skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for pointing that out ...

Updated the original comment with a link to the freely available full text ...

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26342105
The whataboutism from cryptocurrency proponents every time the power use of mining is brought up is astonishing.
Why are there so many articles attacking crypto across the web as of late?
The difficulty is that the increasing dollar value of Bitcoin incentivises more mining activity (even though no additional coins will be produced as a result), so energy use is almost directly correlated with the price, at least in the medium term.

Fortunately as the block mining reward continues to be halved approximately every four years, the incentive to mine will decrease as well (though not quite as much, because miners also receive transaction fees).
If you're going to question the validity of an assertion please provide more than just a counterassertion.
There are plenty of techniques in the past that make RSA a bad choice altogether.

If you are going with it anyway, yeah, 4k bits is a safe choice for making it reasonably secure right now (2k being a bare minimum), but remember, attacks always get better, never worse, and RSA has a fair share of possible attacks.
The US is actually a tiny portion of the hash rate in the BTC network. China makes up 70%+ of the hash rate of the network and they use a lot of coal power, ~62% of their power generation is handled by coal power.

Basically no where is to the point we can just add power draws and say they have no health impact. Energy being fungible until an grid is to the point of having excess renewable power during the day and miners being spun up and down to absorb that excess any mining will have health impacts. I think the spin up and down is important too because it means over night miners aren't causing excess capacity to be built for storage.

https://cbeci.org/mining_map

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
Challenging Utilitarian Product Design
The only positive I see in this is that these kind of government actions on social media giants can push decentralised web more. By it's nature peer-to-peer systems will be beyond control of government. Internet was not supposed to be just twitter/facebook combo which it has now become. A lot of news nowadays are coming just from twitter trends on indian tv channels which is not right all the time. Mostly it's celebrity or big boss gossip but we can't rule out that twitter can start a war inside any country if it wants.

I am not sure these laws will solve any problems with the current internet. Some problems which I would like to see solved would be:

1. Tracing people who morph images real people and ruin their normal life. If this is a criminal offence and what's the point if people can easily get away with this. Internet by and large can have a mechanism to trace and banish such bad actors.

2. Too much dependence on twitter/facebook/google. It's fucked up. Why CEO of these companies have so much power over our planet. Twitter can literally cause world war by sending misinformation if it wants. It's scary to just imagine how much power Dorsey has. May be he is a good man, but is it worth to trust one man over the stability of this planet?

3. Manipulation with bots. There should be certain amount of weightage given to verified accounts as well as posts with links to verified articles. I want to see the real votes of real people - not the trends of automated bot armies.

My suggestion to Indian government on these laws would be - Applying hammers won't solve anything in long term. What will be better is to make people question what is right and wrong for internet themselves; Bring this discussion internationally and use the international platform to tell what problems are spread on internet - and tell the options people can choose in long term. Have a vote internationally may be.
If you are arguing that bitcoin is using a significant amount of overflow hydro power, I'd like to check your sources.
A couple of easy wins:

- are you describing what you'd do in a situation without considering that other people are in different situations with different constraints, both external and of human fallibility?

- have you said "why don't they just" or a similar form of words, without at least coming up with your own potential reasons why that might not be easy?

(This is like writing "works on my machine" on a bug report. You know not to do that, so don't write "works on my lifestyle and background" on other people's bug reports about life)
"I don't like this fake-wokism SV monoculture creeping into everything"

At least, it's replacing the awkward dudebro monoculture that crept into everything.
Where is the HN moderation?

At this point multiple the articles on the front page are just about hating Bitcoin without any substance.

I'd consider canceling my subscription if HN was paid (though there are still many cool articles)
I’ll add one: you don’t need much data to make important insights. I’m taking N < 100. Focus on starting with a good sample and building up a priori domain knowledge instead. Get the data when it’s time to build out complex models/ML IF that time ever comes.
Use reader mode on firefox, or send it to Pocket
Cryptobots really believe this? Even as a European citizen, I have faith that the US Dollar will stay the US dollar, and keep value. The Euro will keep being the Euro. Hell, even the Yuan will stay the Yuan.

Just accept that you're willing to shit on the planet to make a few bucks, it's fine.
>And I know exactly how they would respond to me: What do you mean by "these people" you *ist!

You're inventing a stance to get angry about.
> it clearly wouldn't be permitted in chrome store (as per well known ad-blockers)

Why wouldn't it be permitted? Many ad blockers [1][2][3] are in the Chrome store. Disabling a browser feature is a very standard usage of extensions.

> Why wouldn't it be a setting in the browser?

It might be! I don't know what Chrome (or other browsers that choose to implement the API) will decide. The proposal is not that far along yet. You could consider filing an issue at https://github.com/WICG/floc/issues

> You suggest that the code is in the browser (which i doubt - its certainly not at the moment!)

https://github.com/chromium/chromium/tree/master/chrome/brow...

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...
[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock-plus-free-...
[3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ghostery-%E2%80%93...
In the traditional dealer market, the quality of say Ford dealer A to Ford dealer B, is a MUCH bigger difference than the difference between brands. But this is something very hard to figure out.

I contend that even if Tesla made normal ICE vehicles, their no dealer strategy is a long term win. Dealers are horrible. The trickery to buy and sell a car is terrible.
You could say that to GP who just dismissed a published study without actually taking on any of the claims made therein.
Illustrated List of Shelters as Artworks
Apple investigated in UK over 'unfair' App Store claims
When I flew down to the Antarctic peninsula from Chile in 2016 we went on a BAe 146 I think (1) The explanation given was that it had landing gear that was toughened for rough airstrips, had a relatively short takeoff, and the 4 high-mounted engines were good for landing in snow/ice and offered good redundancy.

It felt pretty cramped on the inside compared to "normal" planes, especially when wearing all your cold weather gear during the flight (you stepped off right onto the snow - no airport buildings)

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Aerospace_146
That may be your point, but it was not GP's point.
The earth is not overpopulated in the same sense that Covid is just a flu: people argue their position with anecdata instead of statistical trends.
We have been interested in miners or mining farms which are fully powered by renewable energy. Canada and Sichuan is taking the lead and they have a lot of hydro power.

If you know any miners/mining farms powered by renewable energy sources, please send me a line to eren@countingcarbons.co

thank you.
I’m noticing some very interesting attacks on blockchain technology lately. I’m willing to bet the calculations are derived from the probability theories we so dearly represent as near certainties.
I can rent a moving truck to get groceries, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea. There might be narrow use cases, but that doesn't mean it's the best realistic way to solve every problem, and it doesn't mean it's worth the cost.
That's exactly how I understood the parent: Musk goes after anything that brings profits, and doesn't care about climate. Neither acceleration or deceleration.
Please compare and contrast the status quo with the crypto alternative.
Mining validates the transactions as well. No mining would mean it was worthless over night.
Onus probandi

Otherwise nonsense claims can easily destroy the discussion by DoSing the opposition.
Not to mention China!
I am unsure how whataboutism pointing to an unrelated industry adds to this topic.
You'd get a few bottles at least.
It is year 2021 and people still think Bitcoin is boiling the oceans. Bitcoin is the greenest think on this planet. Economic empowerment it brings to individual together with energy extraction innovations is just beyond imagination of most people in this forum.
Is the responsibility not on the person making the assertion to provide evidence?
Actually, more of -that- would be grand ...

(Imagine! Politics! ...)
I don't buy this argument. By that logic all of internet banking should also disable web/desktop access? Zoom, skype and google meet should also stop working on the desktop/web, and only allow users through their mobile apps. Yeah desktop is inherently less secure because of the freedoms it affords users, but that doesn't prevent Facebook from operating their website.
> It's a digital unfakeable deed to an asset, that asset being a trading card, artwork or something else.

Well...no. Quite the opposite. The art is an asset. NFTs are not the artwork, and they're not a deed to the artwork. Buying an NFT gives you ownership of the NFT; it doesn't give you ownership of the artwork.

Selling digital unfakeable deeds to an artwork, and trading those deeds on the blockchain, sounds really cool. That might have value! But to the best of my knowledge, nobody has done that, largely because it's utterly impossible and we have no idea how to even go about trying to do it. And in any case, NFTs certainly aren't that. You're not buying and selling the artwork, you're buying and selling a numbered acknowledgement that the artwork exists.
It is not about me. I am only a negligible grain of dust. It is about something bigger.
Pray tell, which part is it that you find fault with?
Sci-Hub link to bypass Elsevier's paywall: https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.erss.2019.101281
Isn’t that exactly what the original comment was doing?
Yes. This is yet another reason I think Monero will become an actually usable currency
From the article

> a financial network that uses more energy than Argentina

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

Just for context: Argentina used about 3% of the energy consumed by the US alone in 2018. And only a fraction of that amount consumed by G8 in total. However, the number does not tell us how this energy was produced and, hence, can not provide an insight into the environmental impact of Cryptos. If it came mostly from renewable sources, the carbon footprint of Bitcoin and other cryptos would be quite reasonable, I believe.
Possibly because so far crypto is a net drain on society?
I suppose the turning point was when we stopped living in a shared reality where scientific consensus was worth something.
Opinion: The inflation tantrum scared investors
Can you elaborate a bit on how you set things up and introduced some security?
There seems to be some sort of smear campaign to smear cryptocurrencies as anti-green anti-environmental

Which is a bit absurd as you can pick anything in modern world, literally anything such as computers/phones in front of us reading this and point that XYZ damage was caused to the planet by the shiny macbook in front of us or android phone, not to mention the huge network of datacenters around the world from which the information is stored/streamed.

Until there is highly efficient zero loss superconductor long range networks of several orders of magnitude better energy storage then saying that energy "is wasted" on crypto is very misleading, that energy could be coming from a dam up in a mountain enjoying a sudden influx of rain or windmills/solar in middle of nowhere with no nearby large population centers to absorb this energy (lack of efficient long range transmission infrastructure and/or energy storage).
Nice write up, and a good example of the kinds of best practices that data analysts should adopt from the world of software engineering. The main recommendations are:

> Utilize design sprints to help focus your team’s efforts and remove the stress of the ticking clock

> Don’t skip on prototyping, it’s a great way to fail early

> Avoid machine learning (for first iterations) to avoid being slowed down by unnecessary complexity

> Talk to your users so you can get a better sense of what problem they’re facing and what they need in a product

It’s useful to consider these recommendations in the context of the AI Hierarchy of Needs [0]. You need to sort out the base of your pyramid as quickly as possible.

[0] https://hackernoon.com/the-ai-hierarchy-of-needs-18f111fcc00...
In short: "I dont have or see a use for X therefore X must be completely useless to anybody"

Also its DLT not blockchain there are DLTs without chains of blocks, without PoW/PoS etc.
It sounds like you're saying something that's popular can't be bad?
It's not clear what they mean by this. Is it an actual laser doing the cutting? Or a traditional implement guided or verified by a laser (to my ears more plausible)?
Is there any rhyme or reason to Square's moves in recent months?

First doubling down on Bitcoin, now a music streaming service. What next?
You certainly are:

Climate activists and sedition https://news.google.com/search?q=disha%20ravi%20sedition

India freedom https://news.google.com/search?q=india%20freedom

India extrajudicial killings https://news.google.com/search?q=india%20extrajudicial%20kil...
Top Trending Skills for Technology Executives
Blockchain isn't a "cryptocurrency tech", cryptocurrency is one of its elements and in fact great solution for rewarding for hosting nodes inside the network.

It has power as combination of P2P/ distribution, immutability, cryptocurrency, consensus and machine code execution. All-in-one solution.

BTW. This article is just a massive trash.
> If that’s true repealing the laws will be no-op.

This doesn't quite follow; dealerships protected by the current laws might provide some value without providing as much value as the law allots to them. In that case, repeal would mean that dealerships continue existing, but become much less profitable.
Social Repercussions of Pandemics
Improvements in semiconductor manufacturing would happen either way eventually; to the extent that Bitcoin accelerates them it is (by definition) by creating the demand that necessitates them.
> The 21st century is a time of great scientific discovery. Cars are driving themselves.

These are the first two sentences of the article and already I'm skeptical. I'd say the self-driving cars are mostly a product of recent technical inventions and not scientific discovery - the scientific discovery happened mostly in the XX century, with discoveries which made integrated circuits, or lasers (for lidar) possible.

The deep learning concept itself did not "discover" anything, it's just a technical contraption that happens to work well for some classes of real-world problems. Granted, there were some maths advances in the eighties and nineties that made current SLAM possible, but again, new math is not "scientific discovery".
"Privilege" is a terrible word to have become entrenched for such a useful concept, because many people instinctively get their backs up about being told they're privileged when they don't have to face a challenge that someone else faces.

And it's not just a question of generalization, but a question of whose stories get told through the media. Whose lifestyles make it into the "lifestyle" section.
Attack on bitcoin != attack on crypto. Gridcoin suffers much less from this problem since the computations are actually useful and would likely be done anyway.
> Focus on starting with a good sample and building up a priori domain knowledge

Yes! Experimental design is king. Sampling strategies matter.
To those that are downvoting: To give you some numbers after over 25m doses of vaccine delivered in the US. The current stats of severe allergic reaction to vaccines (which is the most severe adverse advent reported) stands at 4.7 cases of 1 million (!) doses administered. Even though these are severe reactions, they are still temporary/transient.

It might be hard to comprehend, but vaccines are very safe.
Can anybody explain how this makes sense for Square? Square + Tidal seems like a bizarre combination with neither benefiting in any significant way from being owned by the same company.
I've worked in blockchain for 8 years across the crypto and enterprise space and I can tell you with utter certainty that it is stupid. And I'm stupid too for not seeing it earlier.
They are on the rise, true that.-

(I am hoping they lead to intelligent debate, and - thus - improvement of existing systems ...)
I'd like to see CPU's having a notion of "theoretical time" and "real time". Theoretical time ticks once per CPU instruction or similar. Real time is kept in sync with theoretical time by slowing the CPU down if theoretical time gets ahead, and throwing an exception if real time gets ahead.

All IO with untrusted devices would be delayed until the real time exceeds the theoretical time the message was sent.

Then one can have as many timing sidechannels as one likes, and the running program can never learn about them.
This isn't whataboutism, it's a valid question considering BTC is touted as a replacement for the financial system and ostensibly performs a similar function with an alternative infrastructure. If the premise is that we should stop BTC mining and processing simply because it costs $X dollars (code pun intended) per transaction, then the price of alternatives is germane to the discussion.
I just don’t see how this is true. Are similar assertions going to be made when we switch to electric cars as a significant percentage of the population? It’s at about 2-3% IIRC and increasing this by several orders of magnitude will have a similar impact on electricity usage.
Show HN: Amazon Cemetery – +50 dead Amazon projects and why they shut down
This takes every single possible advantage of async text chat via slack / matrix / whatever and strips it away.

It's already an absolute nightmare to make sure business data is easily searchable, this would make it a million times worse.

I cannot image a single sane IT manager procuring this for their company.

In addition, if this was added to alternatives as a feature I'd disable it company wide.
If $1 in BTC is responsible for ~$0.50 (I don't buy this claim)...imagine how much damage central banks cause by debasing currencies to fight endless wars, funding corruption through a class of useless cantillonaires, exacerbating inequality, etc....

Central bank corruption probably even indirectly funded the stupidity that allows articles like these to be branded as "science"...to the casual observer this might seem like a stretch but it really is not. "Debase the money, debase society..."
I hate this blanket method of dismissing when someone points out that all available alternatives to something are also bad
I was trusting the compiler on this one, but after someone asked this question on Twitter, I doubled-checked:
https://cppx.godbolt.org/z/fhTGcx

Sure enough, it compiles down to "add rax, 7"
From seeing this, I fear the HN I once knew and liked is gone. The article isn't accessible, doesn't make sense and is promoting poor discussion.

fwiw, I realize this comment doesn't help much either.
a "Whataboutism" is just a comparison the reader doesn't like
This happened to my messenger strap. I opened a ticket on their website, included a photo, and they sent me a mew strap.
What is the energy cost of the entire USD-based financial system? At a minimum we need to total up what the US Mint, the Federal Reserve, Visa, Mastercard, Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Citibank, Goldman Sachs and thousands of other companies and government entities do. It is obvious that amount of energy used to keep the USD going absolutely dwarfs Bitcoin.
If he did it on purpose, he's a supervillain, if he did it due to negligence, he's a hypocrite. No need to split hairs.
Imho "but technically..." is not a valid opinion while in practice the access is O(1) on average. Yea sure, it becomes linear if your hash is "return 42;", it can't grantee that you supplied a good hasher.
That's not how it works. If I claim the moon is made of cheese and someone says he doesn't believe me, the onus is on me to prove it is, not on them that it isn't.
> responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages

red flag this article is steeped in pseudoscience.

you could spend a lifetime trying to model and predict global weather patterns _with no outside intervention_. the idea that you could even make an attempt at attaching a number to this phenomena is laughable. what are the error bars here, 10,000%?

lets pretend, for example, you tried to estimate the impact of tsunamis assuming that we think this weather event is standard deviations more likely due to BTC (this is non-obvious and probably not true, but for the sake of argument). dozens of tsunamis around the globe will kill people and decimate cities, but your estimate will be multiple orders of magnitude off in some places like fukushima - a cursory glance at wikipedia indicates a lower bound of 300 billion dollars.

this is not to say that we shouldnt be concerned about rapid global climate system changes; on the contrary! junk science like this actively harms the cause. we dont have to sensationalize, reality and truth are scary enough.
There is also https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3744683. A Vicious Cycle: How Pandemics Lead to Economic Despair and Social Unrest
> Given the absurd salaries that exist in the software industry, what does "really, really well" mean here?

I'm from Eastern Europe, so it was "really, really well" compared to local IT salaries (which are not low, mind you, at least compared to European standards). Said friend ended up working for a local FAANG entity after that experience, for lower salary.
News outlets look for sensational news, it is enough for them. Not long before, NYT ruined some hard-earned reputation of jetbrains with their clickbait headline and suffered no repurcursions.
As a fun exercise sometime, spin up any cheap EC2 instance in AWS, set up an HTTP server listening on port 80 and 443, and watch your SSH and HTTP logs.

The last time I did this I had random SSH and HTTP requests rolling in within minutes.
That was a political decision. Having your own grid means that you also have your own power frequency regulation, and importing power from a different network is not as simple as connecting wires - you need to connect them using DC instead of AC. These transfer points (interchanges) are sized just for temporary power import or export, you cannot use them to power the whole Texas grid. You can see more details about the interconnects here: https://www.eia.gov/realtime_grid/#/status
> On the date Chang admitted TSMC’s disadvantage, its stock rose by 8%. Investors believed that Morris was very angry and there would be serious consequences. Indeed, TSMC started preparing for a multi-front counterattack.