skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a big fan of videos like this[1]. Feels like guitar tab for piano.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3FYU72jwEA
Regardless of how well that article makes the point, within the books the culture is a powerful hegemonic force. Its internal views and conflicts about the nature and execution of that is a major plot driver in a few of the books.

I'm not convinced Banks considered the culture a perfect utopia but even if he did that doesn't mean I need to agree.
This is anti-scientific gaslighting and it does a disservice to all the people working hard to bring the actual benefits of applied cryptography and distributed tech to the public in ways to that actually provide public good. There are alternatives to wasteful proof of work schemes. Proof of space and time & proof of stake. Neither are perfect but clearly Bitcoin's hyperdeflationary raccoon trap proof of work scheme isn't either. Bitcoin advocates had better get it together.
I'd heard a lot about the culture series and was in the mood for some optimistic sci-fi, so I picked up the first book in the series (Consider Phlebus). It was... not great. Now looking online I learn the series varies widely in quality and there are really only two or three novels people tend to genuinely really like. So do your research before jumping in.
Yeah one can is my limit (let's say, for a 4h period). I can't imagine what would feel taking the equivalent of taking that amount all at once. Probably the usual effects (headache and severe dizziness)

That being said, caffeine is a good pre-workout.
idk what you mean with bitcoins fiat.
My favourite line from the article: "The process is known as "bletting", a word made-up by a botanist who noticed there wasn't one in 1839."
Does 10" do it for you? At $139 you could use several.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-10
I think the blame here lies almost entirely with the "journalists", as they are supposedly the experts with the discenment to know when a an online comment is news worthy (almost never) and when it is not (almost always).

The point of having professions is the expectations that the professionals will be, well, professional.
“ no company discloses the full price until you're about to put the credit card in”

It seemed to be a rant based on a world which doesn’t exist
We just a need a moore's law of nuclear power and we'll be able to have lunch at alpha centauri and be back in home in time for dinner!
Seems like a lot when put in terms of Redbull, but isn't really in the context of athletes and performance. 5mg/kg is a common number as a pre-event dose for endurance athletes, and science seems to be mixed on ideal due to large individual variation in tolerance, response, and metabolics[1]. There are many 'thermogenic' fat loss supplements that have 150mg+ per dose taken multiple times a day.

Cyclists I know commonly take 400mg before a race to training session, and often top up over the course of the event if it's more than a couple hours. So I don't think the numbers reported are high, unless casual coffee is your basis comparison. But in the context of caffeine for fat loss, where supplements have high amounts, the numbers seem in line with common use.

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5752738/
You had me there!
It's "author's we", or "academic we". It's pretty common. We in this sense often refers to "the reader and the author".
It’s weird in the same way that believing Die Hard has good lessons on morality and courage is great, but believing the events of Nakatomi Plaza are real facts is weird.

Much of the bible is a mix of history inspired folk tales, political propaganda, morality tales, and self-help advice from various eras. It’s a great resource in that respect, but I wouldn’t use it to explain any particular “how”
240mg is pretty common for the canned energy drinks
Sure it's valuable, but it's hardly significant. You're talking about tiny fractions of a % of the global economy.
You hit the nail on the head there. As you say, the value is in it's location (specifically the cost of transportation of iron to that bit of space). We could use it in situ to manufacture spacecraft.
Sigh.

SPAC: how the incompetent who should NEVER get funding to start a business for which they can get funding and drain that company for maintaining a lifestyle and legacy without doing the hard work or negative consequences that normal startups face. See also: Entitled Trust Fund Kids.

I hear SPAC and instantly assume: Theranos-style fraud coming.
> The waste belongs to the city, so collecting it is technically theft. “The city isn’t going to prosecute these people and most are prepared to turn a blind eye to their activities,” he says.

Funny timing, as it seems the local government is starting to crack down on dumpster divers in the name of "collecting recycling data": https://www.ccma.cat/324/barcelona-estrenara-contenidors-int...

> For many, it is impossible to fulfil these conditions, and even if they get legal status, they have to register as self-employed and pay a statutory monthly “quota” of €300, regardless of income, which they do not earn enough to pay.

This is also incorrect. Being self-employed does have a monthly quota but it only kicks in after I think 2 years (first 6 months gratis, second 6 months small fee, third 6 months bigger fee and so on), so you can get up and running relatively cheap.

I do agree that it's bad they don't get properly paid for the good work they are doing though, Barcelona is better because of them in general. One could always hope there could be a solution that benefits all the parties involved, instead of just one side.
Thank you! Though anecdotal, it is super helpful to learn about your experience like this.
Organizations hire for their needs, not to have exactly equal numbers of people across arbitrary metrics. The issue with "maximum 10% of the total yearly intake from any one country" is that it's a feel good statistic on paper, but it ends up having the real effect that it instantly puts top talent out of reach for US companies (all other things being equal, countries with more population will have more people of exceptional talent).

http://paulgraham.com/95.html
> There’s no value created by crunching random SHA-256

I wonder if crackers and cryptoanalysts could put some of that to good use, generating massive rainbow tables and the likes. It would be a bit like using spent plutonium for weapons. I guess someone who knows the subject already looked into it...?
Wedge the Ever Given anywhere you want in the world
Naming is both hard and important. Reading over the comments in this thread, one of the most up-voted of them reads, "Luckily, there is this one reliable method for detecting a lie, checking whether what the suspect says is true."

I'm writing from the perspective of "how would one build an accurate lie-detector?" And my point is that you shouldn't. You should build something that measures false-confidence. It is infinitely harder to create a lie-detector than it is to create a false-confidence assessor because people always mix up subjective vs. objective truth.

It is kind of like the late 90's difference between a "Web Portal" (yahoo) and a "Search Engine" (google). Ostensibly, they were aiming at the same thing: getting us to the content we were looking for. But the difference in name led to a difference in implementation and product. The analogy is even more striking because Yahoo's categorization of links made a stronger implicit claim to being the kind of content you wanted than Google's ranked list of results.
Jazz was a genre mainly taught as an oral tradition, and of course improvisation was at the heart of it. Musicians played what they thought sounded good. That still didn’t stop George Russell’s book The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization from becoming hugely popular and influential among jazz musicians in the ’50s. Even when performers have an intuitive understanding of music, they can still benefit from explicit discussion of theory.

Also, a lot of jazz musicians wanted to eventually learn musical notation at least so that they could write their own lead sheets for copyright-claim purposes.
Not only that, but it's written by an imperfect human who needed plot points for his stories.

So when the author points at the Minds' failures to predict the consequences of their actions he simultaneously fails to acknowledge that without mistakes by the Minds, there would be no plot. No plot, no book.

And especially telling is that when he writes about murder, the author totally failed to mention that almost everyone in the Culture is constantly backed up, apart from a few abnormal people who don't, and can be reincarnated in a blink of an eye. How can you not mention that? Being murdered is a minor inconvenience, hence the minor punishment.

Also the way Iain wrote about the culture changed over the years, if you read consider phelbas then something like dark matter back to back I felt you can see he realized some of the mistakes he'd made early on, even if he couldnt go back and correct them.

For me at least, it's always been clear that the culture did not need an external threat to function, and as a whole it found war to be a tiresome waste of time. I agree with you that the article seems to be plucking at straws to put that argument together.
Don't blame your co-workers. Blame those that made the decision to move the factory (board of directors)
No doubt. But there's some footprint there that should at least be tossed in the conversation about BTC externalities.

It might be that BTC is 10X worse, 100X worse, but it's head-scratching that the comparison remains between BTC, with its externalities and so sorth, carbon footprint, and null. BTC might fail miserably (it may already have) but the claim is it can be a store of wealth and a possible transaction system.
heh, anyone who could use it would just claim it. Nothing we could do.
If there's no free speech, there's no reason to ever rationally justify anything because nothing can be disputed. If you take "correct opinion, rationally justified" as your definition of truth, then you cannot have truth without free speech.

That's not the same as saying "free speech leads to truth". It's saying "truth cannot exist without free speech". The fact that some people are "bored of disputation" is not a good sign.
That sounds a little like the "vote against it unless we promised to fund quarterly field trips" position mentioned in the tweets. Should the people have been denied internet because their moral superious were worried they might - shock horror - be advertised to one day?
These are... nespole. I have a tree in my garden and we, in Italy, commonly eat them. A bit disappointed after the intriguing opening of the article.

https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mespilus_germanica
Extrapolating from your comment, I guess we'd kind of want a blocked design that is placebo-vs-caffeine and exercise-vs-none.

That would tell us whether there is just an additive effect of high-dose caffeine and exercise, or if somehow the caffeine is interactive with exercise (i.e., has a bigger effect in the exercise group than in the rest group).
That's my point, though. A lie-detector tries to do the impossible. A false-confidence assessor only does what it claims to do.
> It saved my world, and millions of others.

How? Be specific.

> [...] but when it comes to actually making the world a better place [...]

How is Bitcoin making the world a better place? Be specific.

> HFSP

I had to look this one up. For anyone wondering, apparently it means "Have Fun Staying Poor".
Ultimately I pay Visa etc. roughly 3% (the retailer "pays" but certainly passes that cost on to me) of all of my card transactions, which is the vast majority of money I spend outside of rent.

I wonder where the 50x difference goes.

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

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.

The better comparison would be how much the electricity and mining hardware per year is used compared to the transaction work done.

Logic would say, though, that the money spent mining and the BTC->USD value of block rewards would be similar (that is the margins on bitcoin mining tend towards zero).

However with the volatile pricing of bitcoin, you would have to generate a BTC->USD value for each block reward and not convert a year's worth of rewards on a particular day's (or minute's) spot price.
This took 25 seconds on my laptop (15 seconds the second time, when the filesystem was warm).
It's hard to justify counting Pluto without counting Eris:

- Eris is more massive than Pluto (1.6e22kg versus Pluto's 1.3e22kg)

- Eris is only slightly smaller than Pluto, at 2326km diameter (more than your arbitrary 2000km cutoff)

- The orbit of Eris crosses Pluto's, so it may be closer to the Sun part of the time https://solarstory.net/img/articles/big/orbit-of-eris.jpg
If you're new to the Culture series by Banks and are wondering where to start, I'd suggest not to start with the first book, "Consider Phlebas". Instead, I'd strongly recommend to pick up the second one, "The Player of Games" — this thrilling book is a love letter to board games. It's beautifully executed and an incredibly absorbing book for a newcomer.

Then you can pick up "Consider Phlebas". I'm glad I did my research and didn't start with this. It has its many brilliant moments, but I had to show significantly more patience to finish it.

I'm now currently working my way through the fifth book in the series, "Excession". It's living up to the hype. (Two years ago, a Scottish man sitting next to me on a plane just wouldn't stop talking about it when he saw me reading "The Player of Games". I'm glad he badgered me to pick it up.)
Poor sleep is associated with weight gain.
Republic.co has a list of companies you can invest in. Most recently, you could invest in Gumroad and Backstage Capital, among others. There is also AngelList syndicates.
Sorry about the slow reply but I just noticed your question. Haskell supports recursive types just fine. The issue I'm mentioning is that it is hard to express those types in MyPy, which is a static typechecking add-on for Python, not Haskell.
Data Science and more: The Lopez dilemma
I'm not a fan of many of google's practices, but still use their traffic data a few times per month because there isn't really any alternative.

Similarly, I bought some bitcoin to donate money to sci-hub, because I believe the good that they do is greater than the negative effects of a single additional bitcoin transaction, and sci-hub doesn't offer any alternative methods. I don't have to like bitcoin to weigh pros and cons and make an educated decision to use it for a specific purpose.

Then as for holding it, I was paid out in bitcoin for a short time and waited a while before converting to fiat in order to not pay miners multiple times. During that time I was both holding bitcoin as well as being of the opinion that this blockchain+PoW tech has lost the novel factor and we should get over the hype rather than spend more and more energy on it when we're already consuming a hundredfold more energy than we can currently produce without direct CO2 emissions.

It's not as simple as: you use it, therefore you must love it (or conversely, if you don't use it you must hate it; some people might be interested in the tech but still not believe it's an investment vessel befitting of their risk profile).
More electricity buys more BTCUSD, so far. It hasn't been a problem since Bitcoin price continues to go up. If you own Bitcoin, you believe it'd go up forever. If you don't own Bitcoin, you think it'd stop at some point. This is the disconnect between Bitcoin and the world.
No, it didn't.

It got another paper about a magic doodad powered by unicorn farts.
Surely lumber, treated cellulose, contains a high % of the original carbon content (minus water)?
> You have to waste your time, energy, nerves to refute a total nonsense that zombie-like mob find useful in supporting.

See also:

> Sealioning (also spelled sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with persistent requests for evidence or repeated questions, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity.[1][2][3][4] It may take the form of "incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate".[5] The term originated with a 2014 strip of the webcomic Wondermark by David Malki.[6]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
> There is no single reason for bitcoin to exist

Just from my lifetime:
Hyperinflation in Venezuela and Zimbabwe. Inflation in Argentina. The housing bubble. The internet bubble. Banker bailouts. Our current everything bubble.
> It saved my world, and millions of others.

It definitely didn't. It may have made you money, or given you a creative programming outlet, or friends. You could also get that from dealing large amounts of cocaine, but you wouldn't be able to pretend you were a revolutionary.
To be fair Christians have alwsys fought great wars amongst each other on the basis of one basis of christianity thinking all others are wrong.

At least that’s what they told the peasants. In reality it’s all about power politics and money. Same as now.

You gotta remember that for 2000 years the church was politics. Sure there were kings but who crowns the king? The church does.
> By focusing on the behavior of a company rather than dearth of meaningful regulation to protect workers, you're enabling the exploitation of workers across a swath of industries.

Pointing out an individual's wrongs doesn't mean I cannot also advocate better regulation for all. Let this instance be another push toward that end. Apathy and "everyone's doing it" cop outs are just as damaging as calling the problem solved after a single corrective action.
A tall (smallest size) pyke roast from Starbucks is 235 mg of caffeine. A venti (what I normally get) is 410 mg.
I wonder if that’s because sleepiness is associated with poor impulse control. I know when I’m super tired I tend to eat whatever I want the next day.
> Like foam rolling, or running on your toes instead of your heels.

These things have been studied numerous times. Head over to r/AdvancedFitness or r/AdvancedRunning and you'll find people seriously disseminating acacemic, peer-reviewed research on precisely these topics.

It can take a while for certain things to go from practitioner consensus to academic consensus. But that doesn't mean academics aren't rigorously studying it. I also have doubts about your mask and parachute examples.
> I am pretty sure that not sleeping at all also increases fat burning as body uses less energy when asleep

From the admittedly little I know about biology and sleep science; I thought it was universally accepted that poor sleep harms your metabolism and thus would make fat-burning less likely.
I appreciate this on the S1 filing threads where you can get some deep anecdotal insights on companies that you would have otherwise never been able to find through research.
I agree with the sentiment but may I suggest it may not be a recent phonemon - Churchill's famous quote "a lie can be halfway round the world before the truth has its boots on" suggests that it's a human problem - we like to hear easy lies rather than hard truths, and the internet just machine guns lies now, instead of of old musket fire lies of yore.
Credit cards are not permissionless and the settlement is delayed by days.
"A robot decides your credit rating."

That is already pretty dehumanizing. As are decisions of opaque Facebook and Google algorithms to demonetize / disable your account, with no obvious recourse to living human beings.
The subjects were caffeine-naive non-athletes. They had zero caffeine tolerance.

500mg is a huge amount for a caffeine-naive person, no matter how you look at it. No one goes from drinking zero caffeine to 6 Red Bulls per day without experiencing abnormally high stimulation.
I’m going to use this as an opportunity to ask: I tried reading Consider Plebius and couldn’t get into it.

Years have gone by since this attempt (so many books to read, I rarely revisit something that didn’t capture my attention immediately), but a friend recently told me to just skip Plebius and that he guarantees, knowing my taste, I’ll enjoy the rest immensely.

Any HN thoughts here on the series would be appreciated!
The chapters on programming is suprprisingly good for a book of this vintage.
At least the video game industry should benefit from this, as they'll be able to create more realistic simulations.
The key improvement with cryptocurrency (and what allows it to be the first truly digital currency / financial system) is the trustless nature.

Yes, existing banking is just "database queries", which are of course more efficient than transactions on a blockchain. BUT in order for people to trust those database queries, you need to build a monstrous behemoth of energy/resource/human expenditure to maintain that trust. If I just spin up a PostgreSQL database and tell people "hey, I'll store transactions for you – super energy efficient" obviously nobody will use my system (e: without utilizing supplemental systems for trust). Think about how much human/energy/resource expenditure goes into just making counterfeit-proof paper money – humans designing anti-counterfeiting measures, building money printing machines to make good on those ideas, using plastic/metal threads and such in each and every dollar, humans checking your $100 at the grocery store with a pen / UV light / whatever, people making those pens / UV lights, Secret Service agents investing time and money to find and stop counterfeiters, etc.

In cryptocurrency, "counterfeit-proof" comes merely at the expense of more clock cycles. The benefit of which is obvious (to me at least) as the world moves towards 100% renewable energy.

Here's a graph to illustrate the point. txns is the cost of an actual transaction. trst is the cost to maintain trust on top of transaction cost. Worth noting that at some point (hopefully), both "txns" rows will be entirely renewably-powered, while the "trst" rows have a good number of processes that are not made more efficient with the onset of renewables.

[trad banking]

txns: #

trst: ##############################

[crypto]

txns: ##########

trst:
> we have to start supporting each other. Give it time. We’re going to make it friend.

This won't happen. In my opinion they are too 'principled' to support each other. Supporting each other has the connotations of a union or a mob. 'White' men, who in my opinion is statistically among the most capable category are collectively their own enemies, by bending backward to accommodate the 'minority' even when individuals from these 'minorities' are incompetent.
I love this. But this is also why I think using "false-confidence" as a metric avoids all these questions by being unambiguous about what is being measured.
It’s probably important in either case.
I have to concure, I deeply disliked "Consider Phlebas", but the world seemed so interesting that it led me to try again.. and I really liked "The Player of Games".

Your mileage may vary _a lot_.
Ask HN: Best Source for Desktop Backgrounds
Any good recommendations for downloading desktop backgrounds? I'm looking for pictures or artwork to use for my dual screen monitors. But I find it difficult to find high res downloads from safe sources.
> That kind of thinking will lead you to believe offshoring your fabs is a good idea, because is reduces assets in the denominator.

I am under the impression that offshoring fabs is a good idea due to drastically lower labor costs and other costs such as complying with environmental regulations as well as legal costs arising from those regulations. At least it was, and now there may be supply chain advantages to the offshore fabs.
Not OP, but it sounds like a criticism of the Stone/Bronze/Iron age distinctions, which are themselves very Anglocentric in origin.
The smallest size at Starbucks is “short”, it's just not listed on the menu.