skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Part of the challenge is that a large part of the center’s initial funding was from this one source. Furthermore, Professor Nowak is such a key figure as director of this center that it could be hard to find a replacement while he is on probation. Another challenge is that, after Jeffrey Epstein’s character and connection came to light, the name for the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics took on repulsive connotations that the university is right to discard altogether.
This has been known for a long time and it's fairly well studied. I suppose the more interesting part for them was studying the daily variation in fat burning.
Show HN: Marketing at Baremetrics to Building My Own Community – Corey Haines
There's been several interviews with IT people who helped setup the surveillance and networking equipment. It's also documented that the cameras did exist as discovered when his NY home was raided. Maria Farmer talks about this too:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-accuser-maria-f...
The author is mistaking the lock reward as the ONLY reason electricity is used to secure the network.

The block rewards are a small portion of the reason a miner like Fidelity would secure the network... it's about preserving the past as well.
But bitcoin has tremendous value. Just ask anyone who can't get bank account for some reason. Now you can transfer funds from abroad cheaper and faster than before.
HN is not one person. There's people here that are for Bitcoin and those that are against it. I see plenty of healthy debate in the comments here and in other submissions about it.
There wasn't any. Barring Athens[1] in 5th BC, there's no free speech in the short history of humanity.

Looks like ppl get fed-up with "free speech" very easily. Especially when they assume they're "obviously right!" :-)

[1]: Some limits apply (slaves, etc.).
> at that point the general consensus is that the fork is no longer "the real bitcoin".

As far as I can tell the general consensus about what is "the real bitcoin" is where bitcoin's fiat that is supposedly absent is actually hiding.
Personally, being a compulsive perfectionist, I always use “virus” in English as a mass noun, and never pluralize it.

I thus say “several parts of virus” or “several programs of virus”, — an elegant solution, I would say.

And yes, I do say “octopodēs”; I am not some bourgeois peasant.
Because you prefer to beaten by a stick after work, right? Helps your swollen hand.

Lisp is one of the best compiler implementation languages. Doing the same in C of C++ is about 3-20x more effort.
Depends on the time of day.
Not really, if you think about it, lying is knowingly saying what you believe to be false and what you say is also false. If what you say is accidentally true, then you tried to lie but failed. If you misdirect someone by saying the truth - e.g. because you know the person would assume the opposite of what you say or because you omit a presupposed fact such as that the gas station someone asked for is not closed -, then that's better regarded as deceiving.

At least that's the theory of a dear colleague of mine who published that in various prestigious philosophy journals. I think he got it right. What I disagree with him about is the presumption that there is a "right" theory of lying. In the end, you can define it in different ways, but I do think his definition is a very good one.
Mining bitcoin does not convert electricity into value. It converts electricity into currency. Currencies don't have value, they represent value. Their only intrinsic value lies in their ability to allow exchanges of goods.

Take regular currencies for instance ($€¥…): they do not convert paper into value, they use paper to represent value. Now does printing more of it makes it better at enabling exchanges? Not necessarily. There's a point beyond which you just get over-inflation (a little inflation can be very beneficial, though).

Now Bitcoin is definitely not at the point where it does causes over-inflation (else its valuation would drop). But you do need to compare it with other currencies, and its energy consumption is a big fat drawback. A deal breaker in my opinion. Barring perhaps some extreme cases, using proof-of-work crypto currencies is simply unethical: too much harm, not enough good.
Physicist 1: Do you want to hear a crazy theory? Everything is made up of strings!

Physicist 2: My crazy theory is that a fifth force exists!

Physicist 3: Two words : Dark. Matter.

Physicist 3: Does any of this mean anything at all if we cant unify quantum theory and relativity

Physicist 4: You know what, theres a way we can actually check how crazy those crazy theories really are. Unleash the clocks!!!

Absolutely bonkers! This was a really nice and fun read.
> But that’s not the case: in Bitcoin, more electricity does not buy “more Bitcoin”, it rather buys “more security”.

I think this piece misses. Electricity and hash power does translate to economic value. It gives you more share of the 6.25 reward. The author's argument is made by conflating economic value and security into one.

As a whole, the system produces 6.25 bitcoins every 10 minutes. The reward is a constant. But the BTCUSD price can go up. And it has always been going up. That means it's always profitable to invest in mining.

The original piece from Nick Grossman also misses. There're two problems with using Bitcoin as a battery. The first problem is Bitcoin has an unbounded energy use [1]. If its price continues to go up forever, that means we'd spend unbounded energy. The second problem is volatility. Unlike the aluminum example, Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. It has no practical applications like aluminum. Its price is pure speculation. With Bitcoin, we're converting energy into a volatile asset.

Bitcoin can be a battery. But it's a fairly bad one. It stores value with high volatility. The problem hindering Bitcoin's adoption is volatility. Changing the narrative from digital gold to battery won't fix the problem.

[1] https://bitflate.org/post/2021/02/05/the-bitcoin-price-parad...
When the last time _my_ tweet reached millions of users is not the right question. We see that daily tweets go viral and are seen by millions, some things are seen by a billion people (though perhaps not virally in a short period of time). If people are pumping bitcoin with rampant speculation to get other people on the train to increase its value, just a handful need to go viral to increase value, not necessarily yours or mine specifically.

It's like the Birthday Paradox. The chances that someone in a room shares my birthday are small, but the chances that two people in the room share a birthday is large. It just takes a few of the millions of tweets to go viral.

I won't address your second point at length except to say that it's naive to think that with the ease of broadcasting, suddenly the wall is at rebroadcasting, which can be done with no more than a click and is significantly easier than creating the original message.
If I remember correctly, the thesis of that booked talked about the Old World more broadly. This would include Europe, China, and the North coast of Africa as the disease producing centers.
This is a good point, but it's not the point that matters.

Thee fact that 99% of Tweet are irrelevant doesn't abnegate the fact that millions of Tweets from 'nobodies' are broadcast daily and do impact the world.

Journalists decide on an editorial angle and chose random tweets to support their narrative.

Entire articles are written on random tweets.

You don't remotely need to be 'famous' to have massive social media impact.

In a civilization of self-seeking individuals, the objective of communications will be self-aggrandization there's little incentive in promoting the truth.
From paper's abstract:

>Compared to the placebo, caffeine increased mean MFO by 10.7%

https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-020-...
> Learning an instrument without learning how to read music is like learning to code without learning anything anything about programming theory and methodology, and without going back to look at any of your past work.

No: learning an instrument without learning how to read music is like learning to speak without learning to read, and doesn't imply anything about "reproducibility" or "theory" or "methodology", as all of those things existed before we had written language.

People who don't know how to read are still able to form beautiful and coherent thoughts/tunes and repeat what other people say/play... entire oral/audial traditions exist, and you would be hard pressed to find anything written down from some cultures.

More to the point: the way people write isn't even the same as the way people talk, and that isn't to say the people who are talking are somehow worse at the language; find some sheet music for an Irish jig and then see if even a single musician is literally playing what was actually written and I think you'll be surprised that sheet music doesn't even cause "reproducibility" outside of some music traditions that cared about that (such as classical orchestra).

And, hell: using sheet music can itself be a "bad habit". The greatest musicians I admire hear some music and then just join in and start playing it themselves, as they are fluent in music; and sure: some of them can also read sheet music. On the other side, I experience people who are somehow crippled by the lack of sheet music: who you whistle a tune to, and then they need sheet music to play it, as if they are some kind of player piano, and that's it... imagine if you couldn't speak--even if merely repeating what someone else just said--without first having written down what you are going to say... it would be a bit crippling, no?

(None of this has anything to do with your points about finding an instructor, learning proper technique, having a good training refining, etc. but you will find a ton of instructors who don't concentrate on sheet music... particularly with guitar, an entire instrument where sheet music isn't common at all, as the vast majority of use of the guitar in music people want to play is based on chord patterns.)
> An egocentric profit heavily overweights truth and sense.

nice saying
No, I did not hack your MS Exchange server
This is awesome. Thanks for the headsup
I know it's exhausting!

HN readers have been a zombie-like mob when it comes to ignoring Bitcoin, it's sad to see a otherwise smart group of people miss out on the biggest thing since the Internet.
Or elementeryOS which is commonly referred to as eOS
I do feel that. Another way to view this is that programming sometimes is like solving a math problem. A top-tier mathematician can solve a difficult math problem 100x faster than an average person. 100x is even a bit understatement because most people can’t even come up with any solution given long enough time. For sure, programming is not solving math problems, but they have some similarities. But this is a way to conceptualize it.
Or can give you a heart attack no?
Dasung is the only manufacturer that's known for producing e-ink monitors but they are not any cheaper:

- Review of Dasung's current generation 13.3" e-ink monitor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeC3LIFTaho

- Preview video of their upcoming 25.3" e-ink monitor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9qrURPAtnY

If low cost is a priority, previous generations of Dasung's e-ink displays occasionally show up on eBay.
Yes, it is, thanks to Zero Knowledge proofs (and shards in the future), Ethereum will scale to 200K TPS (with proof of stake running 99.98% more efficiently than PoW:

https://medium.com/starkware/on-the-road-to-starknet-a-permi...

https://medium.com/matter-labs/zksync-2-0-roadmap-update-zke...
> Subjects ingested 3 mg/kg of caffeine or a placebo at 8am and 5pm

3mg/kg is over 250mg of caffeine for an average weight man. Twice a day makes that 500mg.

An 8.4oz can of Red Bull contains 80mg of caffeine. They were giving these people an amount of caffeine equivalent to 6 cans of Red Bull. Not a perfect comparison because Red Bull contains other ingredients, but that's still a lot of caffeine. For another point of reference, that's 2.5 shots of 5 hour energy (200mg caffeine per bottle).

To top it off, the subjects were caffeine-naive, so they had no caffeine tolerance. They must have been feeling extremely energetic.

No wonder they burned more fat. I'm not sure this is going to translate to your casual coffee drinker or someone with a high caffeine tolerance.
> I haven't read this study, but I read about this from other studies 20 years ago.

A few years ago I saw an EMEA advertising campaign promoting Turkish coffee as a pre-exercise boost.
I'm actually surprised at the reception, I was expecting a -3, but I wanted to say it anyway.
There's a name for this phenomenon: "The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit"[0] It's orders of magnitude easier to put forth some total horseshit ideas than it is to refute them.

[0] https://quillette.com/2016/02/15/the-unbearable-asymmetry-of...
I think that screen time software should be a bit different
The article title is misleading since the participants didn't actually drink coffee. I know, they said they ingested caffeine 'equivalent to', but it's a little misleading. There are other compounds in coffee which could increase or decrease the effects of just caffeine so it's best to not just assume it would be the same.
I'm not making the claim that bitcoin replaces an accounting firm?

>I don't see any possible way in which bitcoin is making this easier.

Who says it has to be easier or better? It does the work of handling transactions and keeping track of balances.

With bitcoin as a user you only have to pay a very tiny transaction fee in order to keep track of your account value and handle the transfer from one account to another. Is this better? Well you don't have to pay somebody to operate software and as long as you can access the bitcoin network there aren't any impediments to doing transactions.

But the point isn't if bitcoin is better or best or even good, just that is does the thing and doing that thing has value.
anti depressants also makes you quite sensitive to caffeine
Given how frequently Searx instances get banned by the search engines they use, it would be interesting to have a "meta-Searx" client that tries different Searx instances for the selected engines until none of the engines error out.
Bitcoin is far and above the most scalable cryptocurrency. It just might not be scaling the things you care about.
It’s three things. It helps push out legacy 3G tech that reduces throughput, it enables cellular carriers to displace cable companies without running fiber with mmWave, and it is enabling stuff like smart roads that made it a national security issue.

Telematics in cars will be mandated shortly and enable stuff like road vs fuel taxation and congestion pricing. That enabled regulatory changes that basically eliminated most local autonomy over cellular tower placement. Basically, the FCC is “yimby” for anything 5G, and used national security regulations to limit permitting, taxation, etc.
More likely he wants a world where people act with integrity and don't spout lies in their narrow self interest, and that we probably need systems of integrity - from top to bottom (academia, journalism, families, churches, governance) in order to achieve that.
Dang: since the current title is misleading (written in the present tense, but it's something that happened more than a year ago in response to the COVID outbreak), is flagging the story the correct way to get mod attention and have 2020 be put in the title?
The best liars, like the best actors, actually believe what they're saying though, so I don't think false confidence is the answer.
> After studying existing research on warp drives, Lentz realized there were specific forms of spacetime bubbles that scientists had overlooked. These bubbles took the shape of solitons, or compact waves that maintain their whip while moving at constant velocity.

Anyone else remember TNG's New Ground? That was the episode where the Enterprise helps test a soliton wave-based warp mechanism. If I remember right, Geordi is enthusiastic, while Data and Worf are skeptical.
There’s value created from every watt of electricity used to smelt aluminum. Almost all of the electricity used to crunch SHA256 hashes computes the wrong hash for the block.
> Take regular currencies for instance ($€¥…): they do not convert paper into value, they use paper to represent value

Mostly, they use mostly-electronic ledger entries to represent value.
Traditional banking runs all the world's actual financial transactions (likely billions settlements at any given moment), something that crypto hasn't even started scratching.
> From what I have seen, people like me are under-represented in most office environments.

This is not supported either by anecdote or by data. It's true for some environments, but absolutely not most.
Well, actually the Fed is responsible for the money supply, and is pretty independent from the rest of the government (as much as it can be these days, anyway). So the claim that the government can just print money to pay for anything they want is technically true, but fails to understand the nuance of the system.

Further, there are consequences to injecting large amounts of money. Namely, inflation. The great "mystery" of the past decade is why inflation hasn't manifested alongside the various forms of stimulus from the Fed and Treasury. However, theoretically, and historically, printing money to pay down government debt will result in inflation which can be harmful if done carelessly or out of necessity (eg. being a forced seller).

To your last point about forcing rates to zero, the same principle applies. This would happen via market action undertaken by the Fed (who again, is not concerned with government spending, that's not their mandate). Even if the Fed did act in concert with congress in the manner you describe, they would do so by purchasing bonds in the open market. This would again require the injection of more currency into the economy and provide further upward pressure on inflation.

I should say that I definitely agree with your points regarding the politics.
Exercise is great for general fitness and can give you a slight edge in a calorie deficit but has little impact on weight loss in general. If you want to lose weight by far the easiest and most effective thing you can do is to get your diet under control.
You are confusing centralization of manufacturing, which is possible and not so bad, with centralization of energy production, which is much more insidious.
Yes, QEMU user-mode only emulates syscalls, so all the guest program's libraries are guest-architecture code, translated and run via the JIT.
How long does an international wire transfer take? how much energy does it consume? Seriously, if you are going to make a statement like "pathetically inefficient at moving value", can you at least be honest and actually understand the cost of fiat currency (why is it called fiat? what is a petrodollar?) and the banking system?

Bitcoin is a FULL system, you're seeing the whole thing, the mining is for securing the network AND moving value. Can you say that about any other system (that you are already so used to and blind to how it works)
Kind of old news at this point right? It’s been touted as a “life hack” for at least a decade. I remember reading about this in the four hour body book. That was published in 2010. It was also based on prior studies.
> random twitter people

I think the term "free software users" defines them better.

> which is signed by Free Software contributors.

Really? Could you please tell me how "Z" (signature number 2771 right now) contributed to the Free Software movement? I'm intrigued.
The cover reminded me of the unusual style of "Miner 2049er" video game [0] of that era. Sure enough, same illustrator!

[0] https://r.mprd.se/fup/up/91423-Miner_2049er_Volume_II_(1983)...
Shame on the people that make interesting hobby projects without citing everybody that ever influenced them.
If you don’t mind the code being public, GitHub pages is free and a fantastic resource. I think you can also upgrade to a paid version to make the code private. Check it out here: https://pages.github.com/
> Or I could continue renting and put that 15% - > 50% of my net worth in appreciating assets and income producing investments.

Property is a leveraged investment (as well as the loan being a hedge against inflation, depending on the rate you negotiate - with a 7 figure NW you should never have to use market rate). Unless you're using a large amount of margin on these "appreciating assets", the appreciation should be compared at a 1:5 rate.

Be careful not to become one of those people who "win the lottery" and then lose it all in their hubris. I'd stop saying things like "people with absolutely no money sense at all" - for all we know, that's you.
Is there a place where founders & investors can more easily connect? Seems like r/startups and r/venturecapital on reddit and AngelList, but I'm wondering if there's a more suitable forum for this type of thing.

Not really a fan of a spreadsheet. We need a place for people at all stages to be able to quantity their asks and be connected.
Keeping a ledger of billions of participants making billions of transactions is a solved problem, and has basically zero cost when amortized over its utility. In 2020 VISA handled 3.5 billion accounts (cards), 140 billion transactions and $11.3 trillion in volume. Total operating expenses were $7.7bn, so just 0.07% of transaction volume.

At current prices, just the block rewards make the Bitcoin network running cost something like $37bn/year.

As a ledger it's strictly inferior in every way. (The ability to take bitcoin 'offline' by holding your private key, or exchanging it on secondary markets, is not a feature of the blockchain itself. These features can exist without a blockchain).
> Bitcoin is saving the world.

It saved my world, and millions of others.

All the things HN pundits love to talk about, but when it comes to actually making the world a better place, people like you become Luddites and naysayers.

HFSP
Yet another question is, whether or is even healthy. It might just be that not burning that fat more quickly can be healthier then drinking so much coffein.
> we have to start supporting each other

Do you currently feel that white men are not supportive of one another? Or were you referring to a subcategory of white men?

> Give it time

What do you expect time to change?
Worth noting that (the last time I looked into it), the cost of mining gold was $850/troy oz [based on the filings of the largest mining company].

I don't know how much of that $75B/year translates to CO2 emissions, etc, or how it compares to BTC or what have you, but you can buy a lot of externalities for $75B.
No matter where your preferences lie, it should be obvious that signing a pro-Stallman letter under your real name in the current climate is career ending at RedHat, Microsoft, Facebook and Google.

If you examine which Free Software contributors signed the anti-Stallman letter and you are familiar with the respective projects, it is easy to see that a lot of them are vocal activists.

One project I know has 100 developers, about 8 signed, the rest are silent for good reason (or signed the pro-letter under a pseudonym).
Well. I would absolutely defer to Eric S. Raymond over... uh, "Z" (signature number 2771 right now).
This article is not about engineering or even the workforce. It's about venture funding.
Why does India get penalized if they generate 50% of the people interested in a tech H1B (they don't - it's a thought experiment). Why is 49% preferable to 30% or 51% or 70%? Why not split male and female applicants into two pools and hire accordingly? Meaning if you get 70% of your applicants from men, hire 70% male and 30% female. If the following year it's 60/40, hire 60/40.

Or better yet, fix the pipeline issues rather than put in arbitrary caps and quotas that serve only to reduce the overall quality of candidate pools.