex Cabal, and the interview does mention HN bringing a lot of traffic:

>And it got featured on Hacker News, which brought in a lot of traffic. It got all over Reddit and a bunch of blogs and news outlets. And everyone seemed to really like the project and from then on I just kind of decided to make a hobby out of it and then here we are many years later and hundreds of ebooks later and hundreds of contributors from all over the world later, it’s become a very big and I’d say successful effort that people enjoy, so I’m very proud of that.
>And when somehow it doesn't become profitable to do so anymore, the e-waste issue it generates is somehow the fault on the chip maker ?

Well yeah, because the alternative would be that the miners dump them on the secondary market to gamers.
Chants were not random data though. They had meanings in Sanskrit, (very similar to poems) and there were grammatical rules (called Chhandas). The deformation happened mostly after the practicing class stopped learning Sanskrit language and blindly memorized them.
More abstractly, I've argued that migration naturally follows from Lockian political thought. If government exists to serve the governed, then it stands to reason that if a government isn't adequately serving the governed (as some might argue to be the case in the US, but I appreciate this is up to personal interpretation), the governed has the right to choose a new government.

Historically we've seen this attempted through revolutions, but now with the advent of relatively easy/inexpensive international migration (by historical standards - not to mention the impossibility of revolutionary war today, but that's a different discussion), migration is a more peaceful alternative.
Do you mean Terraform? If so, then I suppose yes... both resemble a T :)

This should be an original logo though - not made by me, but made explicitly for this project by someone.
The current system allows rich customers to negligently waste electricity that poor customers need to stay warm. If the system prioritized usage and charged the corporations $5/kWh while charging poor customers the standard rate, people wouldn't have frozen to death.
Who owns it? OReilly?
Are you saying there are people out there that are happier investing in "crypto" than in "stock X" or "gold" or "bonds"? It just makes them happier that that particular name appears on the screen?

I don't doubt that is the case, but that kind of reinforces my point. The societal cost of crypto is too high. If we have to justify the electrical consumption of crypto because people enjoy it more when they see its name on their screen, we are clearly doing something wrong.
At the beginning of the video the blades seem to be spinning at about 2RPS, but after the explosion they're spinning much faster. I presume the former was an artifact of the camera's frame rate.
That guy sent internal email to his students in Chinese. This is crazy.
An important consideration is the number of lives are phthalates improving or saving, something that might be challenging to quantify but shouldn’t be ignored.

Mobile phone use leads to thousands (US) [0] of deaths per year but there are few calls to outright ban smartphones.

Similarly, automobiles lead to tens of thousands of deaths per year (US) [1] and yet only minor support to ban or minimize these death machines.

There are countless other examples of useful objects that provide first order - easy to reason about - benefits that come with steep prices that we are willing to pay.

[0] https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/distracted-driving

[1] https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/
Native American... Indians come from India
Yeah this is pretty clearly price differentiation. nVidia want trying to sell the same product to gamers and to miners but miners can afford much higher prices. So they create an expensive mining card, and then try and stop miners from using the cheap graphics cards.

They've already done it for AI. This is just doing the same thing for crypto.
I might be wrong but I do not believe these are usable as "normal" graphics cards
The AI research paper was real. The “co-author” wasn’t
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gp's point is that even though it might have a positive effect on climate change, the decision was likely not made for altruistic reasons. It's like the apple charger debacle from a few months ago.
This reason is why I don’t get along well with most frameworks.

Most frameworks are infuriatingly self-interested. They’re so intent on telling me that their imposed architecture is superior, despite knowing nothing about how I’m using it.

And then there’s the social pressure to use tech that specifically aims to make devs interchangeable.
You mean ObjPascal or the IDE?
> Nerofen tried to repackage generic paracetamol

Nurofen, and ibuprofen. I assume it's a winning strategy as the products have been on sale for an (un)reasonable amount of time in some countries now.
Haha. I don't know what it is with open software projects and cute animals. There's also Golang's. I find them out of place (mixing cute things with technical matters), but I shouldn't complain.
It's really about being a resident of a state rather than a "citizen."

But it can lead to various edge cases, some of which are being spotlighted at the moment as people move around to get out of cities.

Basically you have this somewhat odd situation where you have free movement within the country and the federal government doesn't actually care where you spend your time. But you essentially need to be a state resident for purposes of things like a driver's license and paying state taxes and some states really want your money if you spend more than a bare minimum of days in the state. So there sort of a disconnect between federal rules and state rules.
You can’t tell from an eBay listing that a given card was undervolt or overclocked. On average it’s far more risky than buying a gamers card which, so their best avoided.

Also, undervolting isn’t always the correct choice it depends on how valuable the coin being minded is relative to energy costs. Someone mining in their dorm room for example may not be paying based on electricity useage.
That’s simply not always true, due to a lot of mitigating factors; bad bosses, jealous bosses, sexist bosses, layoffs, etc.
It's still a good counterbalance to the equally absurd claims that plastic is harmless. Someone might look at both sides, start to investigate, then write a more accurate analysis.
I think it applies here. The problem which conceptual integrity is that short-term incentives oppose it. A developer gets personal benefits for shortcuts (Yay, a 10x rockstar developer!) while the costs are shared by all. A classic tragedy of the commons situation.

Maybe you assume that random developers will speak up, point out an inconsistency, and everybody agrees to make it consistent from now on.
In a small team it might work that way, but "system design" implies a larger community to me.
Consensus is hard.

The whole point of responsibility is that blame and praise is focused. A focus on everyone is no focus at all.
It must have been a weird coincidence but I listened to a few episodes for your podcast and I've actually heard about boring technology in 100% of episodes I listened to
0.1%, not much!

https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_langua...

But concatenating strings together is the same in any language, right?
Using the Monte-Carlo simulation to estimate the value of 𝛑
We had a boil water notice that lasted for a couple weeks after bad storms just a year or two ago, and now this one. I don’t think we’ve had power issues like this recently.
> Noone needs Facebook, it serves no valid purpose for the human race

Billions of people find value in facebook and use it daily. Who are you to make that call?
> Frustratingly, we have this in Australia, and it’s bloody good. The ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission) is ad free, government funded TV and radio, available nationally.

And horribly bias to the left.
So we should all embrace Oracle?
>As soon as it stops being profitable for mining it will have zero resale value, and become e-waste.

There's lots of old graphics cards no one sells or buys as well
And were sued for doing so. Removing functionality from an existing product is not acceptable.
Maintenance is also something that has to be learned (and "built up" in the sense that you're going to accumulate playbooks and processes over time).

If a team already existed that knew the ins and outs of memcached, knew how to resolve any problems it encountered, already had appropriate monitoring / alarms / etc, that's a massive leg up over needing to do all that with a completely new technology.
First of all, this is a typical example of survivorship bias: look, we picked exciting tech and we've succeeded. The point of using 'boring tech' was never to state that everyone should stay away from new/exciting things. It's about managing risks. First of all, if you are building a startup, a new service, you already have a ton of risks and unknowns (and excitement) so it makes little sense to top it with untested, new, exciting technology. Unless you have a very good reason. (And no, anticipating to have a huge number of users X years down the road and the perceived need need for super scalability is not a good reason.)

The point about using more new tech being good for the adoption of these might be a fair one, but it's completely orthogonal and doesn't need to happen in startups and definitely not at the core of their service/product. Once you do know what you are doing (or what you re doing is not that important) then it's OK to pick exciting technology.
Multiply that by 100 truckloads per bag, and you have what goes into the dump. This blow-away trash is unsightly, but addressing it first is kind of the definition of virtue signaling. We end up at "If I don't see the problem, I can pretend it doesn't exist"?
I thought this was long ago disproven. That at very early stages yes breakeven or small loss happens. But rapidly becomes mildly profitable per unit
> oddly this seems to have gotten worse with M1 chips.

If a developer wasn't around or willing to recompile and test their game on x64 to support Catalina (which dropped support for 32-bit apps), then it's not surprising to me that they are also unable or unwilling to recompile and test and support the game on M1 ARM chips.
Capitalism, unfortunately, is not meant to help create a fair society. It is designed to maximize shareholder value based on endless growth and consumption, and that is all it is good at. This is unsustainable both socially and ecologically.

Instead of giving corporations legal status as people, we should be giving the Earth legal personhood. Some countries are already starting to do so. [0]

[0] https://therightsofnature.org/universal-declaration/

How Jet Stream Collapse will Cause Mass Starvation Explained by Dr. Peter Wadhams:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKilc_oMbrg&amp;feature=yout...

Here are four countries that have given nature the same legal rights as humans. #BeLikeThem. Solutions are everywhere. Let's implement them and protect people and the planet. #ActOnClimate #nature #forests

https://twitter.com/MikeHudema/status/1361531384351891456
Reminds me of this verse from Gensis:

> By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.

In other words, work will always be work.
Gamers use only 1-2 cards at a time and keep them for years, they don't build entire farms running 24/7 that burn out the cards in a short time.
That depends on how valuable the last 5% of your hash rate is and local electricity prices. Running an OC especially for memory can objectively be the correct choice.

For collage dorms for example rarely charge based on electricity use. Some apartment complexes also include electricity as part of the rent.
Do you live near a hospital? I have seen reported in some news articles that people who live near hospitals have been less affected.
There are, but these could be thrown put in a matter of weeks. As soon as bitcoin prices crash again, these cards are junk. By the time the next boom happens there will be a new generation of cards and these will be unprofitable. Nvidia is simply leveraging this predictable boom-bust cycle to make a quick buck selling a polluting product. This is Captain Planet-style environmental arrogance.
Reminder that there's a fantastic analysis of the film over at Centauri Dreams : https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2019/02/01/in-wildness-is-th...
I wouldn't exactly call this an objective interview, considering the interviewer (David Grigg) is one of the most frequent contributors to the project after Alex. :)

https://github.com/drgrigg?tab=repositories
I generally agree that externalities are a common cause of problems from free markets, perhaps the most common.

But I would suggest that free markets generally create good outcomes, and when we identify bad outcomes we should correct the rules of the market.

In this case, it probably would make sense for there to be a penalty that providers had to pay if they failed to deliver service after it was committed.

My understanding is that the people who put the market together expected that the huge rate increase which would accompany an unusual storm or other peak demand event was expected to be sufficient incentive for providers to harden their equipment so that it would be able to cash in on those peak rates.

This event showed that the incentive is not enough for events that are extremely rare. It also showed that a lot of the supply infrastructure to the gas plants failed, and hardening that infrastructure is really up to the producers who aren’t directly part of the energy market.

So regulation to increase preparedness standards for gas plants supply infrastructure might make sense. But it may be possible to accomplish the same thing more efficiently via fines and penalties for market participants who go off-line during severe weather.

My point is simply: the market itself isn’t really the problem, it’s creating the right set of incentives and regulations around that market.

One last thought: living in Austin and having lived through this whole ordeal (still living it), I can’t say that I would necessarily want to pay twice as much for energy every single month to avoid one crappy week per decade. I’m thinking that I could probably get myself a backup heat and power source, and do some winterization on my own house that would be more valuable to me than paying twice as much for “the grid” to be upgraded to handle events of this rarity. I admit, we don’t know if these will become significantly more frequent due to changing climate, and that makes the decision more difficult, but I don’t see it as flat out wrong that a significant natural disaster damaged the power system, nor do I think having an “invulnerable power grid” is necessarily a realistic or achievable goal.
Thomas Jefferson's Wheel Cipher
Osama Bin Laden (Elephant)
I don't mean a hobbyist in terms of your level of competence. I mean that employers might see your motivation for employment as the pursuit of a hobby -- that is, they cannot rely on you to respond to economic carrots and sticks.
I seems to me that the owners of natural gas fired power plants in Texas are being incentivized to find a way to store a few days of natural gas on site, and winterizing that storage, so they can win the lottery the next time things freeze over.

[edit - back of the napkin math]

Extrapolating from https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=667&t=3 it looks to me like it takes about 8 ft^3 of natural gas for 1 kwh of electricity. So, to run a 1 GW plant for 24 hours would take 192,000,000 square feet... a cube about 575 feet on each side. That's a huge tank farm.

Coal is about 1 lbs/kwh, according to https://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/fuel.html#:~:text=Nat.... so the 24 Gwh pile would be 24,000,000 pounds, or 12,000 tons. (an 80 foot cube)

This matches up fairly well with https://www.brighthubengineering.com/power-plants/52544-basi...
I don't think this has to be true. I've worked in many places (granted, smallish teams of less than 20 or so) where tech decisions were made collectively, without even that much input from the CTO.

Choosing boring technology doesn't have to be a top down thing, although it probably needs to have some mechanism for aligning a whole team (since 10 different "boring technologies" are no longer boring and bring along all the problems of using shiny new toys).
Perhaps overstated, but it is a noticeable percentage of global electricity use spent on what is at best an enabling technology for the somewhat quixotic pursuits of a tiny fraction of the population.

You should of course make your own judgments, but many people do not consider that a good tradeoff.
And for sports competition.
The MD-80 (and 727) were old turbojets though. Probably a lot harder to come up with a practical tailmounted design with a turbofan although I'm open to it being possible to mount one turbofan above the fuselage.
I caught myself thinking this as well. TBH, I feel the same about most professions, politicians in primis.
But if I have to think rationally "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
Hacked drivers coming in 3... 2... 1...
Site down, cached copy refers to:

https://standardebooks.org/
The problem, I believe, is in the word "exciting". It's simply too broad to make reasonable generalizations about. Exciting technology to one person might be sorting a text file, to another person it might be creating a GAN dapp.

If other people have to use and maintain this thing we find exciting, it stands to reason that perhaps they might not find it so exciting. If social media has taught us anything, is that interactions with UXs that give us dopamine hits may not be in our own or others' best interest over the long run.

I like "make cool stuff". The focus is on the goal, not the step-by-step interaction. It directs us to the outside, where our code interacts with people, be it users or future code maintainers. It's also vague enough that all sorts of people can define it as they like.

I love exciting new tech and having fun developing. I just don't define that love by how it makes me feel. Instead, I balance how it makes me feel and how it makes others feel too. That leads to a lot of even more interesting and fun places than simply "choose exciting technology"

ADD: Put differently, you always want your goal to "pull" the required complexity out of a system. It's a forcing function. It never works well when you start with a bunch of complexity and try to push it all towards a goal. That's backwards. I think we've sold a lot of developers on the idea that with a cool enough X, they're bound to make cool things for others. After all, look how cool X is!

Doesn't work like that.
What is particularly bad about it? Did you try Let Go?
I have packaged for both Debian and Gentoo; packaging for Gentoo is way easier and more fun, one reason being that (simplified) you're dealing with a single Bash file rather than a magic Makefile and things split into 20+ small files. The difference is huge.
(Interestingly enough, Doug would agree with you. The irony of those condemning you is multi-layered. There's the first-order irony that those doing the condemnation probably haven't themselves read the thing they are upset with you about. The second-order irony is that the overall thrust of their clamor is directly opposed to the ideas that Doug expresses -- if only they knew it by reading for themselves...)
Built a $1.7B Business by Empowering Brazilians to Take Control of Their Lending
Maybe this helps https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/ljq262/epdiy_eink_pc_...
He could probably go freelancing and earn a whole lot more.

I earned a lot more as freelancer when working in The Netherlands compared to permanent employee. And I feel in the UK it's probably much the same situation. In The Netherlands it's quite easy as freelancer to earn say 100.000 EUR a year and probably more. If you're a bit smart with taxes, you can have a very good standard of life, you'd be in the top 10% for sure.

And even better: just do this a few years, save money and then move to some country with lower standard of living. You could probably retire before reaching 40 years of age if you started freelancing in your early 30s and be careful with your spending (if your single). With a family (children) the situation would be a bit more complicated.

And yes, you could try to make some site or app to earn additional income outside of your job.
Also it is almost never for "funsies," it is instead usually the "wrong solution" to a very real problem. The current system has bad performance, or doesn't support some new use case that is a major company initiative or whatever. But instead of fixing/augmenting the existing system the (probably multiple accumulated pain points by now) are used to justify an overly complex change. In fact the change probably becomes known internally at the company as some silver bullet that will fix all woes further reinforcing the drive to do it.

Even the best developers get ignored if they try to justify pure-tech-debt fixes. So they learn to include fixing tech-debt as part of a fixing a problem that has some _direct_ business relevance if addressed. This gets clearly observed and taught to the all tiers of developers further obscuring the rationale for architectural changes from more senior management.
which is why they've announced this limitation before the 3060's release
This is a common sentiment I see on discussion forums, but I think it's wishful thinking at best. Most consumers aren't enthusiasts that follow these types of news, and even the ones who do probably won't care/remember a few years down the line. After all, nvidia seems to be doing just fine despite their long history of anti-consumer practices over the years.
When Bitcoin miners take over a town (2018)
Lazarus is the IDE. Free Pascal is the language. Both go together in Raspberry Pi without a problem. Create beautiful GUI that can run on touchscreen too. Use a $50 3.5 inch touchscreen + $35 RPi and you can have a beautiful IoT doing whatever you want.