skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that does help clarify, but I'd say it also aligns with the point I was trying to make in some important ways. They are trading one USDT for $1 of value. If they keep that capitol invested in BTC and do hold only 1:1 in collatoral...no shit, that's is pretty damn reckless BUT they are making the promise that they have the capitol to back it. Given the exponential rise in BTC again this last year I'd be inclined to agree with them for now.

Claims that this process inflates the process of BTC seem far to exaggerated. It's reallocating value that was already there. Firstly, someone has to sell the BTC in order to buy the Tether with it so that argument is somewhat of a moot point. And if they are selling the BTC for USD or other fiat it's actually increasing the sell pressure of BTC against said fiat. It might open the opportunity for trades/swaps which could drive the price either direction faster...but it doesn't make value out of thin air.

I'm not saying Tether is not responsible for poorly investing or protecting the collateral that backs their coin. I'm just saying I can't compute the claims that this is some sort of manipulation scheme. The concept is exactly the same as decentralized stable coins like DAI except the backer is a centralized entity and not a contract. Does me minting DAI magically pump the value of ETH because that is the coin I put up as collateral? No that's a ridiculous claim. I can however feel comfortable holding DAI knowing that the contract will enforce the value of the token no matter the price of the ETH backing it.
Yes, that's what we're inching towards. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26158300 (but I've since written more code).

Edit: By the way, if anyone has a bright idea about how a community-driven past-thread-references feature should work (which, note btw, includes duplicate detection), I'd be interested to hear them. Emailing hn@ycombinator.com is probably best.
It isn't really a precedent; from [1] "When consumers see or hear an advertisement, whether it’s on the Internet, radio or television, or anywhere else, federal law says that ad must be truthful, not misleading, and, when appropriate, backed by scientific evidence. The FTC enforces these truth-in-advertising laws, and it applies the same standards no matter where an ad appears – in newspapers and magazines, online, in the mail, or on billboards or buses"

There already is a precedent for federal law mandating truth in information carried over media channels in specific situations. "That decision" you reference doesn't have to be a decision to drop/silence the media channel outright. The previous administration made continuous claims about fake news and media lies; if the current administration is talking about media disinformation and lies as well, that sounds like there's scope for a bi-partisan agreement[2] to hold media companies more accountable for "truth in reporting", like there are "truth in advertising" rules.

Your position doesn't have to be "I agree these channels are garbage but in the interests of avoiding Facism all media should be allowed to lie without being held to account in any way".

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/media-resources/truth-advert...

[2] lol
I’d also be interested in seeing this in its own repo, if only for educational purposes.
Osu – open-source, extensible rhythm game
Accounts are free at FamilySearch. Anyone can look up all the dead folks they want.
In another thread people mentioned that there are strict laws regarding when you can cut off customers (eg. not when it's cold outside), so placing an upper limit isn't an option because griddy has no way of turning their customers off.
When you sign up for a variable rate loan and default, you should not sue.

The provider in question was providing a service at a variable rate. It had to have been clearly part of the terms.

Who to blame are the regulators. Variable rate loans shouldn’t be allowed and neither should this variable rate wholesale crap.

But suing someone over a bill in a class-action suit? Do you think the consumers will all get refunded fully? The law firm will get that money.
FWIW I'd wager Tiananmen would be less controversial to discuss with him than Hong Kong.
I think people are critical of the fact that the lack of regulation in the Texas power market allowed somebody who had absolutely zero idea of the agreement she was entering to make such a catastrophically bad deal.

I'd consider myself a somewhat sophisticated financial trader and power derivatives are beyond me. I maintain calls on electricity generation by paying a fixed rate for power.

No brokerage firm would allow this person to basically gamble on spot electricity prices but somehow it's okay in the great state of texas.
> Though you could say it was the American Revolution that set things off and that it merely took America 250 years to go through the progression that the French Revolution traveled in a mere 5 years

We're still quite a far way off from literally beheading people in the streets (and no, having your Twitter account banned is not even remotely comparable)
It's a microcosm of the hellscape that results when critical infrastructure is broken into tiny parts for profit.
I posted a knee-jerk reaction, but I should have written nothing. The essay didn't warrant the pique. Besides, I did enjoy the lines about sitting down to watch Star Wars.
Yes, I understand that that's your preferred option. But your answer seems to imply that if people were going to use history as a weapon, then it would be better for it to not be known at all. That is, your order of preferences is Text Book > Secret > Used as Weapon.
This logic is true for a lot of price gouging. Even with supply and demand aside, the cost of getting a generator or a bottle of water to a hurricane stricken area is much higher. But passing along these costs can hit you with huge penalties.

Not to defend this lawsuit, but there may be some precedent. A lot of price-gouging laws seem to enforce the idea that it's better to shutter your business than to markup the costs of your goods.

The effects this has on exacerbating supply issues in disaster recovery is another matter entirely...
Would you be willing to bet that S20 won't exceed an IRR of 20%?

Edit: for context, the comment I responded to was originally linking to the S20 batch and implied that the companies are weak.
Personal attacks will get you banned here, and please don't do nationalistic flamewar either.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: it looks like your account is (or is on the cusp of) using HN primarily for political/ideological/national battle. That's the line at which we ban accounts. Please review the guidelines and stick to using the site as intended. More explanation here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
A signed binary won't help.

Cryptominers fall into the "Potentially Unwanted Program" category, along with remote access software like a VNC server. They're not malware, but can be installed maliciously. If Windows Defender finds a cryptominer, it has no way to determine if it was deliberately installed, so it flags. Manually excepting the directory NiceHash installs the miners is the only way around it.
I found this so useful. I'm building a suite of open source tools at https://datasette.io/ and the section "Teaching is the most impactful aspect of tool building" was something of a light bulb for me.

"To maximize your impact, then, teaching must be central to your strategy. This means documentation, tutorials, examples, videos, tweets, and more."

I have pretty comprehensive documentation ( https://docs.datasette.io/ ) but almost nothing in the way of tutorials - and I added the first demo video to the website just last week.

This has given me a ton to think about. Thanks, Mike!
Neither YAML or TOML are config languages, they are data formats.

A data format is a way of structuring or serializing data. The whole point of the format is to read and write arbitrary data. It may have a simple schema, or features designed for the loading and unloading of data. But all those features are designed to assist the machine, not the human operator.

A config format is designed specifically to assist a human operator, not a program. Humans should not have to consider data types when they write a config, or when they feed it to a program. Humans should have useful features to make their lives easier, like variable substitution, pattern matching, inheritance, namespaces, simple newline-separated whitespace-indifferent commands, etc.

Programming languages are just elaborate configuration formats. And that's where the problem begins: how much "power" do you give the configuration format before it gets unruly? It's difficult to find a balance. People end up using simple data formats because the parsers are widely available and they can "fake" advanced features by making programs interpret a specifically-crafted data structure as a configuration instruction. But there's very little thought put into how this can be extended to make more complex configurations easier.

Most web servers and other complex software [usually run by sysadmins] have a real configuration format or configuration language. Poorly-written software pretends a data format is a programming language, or even worse, forces you to use an actual programming language. These designers fundamentally don't understand or don't care about the user.
I’ll be curious to read what the author thinks in the next few years regarding DeFi and NFTs on Ethereum and other smart contract blockchains. Things are just getting started and it’s going to get interesting.
> Not wasting the first 18 years of a person's life might be an alternative

It's not an alternative, it's strictly necessary. People look around and wonder how 70 million Americans voted for a certain someone, and the clear-cut answer isn't farther than their local public high school.

A system designed from the ground up to mold nearly everybody into obedient manufacturing drones in a economy that doesn't rely on manufacturing anymore is bound to create huge issues.
It’s literally the point of Griddy. It’s not the fine print. It’s the whole damn product.

She was happy to take lower rates 99.9% of the time. She can’t cry foul the 0.1% of the time when the trade goes against her.
Time machine should clear out old snapshots when pressed for disk space, that's very strange.
Possibly.

Depends on whether or not the heuristics scanning in Windows Defender would still flag the miners if you compiled it yourself.
A lot of valid criticism (the name, lack of specs, poor development support). Still I want to give this one the benefit of a doubt! It's from the Tribler folk[1], who have long long been doing by-far the most interesting & practical P2P work on the planet for well over a decade, notably around Bittorrent extensions on everything from fairness, to high durability, to search (by far some of the best/first to really get a win here in Bittorrent space), video on demand, & live-streaming (again a massive early pioneer that very much succeeded, albeit with low adoption). Recently some of their (longstanding) work on trying to add better economic/game-theory incentives in bitctorrent (far beyond simple private trackers with ratio limits) was on HN too[2][3].

I'd be cautious about disregarding these IPv8 efforts. As difficult as it is to wander into a single-language semi-documented thing that calls itself an Internet Protocol. I believe the future is exciting, and so should you, and sometimes that comes from humble (and hard to decypher) beginnings.

I ran into IPv8 about a month ago, but had to jog my memory. There is very much some seeming overlap with other p2p overlay networking, like I2P, EdgeVPN, a more general purpose WireGuard. I too am curious about differentiation / comparison.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/tribler

[2] https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki#tribler-an-attack-re...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26206105
But in China there isn't an opposition party.

US tech firms echo and enforce their party line. Their party just happens to not always be in power. The party line Chinese firms echo and enforce comes from a party always in power.
>I cannot believe you're blaming someone for not reading the million pages of fine print and not completely understanding the ramifications of a situation where your power is shut off for days with freezing temperatures, no water, no heat, sometimes no gas, and risking thousands of dollars of damage to your home with freezing pipes.

how is it any different than being overleveraged in the stock market, and when the crash comes you end up losing your life savings and your job?
This. The stock was at around 20/share before the spike and was considered a WIN at that. It's now sitting at 40/share and is probably priced high.

It was shorted to below 2/share at some point which is imo insane given what we've seen EVERY SINGLE CONSOLE RELEASE EVER.

The media saw an opportunity to make this about populist rage, and we all bit it. But this was started as a short squeeze and a very effective one at that.

EDIT: Just to clarify. There was obviously a short squeeze. That short squeeze could have stopped at 20/share and been a GREAT short squeeze. I have friends who got off the ride at that point thinking the squeeze was over. The frenzy that happened that pushed the stock to 400 was insane, and wouldn't have happened if this stock didn't start trending. You don't have a subreddit go from 2m to 8m in 2 weeks unless there's some serious frenzy.
> Despite having the unblocked access, I've noticed that only very few Chinese are interested in reading foreign news sources or using foreign social media/video platforms.

To be fair, I assume language is also a barrier.

I'm sure not going out of my way to learn Chinese to access Chinese language information sources. I would hardly expect the inverse.
This seems like a great theoretical internet take and not applicable to the real world in the least.

So some 50 year old blue collar dude who saves just enough to buy a duplex and live in half of it, but can’t stop working or he’ll starve, has suddenly been propelled from the working class into the lazy, cigar-smoking, top hat twirling capital class?
My point is that as software engineers, maaaaany of us are complicit in activity that is morally ambiguous at best, a nuisance on average, and in many cases actively misanthropic.

These are the careers that we have chosen and stuck to because the benefit to us outweighs the harm to society. We are aware of what we're doing and also apathetic about it.

A person complaining about their employer being somewhere between morally indifferent and morally monstrous is a reflection of how incredibly normal this is. Users on this site reading this person's complaints and tut-tutting about how bad it sounds is a reflection of how normal this is. We are all neck-deep in the filth of depravity, willingly and gladly, and we're pontificating the important differences between the filth reaching ear-level or just mouth-level.
I only use RSS feeds and email.
I am renting a house and can't do a thing about how my house is heated. How do I find out if my heating system is efficient?
I don't fully agree with that.
- Cheaper: Well most decent banks I have been working with don't charge on USD wires, or they charge something like $20 flat, which happens to be on par or cheaper than the ethereum blockchain fees nowadays
- Faster: In my experience (in sending hundreds of wires every month), the actual "sending time" of USD wires via Fed wire or SWIFT is literally minutes, so that's on par with blockchains. Most of the time the funds are just stuck somewhere in the compliance department. The same would hold if you withdraw/deposit USDT/USDC to an exchange. Funds can still get stuck waiting for compliance approval.
- Easier: That's debatable. I guess some banking UIs are better than others. And blockchain is not particularly known to be UI/UX friendly either.
One definite advantage I could think of is that when you hold USDT/USDC in your wallet, then you have full control over them, but I bet 99% of the USDT/USDC is held on exchange, and exchanges are more and more starting to act like banks (with all the slowness that that entails).
It could just be that it requires scale.
Some science projects just can't be done by small research teams.

You mention our understanding of physics. That understanding only got pinned down and refined by spending billions on large research projects.

The only brain related research project I know off that has a budget even close to what we routinely spend on physics is the Human Brain Project [1], and that only started in 2013. It's not expected to be complete until 2023 and even then it is only laying the foundation for more ambitious projects to build on.

[1] https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/en/
Diesel electric locomotives don't use regeneration because it doesn't make much sense, not because it's not feasible. Locomotives that have regenerative braking actually do exist.

3.5 tons of fuel for 15 000 tons is 230g of fuel per ton, or around a tenth of a gallon per ton.

So even on the highest climb, assuming none of the energy is used on the downhill, that's 3 tenths of a gallon per fuel per ton for the climb.

For context, a car's engine could move the average car 5.4 miles on flat ground with the energy required for a locomotive to lift the same car up 3km.

As you can see, it's really not that much energy. Which is why regenerative braking isn't used.
I'm sorry, are you referring to the Kingdom of Great Britain, a country that doesn't exist anymore, or the United Kingdom, a wholly different structure of government and effectively a different nation?
I guess I feel the opposite -- although I think the system of higher education is fundamentally broken in the US, I see this amplifying problems, not improving them.

Already I think the difference in actual education supplied by elite colleges vs less well-known colleges is vastly exaggerated (most evidence suggests the differences are preexisting, due to students, and that variance is just greater at some schools than others). So the branding thing is somewhat empty and unnecessary. And as for the skill acquisition, I'm more inclined to agree with you there, although I think there's already a dangerous tendency to equate degree with skillset (that is, "you are what your degree is"). Both of these lead to a very stereotyped, one-dimensional perspective on people.

I guess overall I just see this as amplifying inequality trends that are already unjustified, worsening societal problems. There's too much of an all-or-nothing attitude about human beings at the moment, and this just makes it worse by extending it to colleges writ large.

I think there's a lot of unnecessary degree work out there, and think academics is basically broken, but this trend isn't really the best one in my opinion, unless it's ultimately leading to complete collapse, elite colleges and all, and some kind of restructuring. But I don't see that happening. To me it seems like this is just reifying prejudice.
Wow. Seems like NYT's headline might even be underselling this story. Looks to me like this isn't so much a "standoff" as a "former Army private using credible threats of deadly force to intimidate neighbors and local governments into complying with his demands".

> [the gun range's Facebook page] asked followers to find an S.U.V. “to shoot up and then blow up,” and specified the make and model of the car the Huletts had given their teenage daughter.

> But in Vermont, the efforts to shutter his training site seemed at a standstill. Ms. Tilander said she believed the main reason was that Vermont’s law enforcement bodies, from the town level up to the state, were fearful of an armed confrontation. “Nobody wants to go in there because everybody’s afraid of him,” she said. “We’re 99 and nine-tenths percent sure from everything he said, he has a big cache of heavy-duty weaponry and explosive material.”
I’m not sure how that’s relevant?
Maybe the solution is for Griddy to file their own price-gouging lawsuit against the Public Utility Commission or ERCOT or whoever it is that collects or is responsible for the $9 price?
Most teachers in the USA are protected by _very_ strong unions, which are rivaled in power only by police unions. They have incredibly high levels of job security, strong health care etc. Pay is often based on seniority, and there is a feature/bug in unions where higher pay for senior staff tends to be a self-renewing problem.

All in all, being a (unionized) teacher in the USA is a pretty good gig for most people. You won't be rich, but you are secure and protected.

Now non-union/daycare/preschool teachers are a whole different story and they get the short end of the stick. For example, day care centers in the USA have generally been open throughout the pandemic, while schools are (in major cities) still shut.
Auctions would only make sense if those buying the power participated. If i knew that turning on my computer would cost 100/hour i would keep it off. But if i have no idea what the current market price actually is, i cannot make a rational choice. These people had no idea what they were buying until the bill came in the mail/email. This is precicely the sort of area for consumer protection laws.
I'm well aware of all this.
They're not partisan, no, but as you kind of allude to ("many folks don't do so") a prerequisite for using them properly is a certain ideological flexibility that is... less common these days. If someone is ideologically possessed, they will use these tools to skewer outgroup ideas but not apply them to ingroup ideas. As the letters in this very post demonstrate even our congress people can't apply them to their own thinking!

And as far as a governing apparatus, I'm not sure these tools really help provide the structure needed to declare any given piece of media misinformation or not.
Try email without a spam filter or open a web forum with no moderation.
Relying on Taiwan is akin to putting all your eggs in one basket. There is too much in one region of the world where a totalitarian regime with a sordid human rights record has a significant military presence and threatens Taiwan with regularity.

What happens when China rolls over Taiwan? Will the US support its ally as per treaty or will it turn a blind eye? What will the EU do? So far the world seems content to issue only proclamations against their treatment of the Uighur and the world is deafeningly silent about Hong Kong anymore.

The only way to protect the supply chain is to make more world wide that it currently is and Africa and South and Central America are ripe for bringing up their standard of living as well as the rights of their populations.
The issue is that there is a power imbalance: since, in the United States we are living in a white supremacist society, ethnic solidarity among whites exacerbates the power imbalance, whereas ethnic solidarity among non-whites helps correct the power imbalance.

Eventually we could get to a world where no ethnic solidarity exists at any level but until power imbalances are corrected, not speaking and acting against white supremacy is just asking for the status quo to be upheld.
I know a contractor who has worked for a major company that I won't name. He has told me that their source control was, for a time, Google Drive. He knew it was a recipe for disaster but real work was nonetheless getting done, and the client was satisfied. They didn't know how the sausage was being made, but they liked the output.

I think a lot of people who haven't been around the scene wouldn't believe these stories, but this stuff happens a lot. Like major commercial projects with no tests whatsoever (unit, integration, or otherwise), that are still successful and making a lot of money.
It was a power play. One (ideologically uniform, and quite likely coordinating) group asserting raw power over another. Because it could. And in doing so, making sure this was public and messy. As a warning to others.
Tell it to the slaves bud.

(I mean that we've regressed into repression)