skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Parent comment may have this in their greenhouse. DIN rails, RPi in 3d printed case and sensors and water control on GPIO.
Then the news article should have mentioned that point.

But the news article very much arouses the impression that that is not his point, that his point is something other, and that he succeeded at said other point, he never endeavored to succeed at.
ICOs were better
Ask HN: Why did everyone buy electrical surge protectors in the 90s?
Electrical power surges were not more common in the 90's than they are now, but back then it was common to shop for highly rated surge protectors for computers and electronics, even comparing obscure performance ratings. I haven't heard the phrase "surge protector" in years. Did the tech just become so commodity that it is built in to all computer power supplies? Was it just a marketing fad?
A prior discussion here was linked from the article itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15912929
Yes. It’s literally called “The Iron Law of Oligarchy.”
linked in the article: cryptoart.wtf

Just insane... what a completely indefensible ecological cost for such a trivial and absurd use.
I think it has to do with the money being held in crypto... the whales have more than they’ll need and are looking for reasons to spend it.
Ask HN: Where can I find part-time dev jobs that will pay me $2k/week?
I live in SF Bay Area, CA USA. I'm looking to move out of this area but home prices require me make at least $4k/month for mortgage. I am not sold on the fulltime 40hour/week wage slave lifestyle.
I hate to be a complainer, but where is the definition of NFT in this article? I was taught in university to expand acronyms the first time I used them. Is this not common practice?
Probably you are answering to a different comment, otherwise it makes absolutely no sense. In no shape, way or form have communists managed the internal or external American policy in the last 40 years, if ever.
Blogging Is Hard (2008)
So all the military, government, police, medical, utility, CEO, infrastructure, and other people also have their location data in these databases. How do they all feel about this?
I think the immediate value of NFTs lies in industries where you need to keep the producer honest to protect against artificial scarcity.

For example, what stops baseball card printers from re-printing "rare" cards? And how do we know they're not hoarding some of the best cards for a few years, then selling them individually? I could see NFTs being demanded in situations like this to force producers to create digital proof of initial production and distribution.

I haven't thought about it much, but hashing old tweets or a picture of something and claiming it's valuable sounds like snake-oil sales to me.
Yes, that something is that over decades the oil, gas, and coal industries spent tens or more likely hundreds of millions of dollars on propaganda, subsidized talking heads, lobbying, donations, infomercials and such on making happen. This isn't just a natural outgrowth of conservative politics. They got their money worth.
If curious, some past threads:

How to send an 'E mail' (1984) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23978397 - July 2020 (1 comment)

How to Send an Email (1984) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22595154 - March 2020 (1 comment)

How to Send an Email in 1984 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12628019 - Oct 2016 (47 comments)

How to Send an Email in 1984 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11280242 - March 2016 (1 comment)
I have no idea, other than this is a report from a possibly biased, non-objective source and should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt...
I lived through having to move data using flash drives or by emailing files to myself. Heck in some cases the data had no easy way to transfer so I had to pick what device was the most convenient to have the data on. During that time it was my dream to just have everything automatically in sync.

I very much do not want to have to go back to that crap. Having it all "be there" is exactly how I want things to be.
Drug dealing is a facinating experiment of full-free-market capitalism.

The experience certainly inspired me further on the path of entrepreneurship.
I should also note that US oil drillers have to post a bond that will ensure there will be funds available to decommission the well when the time comes. Maybe this should be done for all green energy also as there is a significant amount of non-recyclable waste involved in decommissioning windmills and solar farms.
That is a very good point I didnt even mention, but you are totally correct. That demographic must have actual interesting stories and POV , but they will not appear on reddit without being grossly transformed.
People pay for mods and skins all the time. People will pay secondlife furniture. They will pay to be be able to display it in their VR houses. They will display it like badges on their forum avatars.

The speculation and whales will being the capital to generate a steady market and build out the partnerships and incentives for customers. Once people are used to digital wallets, sending a few bucks for instant delivery of some unique design is easier than etsy.
CryptoPunks will be in the MoMA one day. They are a pioneer — and will be valued as such. Derivative works and obvious cash grabs are a bubble and low effort art will trend back to $0.
Ooohhh not the evil speculation. So scawwrry. Seriously though, everything in life is speculation. Do you have a job? That's speculation on return for your time. Do you own a house? That is speculation on property prices. Do you have a bank account? That is speculation on inflation. Everything is speculation unless you have a God's eye view of the world. Get over it.
I like the take here, but I think it's also worth mentioning that procrastination is also an adaptive mechanism and can be a positive thing.

As humans we have limited time and energy, and procrastination can be a signal that we are using our time and energy on the wrong project or activity.

It can also be productive time for our subconscious to come up with creative directions for our {software architecture, novel, movie, music production, etc} when we are not sure what direction to consciously go in.
Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy:

Earth - a small planet in the outer reaches of spiral galaxy M7529, so far the only planet on record that the semi-intelligent biped inhabitants managed to overheat so badly that they became extinct. Overheating has happened before, of course, however the method of overheating is unique - the inhabitants invented a method of identifying uniqueness by making large calculations and attaching small drawings to the calculations, they then proceeded to trade these tokens as something of value, using more and more energy and creating a runaway green house effect. This has been used as an example to disprove the existence of god.
You could do the same thing today, offering a certificate of authenticity or whatever, validated by the relevant comunnaly accepted authority, and it would be be just as baffling and nonsensical an offer. The certificate is not the weilder of value , even if it were required for the object itself to be valuable (eg originality).

With an NFT I don’t even know what you’re certifying, except that this one chain says you own the object. In your example that’s not even true, the museum “owns” it, yet the thieves have it, and the NFT is now just as flawed as today’s understanding of ownership.
I don't have the impression people buying NFT art consider there to be much difference between the art and what you call a "trading card" referencing art. (sure, many probably buy for speculation, but that happens with meatspace art too)

Thought experiment: if they sold a digital art piece in traditional terms, would you consider the printed licensing contract (which is our usual legal tool represent selling a file) to be a "trading card" and the art itself to be not sold? (the legal meaning of an NFT is less defined, true, but I suspect people will tie licensing contracts into that soon enough)

Especially in art, a lot of this comes ultimately down to social convention of what people do consider to have value, and as long as enough people agree it doesn't really matter what the rest of us thinks. (I think I get how the logic works for NFTs, but it doesn't work for me in the sense that I currently don't consider owning an NFT to be meaningful to me, unlike owning other kinds of (representations of) art)
I have shortcuts to save last (sl) executed command and another to grep that file.

alias sl='fc -ln -1 | sed "s/^\s*//" >> ~/.saved_commands.txt'
alias slg='< ~/.saved_commands.txt grep'

You can also add a comment to the command before saving. For ex:

$ foo_cmd args #this command does this awesome thing
$ sl
There are Christians in Iraq too, the Pope will be visiting this week. Stay tuned.
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OK, so what happens if, say, the worlds energy demands jump 100x in 2-3 years due to out-of-control feedback loops like crypto?

Energy prices go up. People suffer. There are two possible responses:

- Regulation/laws to stop the feedback loop

- Investment + deployment of new energy technologies to increase supply

Will be interesting to see which of the two scenarios above happen, or if the fears of this crypto wave leading to insane energy cost increases just don't happen.
Tech labor's politics != tech capital's politics.
I know what an NFT does. It doesn't even give you ownership on anything other than a blockchain print. To me, the logical conclusion of this is copyright protection, where, say, an eventual platform only plays content where the player can only be verified as the owner.
> It’s amusing to me considering the degree to which tech backed Biden.

Antitrust action in technology will oxygenate the space and restore healthy competition, something tech desperately needs and which users deserve.
I'm hoping we can do our NFT trading on non-PoW chains within the next couple years. This should reduce the environmental impact to that of baseball cards.
What to do when you have a bad boss
Rotary Dial Anti-Smartphone Designed and Built by Space Engineer Justine Haupt
I don’t disagree with you. I am an avid backpacker and really enjoy nature. Many studies show people have better mental attitudes when they can view trees daily, etc.

I’ll just note that there are a lot of different points on the spectrum between country side and concrete/glass metropolis. Many of these points are great places I would still count as cities, and they still allow for gardens. I am NOT arguing for us all to live in high rises in midtown Manhattan. I do think that we should build nice, dense areas that still have green space, while allowing humans to live close together to gain the increasing returns that make society great. Hopefully we cut down on cars and get the fresh air as well.
You wish, maybe? Anyways, conservatives need places like NYC and California to fail to validate their ideologies, that they keep thriving and booming must be incredibly frustrating to them.
Borges spoke English fluently, too, and there is a great lecture series by him on YouTube.

https://youtu.be/YSLV7t9DvN8
"It’s an ongoing waste that creates little in ongoing value and gets less efficient and more expensive as time goes on. For most technological innovations the opposite is true."

Reminds me of another cryptographic novelty that's come back into vogue lately.
SF like most American cities has suffered poor city planning and no foresight about future population growth.
The current US homicide rate is the same as in England in the late Middle Ages. It’s been 5-10x higher than the UK the entire 20th century. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/11217607.0002.206/--deci...

Also, we have had Obamacare for a decade. We have a less complete social safety net than European countries, but people act like it doesn’t exist.
Video Game Pianist on Lichess Streams
I have always washed my iPhones in the sink (careful to run water over the screen and back, but not directly into the charging ports or speakers).

I have done this for my iPhone 6, 8 and XR over the last 5-6 years and it has never caused any damage. I used to wash the iPhone 6 in the sink nearly daily to remove the oils/sticky from the screen after eating lunch^. In my experience, you don't have to be extremely careful, you just need to be mindful that if you run the water jet continuously into a hole then it will eventually bust through... no matter what Apple marketing says.

^My workmates used to always tell me off for doing this, and I would explain that I've been doing it for years.
I get that you’re frustrated but you’re conflating a number of different things. The scaling past a Costco metric applies to Bitcoin which is something you yourself mentioned above re 1.5kb/sec for $25. That were actually aligned on.

The scaling meaningfully beyond that with proof of work by increasing block size, ok I get, however it comes at a cost as I mentioned. It does not allow an average person to run a full node. I’m asking how you feel about that. You say the core team is trying to “sell a second layer” - do you have some citations for me to read?

Beyond that it’s not clear any POW coin would scale materially because it still has massive inherent inefficiencies in proof of work, which aren’t manifest in BCH at the moment because too few people use it (ok more than BTC but my point about visa wasn’t to move goalposts but to say 7tx vs 116tx/sec still round to roughly zero). Further the direct costs (ie transaction) while low have side effects such as miners not bothering to even mine. Maybe that’s not a big enough problem, ok, but I don’t think anything I’ve said is invalid is it?

If it ever actually becomes popular miners will clamor all over themselves and then we’ll have two Argentina’s of power wasted on this.

And while yes 50ktx/s is visa peak velocity at time of writing - 24k is typical - bitcoins remains 7 peak, 3 typical, and bch is 120 peak?
I have the Droid48 app on my android phone. Pretty nice but I actually never use it.
Study Shows Far-Right Misinformation Is Thriving on Facebook
I've seen a bunch of artists jump on https://www.hicetnunc.xyz (which uses Tezos, which apparently is a Proof-of-Stake chain?) after the "wait, ETH uses how much energy?!" shock.
> A very simple example is that it could partially solve the problem of verifying digital identities. If I follow/friend your NFT based identity, and various virtual realms (games, social media, virtual spaces) integrate with that 'identity' NFT for user accounts

You don't need Crypto Kitties for account verification. All you need is a cryptographic keypair, like the kind you already get by default in any Bitcoin wallet. Just sign a message proving you own a public key with the corresponding private key.

> Maybe I'm starry eyed and delusional, and I'm sure it's a LONG, messy road to get wherever we're going with this.

Evidently we’re going back in time to 2015, when “NFT” meant a blockchain representation of a digital trading card game. No one cared then, and no one cares now. The only thing new to the 2021 “NFT” narrative cycle is Twitter trying to monetize itself by selling tweets. Needless to say, none of the historical attempts at NFTs have ever resulted in lasting value to society, and probably this won’t either.
Until the price of carbon is accounted for in the price of electricity, using ridiculous amounts of electricity for such trivial uses is externalizing the costs of these transactions onto all of us.

We are facing a climate crisis that is projected to accelerate a mass extinction crisis and create tens of millions of displaced refugees and yet we are spending 200 KgCO2 of wasted compute on a 'digital ownership token' on this: http://cryptoart.wtf/#https://superrare.co/artwork-v2/the-fo...
This was hilarious and well-written.

I've become extremely alarmed at the number of completely non-technical people who don't know anything about how cryptocurrency works getting extremely into it via YouTube click holes. It's obvious that these NFTs are capitalizing on it.

A guy I ran into at the hardware store today was talking to me and he didn't understand the concept of a cryptocurrency that has a stable value so that it can be used as a means of exchange.

He's an airline pilot and he just has tens of thousands of dollars invested in various crypto things that he heard about on YouTube and he's made a ton of money on it..
It was eerily reminiscent of conversations I had with people flipping houses in 2006.
> low effort art will trend back to $0

This is being continuously disproved since decades by contemporary art.
The "rest of us" don't pay for the electricity use. The ETH miners are paying for it directly. And creators and buyers are paying for it indirectly through ETH usage. It isn't an externality. That's like saying the physical art world shouldn't exist because it uses physical real estate, electricity, and raw materials to be made on -- and the rest of us pay for those things.

Negative environmental consequences with costs imposed upon society are literally externalities. All the things you list are textbook examples.
Pretty bad take on NFTs.

There are numerous configurations, networks, and commercial structures that can be created for NFT offerings that can mitigate "problems" described in the OP and accommodate for different tradeoffs.

A simple retort would point to the many alternative NFT networks that don't use POW-based consensus algorithms or the NFT offerings that enable value add offerings very differently than purchasing art or baseball cards.

Evaluating the capabilities of NFTs against the value offerings of something like rare art is an apples to oranges comparison. Of course the market for digital assets offered via NFT is immature and speculative; this is a new market, based on an alternative technology paradigm, that has a long way to go before it settles into a more usable and valuable structure.

Ultimately, the idea of using key-pairs pegged to widely accessible peer-to-peer public networks as a mechanism for tracking ownership of digital (or near digital or at times even physical) assets is incredibly novel. It turns the conventional model of third-party hosted digital assets on its head and enables really interesting mechanisms of distribution, ownership, access, and value consumption and creation that does not compare well with traditional mechanisms. And in saying it doesn't compare well I mean to acknowledge its limitations and its potential at the same time. However, the critique in the OP is pretty bland and doesn't seem to acknowledge the full scope of the situation.
Thanks for the videos... Osamagirl69, it seems you know about relatively-obscure quality stuff on youtube, Do you have per any chance more recommendations (it does not have to be on this topic)
That research was from 25 years ago. Rent has ballooned since then and wages at the bottom have dropped (minimum wage is lower now relative to CPI). Would be curious if this result holds up if we adjusted for inflation.
you are completely right and im the definition of the pot calling the kettle black. Ive collected all kinds of things throughout my life that many would deem stupid/garbage. To each, their own.

I love blockchain for transparency/authenticity aspects. I just struggle with the collector side of it not being physical things for me to hold. It just doesn't feel real to me in the digital world.
It's like bobby tables in real life.

I wonder if this will be the new anonymity in the future, sort of being like a "john smith" in the past
I love when the driver pretends that the credit card machine is broken then glares at me when I try to explain that I'm not carrying $65 in cash, then suddenly the credit card machine starts working again, and just paying for the damn thing is a 10 minute ordeal that nearly has me fearing for my life.
>CREATORS may rush to start minting NFTs as a way to get paid for what they’ve created. Unlike alternative digital currencies which are relatively complicated to invent and sell, it’s recently become super easy to ‘mint’ an NFT. [...] The more time and passion that creators devote to chasing the NFT, the more time they’ll spend trying to create the appearance of scarcity and hustling people to believe that the tokens will go up in value. They’ll become promoters of digital tokens more than they are creators. [...]

>BUYERS of NFTs may be blind to the fact that there’s no limit on the supply. In the case of baseball cards, there are only so many rookies a year. In the case of art, there’s a limited number of famous paintings and a limited amount of shelf space at Sotheby’s.

How do these make NFTs signficantly different from the art trade and collectibles market? In both cases, creators could fall prey to focusing too much on selling things, and in both cases, the creators at any time could decide to put out a ton more. (I don't get why the case of baseball cards is treated differently: nothing stops them from suddenly deciding to print many more cards.)

---

I think the externality of the power usage of proof-of-work blockchains is a significant issue though, and that maybe NFTs should be discouraged on that basis until we have NFTs working through environmentally-friendly solutions like proof-of-stake. I think this is way more of an issue than whatever possibility of a downside exists from artists maybe deciding to focus too much on making sellable tokens instead of art.
Microsoft, Twitter, Dolby are 3 who share an intersection! Square and Uber just a block away.
And pollution is usually not, or only partially, paid for by neither the energy producer nor the consumer. Thus it's an externality.
I too enjoyed the prose!

However, what does leaving open to luck mean? Is it not that the results of one's efforts (diligent or otherwise) are left to external entity or luck? I mean don't we all own the ability only to put the best of efforts, but cannot influence the outcomes?

I am genuinely asking how to cultivate this skill?
The same thing happened to me. It's illegal but they still do it.
Shibuya City Office Launches “Startup Visas” for Foreign Startups