skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cryptocurrency is not an abject disaster.

Drew is right that proof of work mining is expensive and has serious negative externalities.

Drew is also right that cryptocurrency, via its growth, hype, and decentralized and self-sovereign nature, is often an ideal vehicle for certain kinds of criminal activity, including pump-and-dump fraud or ransomware.

Drew is right (perhaps indirectly) that many or most well-meaning crypto projects will end up losing money for most of their investors.

But, there's a lot more going on in crypto. At this point, if you think crypto is wholesale a scam, bad for the world, or a fad, you're simply misinformed.

As Drew observes, Bitcoin has a cost problem. For that reason, many crypto insiders think that BTC's reign as the #1 top crypto will come to an end within a few years.

More reading on Bitcoin's cost problem https://twitter.com/RyanBerckmans/status/1386505715938775044

In contrast to Bitcoin, the Ethereum community is actually building many useful things and will soon stop proof of work mining, replacing it with proof of stake. As a result, Ethereum earns enough actual revenue that ETH is expected to generate lots of cash, like a Buffet stock, in the coming decade.

Today, much of Ethereum's revenue is what we may call "reflexive" or insular, in that the revenue is related to cryptocurrency services or speculation. That might make Ethereum's apps appear to be "not useful" or "scams". However, I think it'd be a mistake to conclude that just because most early Ethereum apps are related to crypto, that they'll all be. Ethereum apps are increasingly connecting with the regular economy, and that's the primary growth opportunity.

Further reading on Ethereum's cash flow https://ethereumcashflow.com

Disclosure: I hold ETH and no BTC, and am the author of both links.
Bitcoin falls and anti-crypto headlines rise it’s like bond prices and bond interest rates.
It's not just nulls. In C, you can compile and execute this without warning:

int square(char* string) {
int *number = (int*)(void*)string;
return *number * *number;
}

It's UB, so in principle it can do anything, and in practice, the best thing it might do is return gibberish.

The Java version of this would throw a ClassCastException on the first line.
Mastering your company-wide remote communication
I think that's depression. I'm guessing these tips are more for the technically lonely, which is probably a much higher number in the past due to WFH and quarantines.
There are plenty of other ways to store value that is neither governmental nor cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is supposed to be better than them because it can not be as easily stopped/banned. That last promise does not seem to hold (yet?)
Very often investors sit on boards, too
Not a fan of this. There's a lot of fancy UI elements but the UX is actually pretty horrible. It's so hard to cut through the faff to get to the actual content.

Most of the real estate is given to something that doesn't actually matter, the stock images. Images are nice but the article titles are the real content and need to take pride of place.
The TeX Live Guide–2021
the suggested article in the series at the bottom is even more interesting, outlines a 'fantasy f1 championship' but for aereodinamicists to compete with their car concepts

https://maxtayloraero.wordpress.com/2020/12/15/mvrc-2020-f1-...
When times are good, yes. However, bank accounts can be frozen, and when things go bad governments can introduce capital controls preventing you from moving your money abroad without massive paperwork or the right connections.
> But cars had value. They have value. They had value from day 1.

This is so true: cars have massive externalities but the 20th century was spend rebuilding the world around them because they were useful. You saw that immediately and the true costs only became more apparent years later.

Cryptocurrency is as if Robert Moses had redesigned NYC around pet rock warehousing on the theory that someone would later find a use for them, and the warehouses needed to burn coal continuously.
These percentages are purely aspirational. Managing software developers' time down to the single digit percentages is impossible. In reality if you're doing something in your 20% (or whatever) that turns out to be valuable, and in particular you make your management see that it's valuable, your 20% will become 80%, and if not, then your 20% will be whatever you manage to make it.
So we should all have stayed on our family farms and lived a life of manual labor?
Can you tell the AI changes from the ones that are submitted by users? Early in the pandemic especially, I was submitting lots of changes to Google Maps for places that had changed their hours or services but didn't update their Maps profiles.
For what it's worth, Signal on Android allows sending of unencrypted messages over SMS.
Yeah, that was kind of my point. Trains are expensive when sleeper cars are involved (although you the journey is the reward when traveling by train).

Of course a bullet-train in Japan from Tokyo to Kyoto is two hours — not requiring a sleepover on the train.

Japan, to be sure, is a small country compared to the U.S. But with a similar train system, San Francisco to Denver would be an 8 hour train ride.
Maybe it's possible Cloudflare infringed on valid patents.
What are you talking about? Secret chats, which are E2EE, are supported on Unigram and other desktop clients.
Inequality in the creator economy, and why it can be a good thing
read the book Blitzscaling for how private efforts defeat regulations
It's just a terrible platform. Hard to use, hard to read, paywall.
This is exactly the general hypothesis behind https://100dollarceo.com
Meanwhile even if a CEO completely fails at their job, the amount of compensation they receive for doing a poor job could be better used for something else.
In these situations, the evidence is rarely clear cut. Part of establishing the belief in the evidence is investigating whether or not it can fit into a plausible-but-ultimately-speculative narrative.

In other words, if you can't even construct a coherent story of causation that incorporates your evidence, then maybe you have misinterpreted your evidence.

That's why a narrative is an important part of the puzzle. They are not to be taken as gospel -- they're just a basic sanity check of the evidence.

Edit: I'm not dismissing your perspective! I would have said the exact same thing a couple of years ago. I'm used to evidence being either obviously true or obviously false, or at least being able to establish a Bayesian posterior belief based on incontrovertible assumptions.

What changed for me was that I read some monographs in anthropological history (or is it historical anthropology? I keep forgetting which is which.) These make for incredibly frustrating reading for someone like me. It's all anecdotes and narratives and no clear sets of underlying principles. But that's precisely why it's been so meaningful for me to read them. It's really widened my perspectives on both humanity and that type of research.
It's interesting to look at the age breakdown [1], though. Less than 50% of respondents under 50 have cable. How much of the older population does, just out of inertia and being used to it?

There's a generation growing up now with a very different experience.

I distinctly remember my kid experiencing cable for the first time around age 3 or 4 (rainy day while we were staying at a cottage): "this is in the middle, start it over at the beginning", "I want to pick a different episode" and when the first commercial came on "hey! Put my show back on! I don't want to watch this".

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/03/17/cable-and-s...
That still sounds like an interesting and publishable result, if unfortunate if you're trying to spin an entire PhD out of it.
I Hate Remote Work
We have hybrid work in my place it means we go to office every second day. I hate it, because i have bad computer in home. I work on large java project, and everything takes so long: compiling, running tests, even writing code (IDE freezes for seconds all the time). I disabled all unneeded plugins - did not helped. Everything takes 2x or 3x more time than it should. Coworkers laugh at me and they hate me because my output is weak. I must be in office every second day, and i have long commute so i cant bring office computer to my house. Why no one will listen to poor programmers that may have no capabilities to work from home?
well, it was more or less the same thing as the python3 debacle. Imagine having a big python2 project and all the cool stuff is happening in python3. You can't upgrade without substantial effort (code & testing). Now replace python2 with zope2 and python3 with zope3. You get the idea.
in most regions I find OSM Nominatim better.

What regions? I work in GIS and have tried Nominatim in several projects, and it always ends up being so error prone we have to abandon it.
Had this vaccine over the weekend (in Canada) and given the supply concerns and all the drama around it I really wonder if I'll be able to get my second dose of it (scheduled for August at this point). I kind of wonder if my second dose will end up being Pfizer.

Aside: While I am glad I took it, the side effects were brutal for my wife and I; fever, chills, nausea, agitation. Lasted about 36 hours. Not everyone gets this, but most of my friends who took it last week did, it's just anecdotal but it seems higher than the 1 in 10 statistic they're throwing around. I'm hoping that this strong immune system response correlates with future resistance to COVID.
I don’t like how the local government is courting these businesses. It just reeks of corruption when they’re getting special tax breaks and treatment.
How do you think the roundup is applied in the first place?
You’re correct that patents generally last 20 years from filing. But patent term can be longer when there were processing delays by the patent office. And yes, you can sue on expired patents for past damages (but you can only go back up to six years from the date you sue).
This strikes me as a perfect visual example of repl-driven development. I like how he starts very simple and slowly makes it more sophisticated, testing every step of the way.

If you've never tried it before, I highly recommend giving it a shot - it's extremely satisfying. I use Clojure, but other lisps also have fantastic repl environments that facilitate this style of development. "Bottom Up vs Top Down Design in Clojure"[0] is the talk that really made it clear to me how to design programs this way.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb823aqgX_0&list=PLZdCLR02gr...
There are many GPUs with no double precision floating point support in hardware. Modern ones can probably emulate it. Older ones don't have any explicit support. Most real time 3D renderers do not use double precision at all.
Reading between the lines, anyone else seeing an inhouse FAB! In the name of vertical integration, that is the last thing they need to consolidate after M1. Imagine Processor, Graphics, Modem, Baseband, Power Control all chips designed inhouse and manufactured on own FAB. ;)
I don't remember anyone ever saying that Google was promising strong AI?

Just another case of wishful thinking by someone who doesn't like how the web works in practice?
The problem is that the best CEOs might not go for that. There are a lot of long term things that can impact a company for the negative, and you don't want your CEO bailing to a different company the moment that some macro event (semiconductor shortage, new competitor, global pandemic, etc) comes along and alters the long term upside of your company.

You want a CEO who is going to stick around and make the best possible decisions to improve the company's trajectory, even if that mostly means keeping the company flat as opposed to faceplanting.
I'm wondering if people are looking for Rust snobbery and finding it where it doesn't exist. This is not a dig at who I'm responding to, although the comment did trigger the thought.

I interpreted the points in the article as fairly generic. The idea of "Inconvenient knowledge is better than convenient ignorance" goes well beyond Rust.

The author of the article does imply that Rust does a lot of things right, but I'm curious how one could say "Hey, I like this language it does a lot of things well and fixes problems I see in other languages" without sounding like a snob.
A new way of rapidly counting and identifying viruses
> Dan struggled for years with diabetes and was even recently hospitalized because of it. This tragedy has nothing to do with the COVID-19 vaccination and unfortunately everything to do with diabetic ketoacidosis.

https://twitter.com/sarahbrie/status/1386384261133922310
Wouldn't it only make sense to gamble away the company in that scenario? Heads you win and the options pays out big, tails bankruptcy, but the option is worth the same as if you just did mediocre (worth nothing).
Because the people who own companies are either a) disinterested index funds, or b) members of the same plutocrat class as the board members and CEOs.
Unlike CEOs, authoring idiotic clickbait IS a job that is rapidly being automated away..
I don't think absolute precision regarding specific commands or flags therein would be required because when you're in the chair and dealing with a problem you're going to have access to the resources you need to get that precision (man pages, vendor documentation etc).

Though being able to explain the mental model of how you want to go about manipulating the output, extraction of the information or data you need, be it through json manipulation, regex, line/column parsing etc is valuable.
I don't know why I didn't think to check into this sooner, but I inherited my grandfather's record collection that is >5,000 records, and I just couldn't bear donating it to some random thrift store, and I knew that selling them would just mean someone picking through the collection and leaving the dregs. This is a solution that I've been looking for. I do listen to some of the records, and I enjoy it, but I don't have time to digitize the whole collection, but this is actually a better solution, because now other people will be able to enjoy my grandfather's collection besides my family.
This. A more practical approach would be to embrace the fact that no one really knows what's going to happen & plan accordingly.
I generally agree. I do have a question, though. Would it be this bad without the marketplaces? I had a sliver of hope for a small period of time that bitcoin would truly replace fiat currencies. And that ethereum could replace law. Both have failed to achieve their goal. Is it society’s fault or has the tech always been pointless? Are there meatspace things society could do like e.g. ban using dirty energy for mining, ban proof of work, some [thing] about regulating exchanges, etc.?
Tornados are not wide, area-effect disasters. They're forgiving in that regard: preferring a relatively narrow swath of absolute destruction.
I had the pleasure of staying there for a couple of nights in 2008. The hallways smelt of burning incense. As I waited for the key to my room, I remember someone coming up to reception, saying that they'd like to film a documentary about the place. The guy just looked at them and said no, fuck off.
Narratives are stories. In this case a story used to describe a conjecture. Unfortunately researchers found the story convincing enough that Since the publication of the wood‐overuse hypothesis, no attempts have been made to evaluate if erosion in the uplands and/or increased flooding in the floodplain did indeed occur during Cahokia's occupation.

The authors have a potential solution in that conjectures that cross academic divisions should include support from related academic fields or from new interdisciplinary ones like geoarchaeology.

Moving forward, we propose that to move past these older narratives of ecocide, there needs to be increased engagement with obtaining both archaeological and environmental data to address these older theories, a need for researchers who are trained in interdisciplinary research, as well as increased support for long‐term, interdisciplinary collaborations. The interdisciplinary field of geoarchaeology is especially equipped to help us move forward, as long as the members of the field remain engaged with developing anthropological theory.
I find it funny that people throw out decades of history. Options contracts, as you propose, introduce the incentive for extreme risk taking because doing "normal boring" things literally doesn't pay. It's one of the main arguments for stock compensation because if the company does poorly, the CEO directly feels it where it hurts (the wallet).
402, Payment Required
Or just block cookies on the domain itself. Then again, there are a lot of Medium blogs on other domains.
This is really a complaint against Proof of Work based consensus protocols.

"Cryptocurrency" is also kind of a dumb term. Everyone seems to still think this is about creating new currencies. Really we are talking about tokens that represent some component of a system. Yes that is general because the base for experimentation with tokens is absurdly vast. God we need to move beyond thinking about Bitcoin! Really this article is saying "Fuck Bitcoin" and well, I'd agree with that at this point.
Bill Gates says no to sharing vaccine formulas with global poor to end pandemic
Ah well I agree with the second sentence, but having friends is different from just being around other people.

And I guess if you really have friends and still feel lonely, making more friends might not help much.
There's a free article limit and you're probably under it.
I'm not sure if random conversations at visitors centers are really the way this kind of research proceeds. Illinois mints quite a few archeologists every year, at a series of rather large universities, none of which give even a fraction of a shit about real estate interests around Cahokia.
I'm not sure I understand, are you saying we should not worry about immediate effects that only affect 1 or 2 generations?

I don't see why thinking about negative effects over different timespans should be exclusive - climate change certainly won't be an issue in thousands of years (if we still exist).
I don't mean the tax/audit arm of those companies. They all do the generic management consulting. I left several off. Here's a market share chart: https://imgur.com/a/O1Urjkm
SiriusXM Is Buying 99% Invisible
Modern equipment usually has a power controller chip that sits between the power button and the actual "power on" signal that's sent to the power supply. There's no direct physical connection between the button and the PSU anymore.

The one I usually work with (LTC2954) does have an RC circuit attached to it to determine how long to hold the button to force a shutdown. And I'd wager a guess that this is the capacitor you're discharging by kicking the controller a few dozen times. But there's no possible way I can see that you're discharging every cap in the system.
Keep in mind that this is not an objective take, fraud is destroying his business.

He’s conflating all crypto with PoW based systems. A more accurate title would be "Bitcoin is Making My Life Complicated”.
Good luck automating an Elon Musk or a Steve Jobs. Your algorithm would never come up with new ideas like Amazon or Space X

So far "automation" means a bunch of if/else statement or at most a biased deep learning algorithm, this is why they're used on entry jobs, because they're fundamentally not very useful for anything other than pre defined repeatable and easy tasks
Of course, still runs on some of my servers.

Why? Because I know it inside and out, it's simple, I know exactly what is running, when it's running and how it's running.
Can you switch to the fork?
“Basically the same bridge” is such a hilarious oversimplification that it makes your blame of the Federal Reserve even more amusing. No, absolutely no improvements in engineering, materials, process, or design in sixty years. No added overhead for environmental studies and other regulations. It’s all the Fed.

Hacker News discussing economics is like arguing geopolitics with someone on peyote.
> In what sense it is deterministic?

In at least two senses:

1. Memory usage: with reference counting, at any given moment, the amount of memory used is the minimum necessary for all live references.

2. Timing: with reference counting, the only moment when memory will be released (and their corresponding destructors called) is when a reference count is decremented.

> Any refcount decrement may or may not be the last one and that may or may not cause a huge graph of objects being free()d which (even without destructors) takes unpredictable amount of time.

That's actually predictable: it will always happen precisely at the last refcount decrement for that object, and will release only that object and other objects owned exclusively by that object, and nothing else. The size of that "huge graph of objects" is bounded, which makes the time taken to release it predictable.
I can't imagine why you're being downvoted, for a well-balanced, educative post with full disclosure.

No wait, I can - and it sucks.
How is that indicative of destruction? If someone really believes that inflation is destruction they can hold one of the many assets that are protected against inflation, such as stocks, inflation-adjusted bonds, real estate or gold. Why is cryptocurrency supposedly the only solution here?
I got Moderna last week.

And then I directly got the appointment for my second dose.

As far as I know usually this is how it works here in Germany.

Also In some EU countries they stopped AZ completely.

I think there will be enough AZ left ... sadly.
There was a Danish study that showed that a death in the family of a Danish CEO led, on average, to a 9 percent decline in the profitability of the corporation. If it was the death of a spouse, the decline was 15 percent and, if it was a child who died, 21 percent.

From the study: “Interestingly, similar deaths experienced by individual members of the board of directors do not significantly affect firms’ outcomes. Our results provide strong empirical support for the idea that CEOs are extremely important to firm performance.”

So I’d say they add significant value.

https://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/mygsb/faculty/research/pubfile...
+1 to that, and especially to America's test kitchen. People complain about blogspam and recycled recipes and being unable to filter through to find quality recipes. They also talk about being willing to pay to find quality.

There is, and has been, a very well known, nationally respected organization who does this, for years! Their recipe recommendations are usually good, and the narratives actually ADD to the recipe, by offering alternatives and reasons behind choices made, instead of just telling a nonsense story.
I wish the author would tell us how he really feels :-)
I sincerely doubt it.

How many people keep open 50+ tabs, or open a page and walk away?

I'm sure that time spent on a page, if it's given any weight, is given barely any. I'm sure returns to search to click a new link is a much higher indicator that the user didn't find what they wanted.
What's inherently bad about deflation? It's happened routinely throughout most of history until recently.

Speculation is a good thing, it's a form of entrepreneurship.

Example of historic deflation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Deflation
My newsletter: sentiment analysis of stock market news last week and trends
I’m not a botanist but my understanding is that the root balls hold a ton of energy and the plant can just keep sending out shoots, and spread underground for fairly long distances. So, eventually that energy source will run out, but they’re invasive because of how resilient they are at finding sneaky ways to hide and appear.
I would also like to add, to be positive, and affirming. Tell other that you enjoyed the time you spent with them. Cheer them on in activities, even strangers!