skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> if democrats get off their ass and start pushing change like they promised, we'll have even better safety nets.

The Democrats have not had sufficient numbers in the last 20 years in the Senate to accomplish this outside of 2009 and 2010, when they got ACA passed, and unless DC/Puerto Rico get added and a few states go from Repub Senators to Dem, I don’t see it happening in next 10 years either.
Should anyone defending McDonald’s be banned for doing so?
> the state of being "unstained" by thought

This reminds me of the metaphor of a mirror, which stays pure and clean even when it reflects something dirty.

What's interesting to me is how detachment is a concept common across many religions and philosophies.

As one of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism..

> "The third noble truth, cessation (nirodha) or nirvana, represented the ultimate aim of Buddhist practice in the Abhidharma traditions: the state free from the conditions that created samsara." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Noble_Truths

..As well as a primary teaching in Christian mysticism.

> "When I preach, I usually speak of detachment and say that a man should be empty of self and all things." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meister_Eckhart
As a non-American this is so bizarre to me. You get people so full of concern for the hypothetical woman in banking making 100k a year who just can't get that promotion, or the hypothetical black Harvard graduate who gets rejected from tech jobs, while they only show disgust for the unemployed guy living in a trailer with his family and friends ODing dropping dead like flies, simply because of the color of his skin.
But you can monetize a youtube video so much better >_>
If you ever want a very real anxiety attack drink half of a redline without any caffeine tolerance. If you want to die, drink an entire redline.

I tried it once in college and it blew my mind that something like that was available off the shelf.
Ah, this is called an ectopic heart-beat (usually harmless). Back when I drank too much coffee and didn't sleep in my last year of college, I got a few of these. Now I'm a one-cup-a-day kind of guy, and it hasn't happened much anymore.
Comby looks great. I've been wondering recently why there isn't a mature tool for both language agnostic lining and transforms. I started using semgrep for linting various languages but I just as soon want to run transformations.

Maybe Comby is what I'm looking for for both cases.
Which is easier? 1) Faster than light travel. 2) Extend lifetimes so 1) doesn't matter.
Usually truly "talented people" aren't looking to "rise to the top".

The startup version of this is the person wanting to get rich but not learn anything needed to become actually successful in anything. Always looking for the shortcut or quick-fix recipe because it's NEVER about talent as a type of success but instead as power and wealth which are only side-effects of talent.
Absolutely. I love the Culture series, but Consider Phlebas has always been one of the least enjoyable books.

I’d personally start with the excellent Player of Games and go from there.

(Also skip Inversions)
The Culture is unobtainium-grade post-scarcity. The Minds and lesser AIs make computing and intelligence abundant beyond want. It also has effectively unlimited freedom of voice, freedom of exit, freedom of association, freedom to roam, and unlimited supplies of energy, matter, and manufactured goods. The only limits it can't overcome are logical contradictions.

It has basically the same fictional technologies as Star Trek: powerful AI, FTL communication, FTL travel, replicators, transporters, and ridiculously abundant energy. But it is a far more wild and unrestrained What-If than Star Trek, which is probably why it has never been adapted to the screen. (An adaptation of Consider Phlebas was apparently a project for Amazon Prime for a while, but that was dropped.)

Consider for example transporter accidents/paradoxes/quirks. In Star Trek the question of identity and continuity going through the transporter is mostly shoved to the side, sometimes addressed in oblique character remarks, and occasionally rises to the forefront in an episode where somebody is duplicated or trapped in a transporter. Then the possibility of personal storage or duplication is set aside until the next rare occasion where it rises to Plot level.

In the Culture, having a molecular pattern backup of your body stored is routine, even among ordinary citizens. Not retaining a backup is unusual. Most Special Circumstances agents killed in the line of duty will be restored from backup, minus a few hours or days of memories. Only in wide scale conflicts, where backup data cannot be replicated outside the danger zone fast enough, are people in danger of involuntary permadeath. Star Trek has basically the same in-universe technology to make violent death reversible, but chooses not to pursue it, probably to avoid making things seem too weird to audiences.

But the future seen from the past is weird even when it includes only actually-realizable technologies. If you had a time machine and could show an audience of SF enthusiasts from 1940 a vision of things to come from technological change, 2010's film The Social Network would be about the best you could do. It might also be baffling and off-putting to the sorts of people who liked SF stories of the time. Most people who enjoy SF prefer adventure stories with relatable characters and some plot-enabling or plot-driving tech gizmos. Visions of everything transfigured and rendered strange by technology or sheer cultural drift over time are less popular.
I don't think academics like this one somehow convinced wealthy donors to support their work and starve all other work. I think the people who have come into wealth recently are pushing their agenda for political reasons independent of what academics discover.
That and you may be having an extra meal whereas you otherwise would have been asleep.
Democratizing the spread of ideas can help prevents privileged groups from controlling discourse. In the past you were subject to what you could broadcast on radio/tv or publish in print -- many of these options were out of reach for POCs, women, ppl in poverty.
> One common similarity in these cases is that always relatively powerless people are exposed and "face consequences" (don't we all love that phrase by now).

Oh, god, the poor, powerless Harvard professors. My heart bleeds.
Warranty void if seal broken or roasted off.
Same. Also, even studies without obvious flaws need to be reproduced with same results multiple times before we can start accepting the conclusion. A single study is at best suggestive.
I don't really care about this topic but this wreaks of a hit piece.
You keep saying this but provide no proof. Could you please do so so it adds more to the discussion than just hearsay?
There is nothing modern about what you say; there is no internal logical consistency in any religion which is why you have the fanatically orthodox and the ultra liberal coexist in every religion - each one sure of their moral superiority, of their interpretation of the code. People have always been able to defend what they believe in, what they grew up with etc. If anything the divisions have grown more peaceful over the years. The trend is that due to the internet and social media, you do not have to follow your tradition, you can find other things, which would be in general a good thing, except it doesnt do anything to bring people together, and it also has the effect of giving the worst of them a voice and a following which could have been suppressed by more moderate voices in the pre internet era.
There is that and there is the “enforced fasting interval” that sleep is.
now i'm gonna draw a tulip and sell it as a nft for metahistorical lulz
Okayama University: Studying Parkinson's disease with face-recognition software
I think you also missed where I'm advocating for DGRs for non-nuclear material too. I think you underestimate how some materials don't have a halflife at all and are still dangerous (e.g. heavy metals never become less dangerous over time).
White men especially in America tend to pathologically see the world through an individualistic lens and ignore their identity. Things will change as more and more of us start to become conscious of the identity for which the system hates us.
Also he did a "dash cam" box lock break-in as well. A matter of seconds. Great show.
So? People who live next to the powerplant now have to pay market rate? What a tragedy.
> the energy it takes to create a btc

Sounds good. How do I convert my bitcoin back into electricity? Is there a Python function for that or something? Would be very useful to have on hand during blackouts.

I mean, that's the whole point of the article we're commenting under. Bitcoin is not a battery, it is a sink. You can't get the electricity back.

Not to mention that if the value of Bitcoin was actually determined by its electricity cost, then Bitcoin and Etherium wouldn't be making moves right now towards Proof of Stake.
Your future self.
Reportedly, there are some wild conspiracy theories about this:

"QAnon’s Suez Canal Dick Ship Conspiracies Are Getting Wilder and Wilder"

https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy8n9q/suez-canal-qanon-carg...
Rabbit walks on its hands. Scientists think they’ve found the genetic reason why
It's getting to the stage where a bit of gunboat diplomacy might be in order? Like the US could ask them to respect human rights and democracy while parking a couple of aircraft carriers near Yangon.
I've just pulled my copy from the shelf and am starting to re-read, but I'm sure Sma doesn't recommend the destruction of Earth. That would be very un-Sma
Honestly, I'd take it a step further and skip Banks all together. I first read a bunch of Culture books roughly a decade ago, thought I'd give them another read recently, and had lost all interest. Thin plots, boring characters, worlds that are mostly hinted at but poorly developed, and in his later books a deep sense of nihilism that reads more like a depressed teenager than an author finding his voice.

Of the books, the two that manage to stand somewhat on their own as decent books are Player of Games, because what geek doesn't like a book about a planet where the government is based around whose best at board games, and Excession since it's the most Mind-heavy book, and frankly the Minds are Banks' most interesting characters.
It's one of my favorite series. IMHO the order to read them doesn't matter all that much, and Consider Phlebas probably isn't the easiest to get into it. Maybe start with Player of Games or Look To Windward.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5313377.0

I'm not sure of the details and my understanding of it is limited. But it seems there is some kind of statistical anomaly in the nonces of early blocks, and some people suspect that he purposely formed this anomaly the leave a clue or encode the private key for the wallet.
Nice job Sherlock... you appear to know what battery means.
The Problem with Cyber Insurance: Outdated Incentives
We have a similar fruit in southern Italy. It's from the sorbus genus. It used to be consumed (almost) rotten during the months of December and January.
> CNN: Would you like to live in the Culture?

> Iain M. Banks: Good grief yes, heck, yeah, oh it’s my secular heaven….Yes, I would, absolutely.

Iain Banks's The Culture is my Utopia too.

Of all the worlds and societies of science fiction that I've read or seen on the screen, The Culture is the one I'd most like to live inside as an ordinary citizen. A society that has eliminated material scarcity. Life is centuries long, health and disease are solved problems. The lives of most of its inhabitants are largely devoted to self-actualization, the pursuit of happiness and meaning.

And... that sounds pretty good to me. Go climb in the mountains all day and come back and philosophize with friends around a camp fire. Learn architecture and design your home; make art; seek out new kinds of music. Spend 10 years mastering a new branch of mathematics, just for the sheer joy of learning. Travel between the stars, go to parties, fall in love, cultivate friendships - and when you want to be alone, go to your ranch in a desert for a month and just look at the stars. Explore what it means to be yourself under a hundred different suns, on a hundred different worlds, in a universe of boundless wonder.

Good grief yes, heck, yeah - sure as anything I want to live in that world.

Footnote: of course, the irony of the Culture books is that this kind of Utopian life isn't terribly interesting for the plot of a novel, so you only see it in fragments. The books are mostly set around the edges of the Culture, where it comes into conflict with societies or individuals that don't share its values. And they're damn fun to read (I particular recommend _The Player of Games_ for those starting out.)
I'm objectively very high performing at aerobic exercise, since high school and have kept it up. I have seen quantitatively higher performance when taking 3-5 mg/kg of caffeine before exercise and regularly during. This includes anything high intensity aerobic, from swimming to running to cycling.

This is the best collection of research I have seen on the topic and where I arrived at my 3-5 number above many years ago, perhaps it will be useful and seems to speak to the broader topic at hand: https://fellrnr.com/wiki/Caffeine
Exactly, the decentralized nature makes this possible.
> For example pointing out that the number of unarmed Blacks killed by police is actually very low (https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/poll-44-of-liberals-say-...) gets you mass reporting from dedicated activists and results in your post being blocked or account bans.

No, this is because extremely online people fight each other by begging the owners of websites to censor their enemies. It has nothing to do with the bad argument, which John Birchers would see as ancient.
Do these companies invest into more data centers because the value of a stock went up?
Actually it doesn't. The difference between perihelion and aphelion is around 6 million km, and it takes approximately 6 months to cover.

That means Earth is moving away or towards the sun at 1 million km per month. That's 33,000 km per day. So 1300 km/h or so? Basically unless you're really fast, climbing the stairs is overwhelmed by other effects.

Haven't taken the Earth's rotation into account but it should be less of an effect.
> humans are just much-loved companion animals to the Minds

I think that's just an imperfect translation for the existential dread people might feel when confronted with a perfect utopia. They go: "what's the meaning of life, then?" and have bad trips. On a similar discussion on the Spacebattles forum, there were people saying they would rather live in the Star Trek or even the Warhammer 40k universe, exactly because those two universes provide meaning (mostly through pain...).

The Minds certainly respect humans and their rights. Special Circumstances have a lot of human agents, for example, which play important roles in the organisation and on the field
Asphalt8
The fundamental value of the US dollar is that you can pay US taxes in it. If you don't pay your US taxes in US dollars, the IRS will get you. ;-)

However, its actual value is higher because people have decided to use it as money.
> Ultimately I pay Visa etc. roughly 3%

It would be the same with Bitcoin. Retailers have no interest in eyeballing the Bitcoin exchange rate and dynamically repricing their goods every 5 minutes. Unless Bitcoin becomes price stable, or the currency in which they pay all their expenses, they'll always be deferring to payment processors.

Bitpay charge 1%, which isn't even that cheap.

> The block rewards are "free", it is hard to come up with a way to account for the cost of something which is invented from thin air.

It's not "free". They spent a fortune in amortized equipment costs and energy to win that reward. The bottom line is the miners need to sell their 12.5 BTC block rewards to cover their real world costs (+profit). So, in a competitive mining environment, the block reward coupled with the market price is a proxy for the minimum cost of running the network. This is one factor in market prices.
I still don't understand why HN doesn't want to blacklist submissions of the bookmarklet[1]. Especially since it happens all the time.

[1] yes, I've asked.
When people on one hand want to not be harassed for wherever reason and then are harassing someone neuroatypical for neuroatypical behaviour they are not any better themselves.
No, it is not "universally accepted".

It is actually opposite. Most organisms under stress increase their energy consumption.

A good proxy for energy consumption by your body is your heart rate. Heart rate is linked to the amount of blood distributed through your body and amount of blood is amount of oxygen that is needed by your cells for metabolism.

And amount of oxygen used by cells is almost equal to the amount of energy produced (excluding those rare anaerobic regimes).

Heart rate is always lowest at night during sleep.

What you probably meant is that a person who has poor sleep will have a statistical tendency to eat more, for many reasons. One it is more difficult to exercise willpower when you are not rested well. It might also be more difficult to accurately judge whether what you feel is hunger.

To accurately compare energy use by body you would have to externally limit amount of calories ingested to same level and figure out how much CO2 you emit or how much weight you lost.

Otherwise you are measuring your regulating machine -- ie. your brain, hormones, etc. and that is whole other set of problems.

Eating makes us feel better and if you are on poor sleep you might eat just to offset it.
How does Bitcoin help? Deflation is actually bad for the economy because people hoard money. It would be stupid to buy things because money gets more valuable over time while things depreciate.
I cannot fathom Bitcoin ever adopting Proof of Stake (PoS) like Ethereum. Bitcoin's community is far too dogmatic.

I see PoW as a liability for the whole cryptocurrency system. For this reason I think the transition to PoS will be like the Whigs vs. the Republicans. One simply does not survive.
I’m no expert but I would wager that all of the world’s financial infrastructure consumes less electricity than Argentina[0] and that it’s growth is fairly linear and predictable.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952
We did that before, it's called a banking system, and it doesn't require nearly as much energy per transaction.
Lol, you people are idiots.
The most successful company to come out of YCombinator is Coinbase,

AirBNB alone has a market cap of $104 billion, while
Coinbase has a valuation of $90 billion.

(AirBNB loses money and has pretty much saturated their market, so they can't grow much. Why are they worth $104 billion?)
IDK... Whatever the quality of the original, this rebuttal is incredibly written and "Why Bitcoin is not a Battery" turns out to be an interesting topic.

A lot of economics and social theories generally use a lot of metaphor. A lot of mistakes get made by habitually applying an incorrect metaphor as a model. Battery is a sensible metaphor for aluminium. It is not a good metaphor for bitcoin. I'm pretty sure the original author made that error honestly. Either way, I learned a lot about bitcoin's energy economics.
I've been working on something somewhat related. Would be happy to have a chat if you like.
What the author is describing is not a battery.

It is a sink.

I saw no method of storing and re-releasing the energy

Only a method of immediately consuming the energy into something potentially useful and transportable. IT is not like transporting your BTC will allow you to extract new energy at its destination, the way that transporting charged batteries or gasoline would.

So it has utility, but not nearly as much as he's advertising in the headline.
Van Gogh has a value to rich people who have most of the money. Ask yourself this, is it ok to have a world that caters to what a few people care about?
It's right in the README - "Box86's Dynarec uses a mechanism with Memory Protection and a SegFault signal handler to handle JIT code." Essentially, code areas are write protected and when they trigger a write fault, the area is marked as "dirty" to be recompiled.

https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86/commit/2aa2e53fef61d00df535...

first "protect memory, fault handler purges that code block as 'invalid' approach"

and

https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86/commit/4778760622df90c97da2...

second, "mark block as dirty rather than purging it" approach
Seems pretty hand-wavy. Plenty of people derive value from using USD without ever paying US taxes.
I can't comprehend your comment. You can just create a centralized system that does the same thing as Bitcoin and consume less power. It is that simple. Blockchains don't provide utility beyond executing arbitrary code in a trustless manner. We already know how to execute arbitrary code in a trusted manner so the only substantial difference is the degree of trust which in the vast majority of cases simply doesn't matter.
Hmmm I can't say the author is wrong...it's just a depressing and boring world view that, more often than not, leads to a mediocre existence.
Yikes. I immediately went to see how much it was, because I have always wanted to buy a large eink screen. Guess I'll be waiting a bit more.
The toxicity of a lot of Bitcoin advocates' comments on HN does not exactly make me feel like being invited to a fun movement.

"Have Fun Staying Poor" is in my opinion a disgusting remark to make to complete strangers.
That's because you probably value independence and critical thinking. You are probably teaching your kids to focus on personal growth, learn from the work environment, look for opportunities, be competitive and keep increasing their own bargaining power. At least, that's what I'm teaching mine.

Except, this makes you a threat to the corporations. They don't want you. They want to have someone replaceable, who will fulfill their corporate duties at the minimum possible rate. Who will never challenge their superior, and will be thankful for the opportunity to join the ranks, rather than thinking on how to go independent.
I also have a "nespolo" tree. But honestly I don't know if it's a european or a japonica variant
Growing up in south of france, we had a few of theses tree ("Néflier") scattered around the village. I really loved the fruits as a kid, it was a true delicacy. We had to wait until the first freeze in december, and pick them off the ground after bletting. they are really sweet, with a touch of alcool, and one of the few fruit you can find in the wild during the winter.

Now the title is a little bit misleading, they fell out of favor, and not widely available commercially, but definetly not forgotten.
Bitcoin doesn't stop bubbles or protect you from one any more than investment in another asset - in fact it's more than likely a bubble itself.
English version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mespilus_germanica