skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Honest question: why do you think it's a Ponzi scheme? In the energy sector, when a well doesn't perform well enough to cover its costs, exploration companies try to get more money from their investors to drill another well that will "totally put them back in the black". I don't see this kind of dynamic in BTC.

Full disclosure: I don't own any crypto myself, I'm just "crypto-curious".
Can you give some sources for the development progress of Monero vs the meme coins you mentioned ? AFAIK at least Shiba Inu ecosystem is under development, namely their own exchange and staking system.
The key to your misunderstand here is that the proof of work hashing is decoupled from transaction volume or market cap.
I'd forgotten entirely about SS2 - he goes to the big city and learns about rock & roll and dancing?

Completely agree on different standards back then. Definitely an area in which I think we have collectively improved.
the bulk of those returns were from 2010-2013
The fees, on a good day, you can pay somewhere around 50-100gwei for a transaction on eth, right now we are seeing 1500+gwei transactions.

For example, to deposit into a maker vault, a 50 gwei transaction would cost somewhere around 100$, it now costs like 2-3k$ just to execute a single transaction.
Erasing one ethnostate (Israel) for another ethnostate (Palestine) is not racism, is just lack of self awareness.
Maybe that’s it. Greater wall surface area for lower pool volume means that the filters can be less efficient.
Junk food is continuously being exported from US. Here in a medium sized town in The Netherlands, we have multiple MD's, now a KFC, Subway and I must have forgotten some.

I still remember when the first MD opened in 1986 ( around the same time we got MTV ). Now it is US franchises all over the place.

edit: and not only food, drinks too. We used to have domestic 'soda' brands.
>People just parrot that viewpoint without asking whether some amount of Keynesian economics is useful, because you know, government is evil.

This just isn't an accurate portrayal of any of the serious criticisms of Keynesian economics.

>It got us out of the Great Recession and it’s been 12 years. Maybe the consequences haven’t fully manifest, but another Great Depression would have been guaranteed hell.

It feels like an unfair argument you're having because of course the opponents' whole argument is that the consequences haven't manifested AND that they would be far more dire than a continuation of the Great Recession / another Great Depression. As wealth gaps widen, as inflation rises, as our debt grows, it's possible to see a worse future ahead than one where we continued into a depression.

In hindsight, we all know the problems which led to the fall of various empires (Roman, Mughal, etc.) but if you lived at the time, this same argument could be made against you for sounding the alarm: "Yeah, maybe it's better to not constantly expand our Empire and rely on mercenary soldiers who have little loyalty to a place they've never even been to, but can you imagine the hell if we lost the war against the Gauls??" (forgive me if I mangled the history there).
I'm also poor. I once told a well-off investor that if I counted the hours I spent working on my open source project, my hourly rate over my career would be below that of a McDonald's employee.
His answer was "It's an investment in yourself, you'll make it all back later." - He was partly right, it was an investment, but all it got me was a foot in the door at that company as a regular run-of-the-mill software developer, nothing more.

2 years later, I'm a proven 100x developer, working on some of the most complex projects imaginable as self-employed - I managed to pull myself up by the bootstraps but I still earn much less than all my ex-colleagues who work bureaucratic corporate jobs.
I don't see anything changing for the better. It only seems to be changing for the worst. Nobody even cares about open source anymore. I'll have to be a 1000x developer by the end of the year just to make ends meet as a self-employed developer.

The situation is getting so bad, I find myself fantasizing about communism. Anything to end this crony-capitalist nightmare.

I often think of the quote "In communism, we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." - The "pretend to work" aspect sounds like an upgrade over the deal I'm currently getting.
I completely agree with using email as "social network". I really think "email" should be the backbone of social, planning, chat, etc. Nobody "owns" email. Yeah, there are service providers, but you can switch easily enough.
The “debunking” of Tulip Mania has, itself, been thoroughly debunked:

https://fee.org/articles/tulip-mania-not-a-myth/

Plenty of financial records still exist from back then. Tulip bulb mania actually happened.
I've read a lot of chat logs and so far I've only seen Andrew try to claim he owns the whole network, domain, copyrights, etc whereas it seems he only owns freenode Ltd which owns the domain that has a client to the irc network. The volunteer staff of the irc network say the irc network itself is hosted on servers owned by sponsors of the network who are not affiliated with freenode Ltd. Up to what I read, they were still trying to figure out if freenode Ltd owned the copyright/trademarks for freenode. Was this from newer chat logs then?
think of negotiations as a price discovery mechanism (auctions as another example) with severe information asymmetries. the point of the process is to learn what each side values and what exactly is on offer (and can be potentially offered) and how much value each side places on those things. price is used as the primary signal of value, and you learn about value as prices and information is exchanged in an iterated fashion.
The point I so coarsely was trying to make is, the impact is the same whether it is nondescript industrial sludge or sanctioned chemicals. Permitting one while demonizing the other for the sake of some control over property owners is asinine at best and a power grab at worst. We already have laws and penalties specific to the dumping of some chemicals that are effective regardless of who the property owner is. We would not need additional laws that apply specifically to property owners.
Currency is a broad term, like service. Like many broad terms, it is often misused and that leads to the broader meaning. Currency can be used for different things. In one meaning, currency is a tradable and stable store of value. This used to mean it was backed by some recognized valuable commodity, such as gold, but that is no longer the case. In another meaning, currency is a thing that is traded and has an expectation of growing value over time. The more proper term for that is an investment property. Bitcoin is not (yet) the first type of currency, it is the second type.

It's an investment. Detractors cite electricity usage, but overall it uses much less electricity than the traditional banking system. Also, the value of the second type of currency is only the value that people believe it has in their transactions, which is no different than the US Dollar. Since we went off the gold standard, the US dollar only has the value we believe it has. Part of that belief is that the US Dollar is rightly a bit more stable because it is artificially manipulated by the FED to control inflation.
Agree. For studying pure markets and financial psychology, there is no better case study.
WTF, gtp-3?
How would oracles verify semi-private business deals?
Where? My ex-girlfriend from 12 years ago came from Amish country and I got to meet some when we visited her family. Not a single house even had electricity.

Lots of places.

The term "the Amish" is so broad that it is largely meaningless, unless everything you know is based on stereotypes.

See also: "The Americans," and "The Christians."

You and I are both "HN Users," but I suspect very different. I wouldn't want to be judged based on your lifestyle just because we both belong to this group.
Man, I felt this stuff a lot when I was in college. Coming from a lower middle class family in a poor state to a private school in California, there were so many little things to make me feel like an outsider. The part about hobbies was the most memorable because it made my social anxiety worse early on. I always struggled to think of something more interesting than "video games" or "reading". And, of course, the food stuff. Took me years to get into the habit of ordering a salad when out for lunch like a civilized human. But unlike the author's experience I was so much better off than many Americans with backgrounds like mine because I went to a private university that provides enough financial aid to students who need it. So for the most part, I was already better off in college than I was growing up, and I graduated with a manageable amount of debt. But there were times when my family needed a little help and I was scrambling to find some free food to get through to the next paycheck or wondering if Mom would pay me back in time to make the phone bill. I also wasn't the "only poor person" around, and I found others like me which really helped.

I think all the useful political points have been made by others but I think it's also worth saying whatever happens with society overall it can get better for you personally. I hope others who relate to the post find a job that values them enough to start chipping away at the accumulated disadvantage. Once the major financial stress is removed, you can and will acculturate, start worrying less about these little things, and even become more like your peers, and I think it's ultimately a positive thing. These cultural markers are, in part, adaptations to the situations we're in, and if you're working in tech it makes sense that you will find things that newly resonate with you and shed some of the things inherited from parents whose work society decided to value less.

Of course there is at least one serious obstacle to this, which the author astutely points out and which I don't have any good advice on because I still struggle with it:

>I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I was afraid to seek mentorship from anyone above me, convinced that even asking would seem like bothersome begging. I watched the people around me network effortlessly, assured of favors and good words put in. I could only think in terms of what I could offer and how I could survive; they were thinking on the next level where they never had to wonder if they were good enough.
~300% return YoY is bad now? Just put a small % of your portfolio and if it fails, not a big loss, but if it increases at those rates, it'll naturally end up becoming a large % of your portfolio.
i have some bad news for you when it comes to how lot of electricity is generated.

Also, how do you decide which computing is good and which computing is bad?
I haven't looked into any reasons past the only one that actually matters, which is that people who actually have an intellectual disability prefer it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_disability#Termin...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/why-you-sh...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK64884/
>I just think it has no value.

Don't use it then, but why would you also disparage the millions of people who are happily finding value in it?

>Just because someone does something first, doesn't mean that thing is useful or good.

Well done creating your amazing straw man.
Total energy / total transactions is a completely appropriate metric to use. If you could meaninufylly scale the number of bitcoin transactions and could amortize the high fixed costs of running the blockchain I'd agree with you but as it stands right now, you can't.

Yes, I'm aware there's off chain solutions such as lighting but it's unclear to me whether those solutions are viable long term.
I recently did a bit of a dive into the internals of another interpreted dynamic language - R. This may be quite unsurprising but I was struck by how similar many things are here. I guess this says something about how writing a runtime in a language like C naturally leans towards certain patterns
Personally, volatility aside, I don't invest in non-productive assets (be it gold, or other precious metals).

I have a risk appetite so I keep my IRA in this [1]. Then, for taxed investments, I have a core portfolio of the stock from companies I've worked at, against which I sell covered calls. I sell futures options for passive income (not all the time, I'm sitting this move out, for instance). I carved out a chunk for my financial advisor to manage more conservatively.

NFA, of course.

[1] https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=272007
Hacking Academy
Currently people are fleeing to Tether, so of course the price is up. The implication of the parent comment was that the Tether printer could be getting out today, which would cause BTC to drop.

The question then becomes what happens tomorrow. Are people going to try to get out of the Tether that they've jumped into today by going to BTC or USD? If they go to BTC, then no problem, the price goes back up (some). If they try to go to cash, BTC keeps dropping. Tether's value doesn't have to crash for the Tether machine to stop running and cause a BTC crash. Though, at some point in the process it would start dropping, and that would then cause a further BTC price drop.
> Where else should people invest their money?

Pretty much any low volatility/world ETF or streak based ETFs (paying out an increasing dividend). If you trust nobody except yourself then get gold.

>And bonds/cash will soon be completely worthless by the time the gov and feds of the world are done with them

Actually, the worst thing that could happen to the US economy is that the USD goes up in value.

>There’s a desperate need for a store of value, now more than ever (gov of the world are abandoning their obligation of providing a stable fiat)

Why would anyone want to buy a "store of value" that is extremely volatile? You put in $1000 and you aren't unlikely to get $1000 back out, either you make a big loss or big gain. People love shouting that assets going up is inflation but when they go down nobody thinks "hyperdeflation".

>Do you see any better solution than crypto?

Even gold is better at the "store of value" meme than Bitcoin. People buy Bitcoin because it goes up, that's all there is to it.
Well so far it’s anything but zero sum. From nothing to tens of thousands of dollars in 10yrs is not zero sum.

It’s highly volatile yes, and has lost >= 80% of its value four times in those ten years (so this little 30% dip is nothing by comparison). But not zero sum.

It originally mainly appealed to two factions: techies who like disrupting big things from first principles, and people who were long concerned with the mechanics of government fiat money and central banks [1]. There was some overlap between those two groups, and they were the innovators and early adopters.

Interest has since expanded to investors of all kinds due to its, so far, non-zero-sum aspect.

But if you’re not interested in the mechanics of how money works, it’s not surprising Bitcoin or cryptocurrency won’t be of interest to you.

Also, Bitcoin has aspects of both currency and commodity (and possibly security, though the US SEC has said they don’t consider it that). It’s impossible to categorize based on previous definitions for this reason. Try not to get caught up in debating whether it’s one of these things, because it’s a mix of both (or maybe all three). So many people drive themselves crazy trying to define it as a currency, or arguing against it as a currency, but that’s just a mental tar pit.

[1]:One well-researched take: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princes_of_the_Yen
I am Negan
Governance Heretics
> But this is great right? What you just wrote? I'm confused now. Is this what you wanted me to say?

I don't know how to parse this. What are you trying to communicate here?

> This is why I point you to research books or articles.

I'm pretty widely-read on this subject, and yet there is no indication that this is converging on something useful.

> Or even follow actual politicians on what work they are doing

If the literature isn't forthright, why would a politician be different? Who are the honest, forthright politicians to whom I should be listening?

> But if you know that black people are more likely convicted than a white person(they also get longer sentences for the same crimes), then why are you asking as if you don't know.

I'm not asking whether black people are more likely to be convicted or not, I'm asking what utility there is in framing the problem with esoterics.

> Overall, you've ended up raising more questions than answering...

Right, I'm asking a question, and explicitly not positing any answers, so of course I'm raising more questions than answers.
Fiat currencies can and do do that also.
BTC narrative pivoting is wild.

Remember "of course it's not a currency - it's a store of value, like gold"?
> I never heard this either. Please just use social media

I agree. It's also impossible to Google, since that acronym is also a common word.
Their average buying price is in the ~20-30k range, still lots of way to go. And if they have losses on their coins, they can harvest them to offset their other incomes, etc.
The Amish/Mennonites have an interesting take... Some of them are 'allowed' to drive cars, as long as they're black base models and are "modest" and largely utilitarian. There are also rules about which types of equipment they can have, so no tractors but they can have skid steer loaders for "construction" which they hitch regular farm implements to. No electricity allowed in the house, but no real restrictions about power in the "shop" or battery powered devices.

It's a strange combination between modesty and strategically bending rules. I kind of adore that.
OK, it looks like nobody understood my point, fascinating.

Discord is a company. You can look it up, there are contact points - abuse, legal, etc. People who put their community there trust the entity running Discord.

I'd prefer to trust someone I actually know, and with that, I'm fully on board with librachat, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have a real, visible legal entity behind them.

I was never talking about the community on top of a platform, but the platform itself.
I've tried Matrix multiple times, and each time have been turned off by the broken and/or slow clients, both on mobile and desktop. No thanks.
Sorted or unsorted?
Robinhood’s big gamble
The government of India has poisoned the minds of Indians to believe that cryptocurrency is bad, risky, dangerous and criminal. In my experience people were interested, but afraid. My western (for what it is worth) viewpoint was that adoption of cryptocurrency may challenge the gold culture in India. If BTC was promoted, I feel it would surpass gold quite quickly — India has a long term save, store of wealth culture with gold; a cryptocurrency “alternative saving mechanism” challenges the state apparatus and is of great concern to the continued control of the country by its leaders.
If new product/service is not lead by Mark Zuckerberg you should not trust it ether, since you have no track record, furthermore past performance is not guarantee of future results.
It already has done that many times over (20k->3k back in 2017). And people who would have kept buying would be in a great place right now.
Experiment in helping users and publishers create deeper connections on Chrome
once you compare it to CP it’s clear you have a valid argument.

democracy? data privacy? thanks for the good laugh
In these material designs, I have trouble knowing what things are buttons I can click on.
If you mean let Palestinians back into their homes as opening up Israel the you are essentially destroying Israel is a state.
Sea shells have intrinsic value, cryptos don't.
/s is to show sarcasm, so you might be missing point of my reply

Bitching about lang A > lang B is sign of immaturity. Every language had/has a use and arguing about what is better doesnt get anyone anywhere.
Mine is bicycling. To me, a bicycle is a device built to convey me a short distance before humiliating and injuring me. I am comically bad at it, capable of flinging myself into unseen ditches and then having the bicycle land on top of me in a painful manner. Since childhood, I essentially look like one of those self-evolved neural net programs trying to propagate some kind of "vehicle" of randomly distributed wheels across a terrain: flailing, flipping upside down at the tiniest bump, hopelessly mal-adapted for the task.
"An alternate hypothesis is that prison should be uncomfortable and unpleasant as a deterrent."

But countless studies have shown that it's not an effective deterrent.
I think the idea is that eventually this won't happen, and there are currencies issued by governments where this happens too, and certainly you wouldn't want that either.

Cryptocurrency will simply have to compete with currency issued by sovereign governments, similar to how government-issued currencies compete with each other now.

I think an issue for many people is that crypto is looked at categorically as a currency, but it could be much more. It could be a crappy currency, but a good store of value (a better version of gold in most respects, though gold retains an intrinsic value), it could also be a great currency - transiting government borders with impunity and anonymity, which may be very valuable to some.

Historically, we've used gold, up until the last 150 years or so (don't quote me on exact timeline here) and even then the U.S. finally went off the gold standard in the 1970s. For most people, cash was still thought of as a store of value - they'd throw it in the bank or under a mattress. Or they thought gold was, but since it's heavy they just trade cash instead that's backed by gold. It'll take a while for the global paradigm shift to occur that pits currencies (sovereign issued and otherwise) against each other as a separate theory to assets in general. Cryptocurrency (which is now a bad name IMO) straddles the borders here, so it tends to be confusing.

Personally I view cash as good for liquidity, but that's mostly it. I want the cash I receive to be turned into productive assets, so I hold a much smaller amount compared to assets.
Private Internet Access has no connection to Freenode at all anymore. It WAS owned by London Trust Media, which also owned PIA, but Kape acquired PIA in December of 2019 and has had no connection since then. We do not have any involvement or knowledge of any takeover of Freenode.
Should I Continue
> It's an interesting design, in som eways the ramp is a deceptively simple concept but I'm not sure if it's safer than the US approach.

It's the 'standard' way as far as I know (see Path Finder/Sojourner for instance).

The 'sky crane' system used by the US is fairly new and, I guess, much more complex to pull off and more expensive. I think it was developed partly because the payload had become too big/heavy for the previous airbag system.
We're talking about IRC, right? Joining a random channel in the 90's would pretty much have 'A/S/L?" as a standard greeting..
What about all the children harmed by the freenodegate conspirators?
He means the irc network. The servers which one connects to when using irc. The freenode network is an irc network that one can connect to in order to chat but there's a freenode domain that acts as a client to the network which it seems freenode Ltd (of which Andrew is now the only member on the board) owns
yah, have seen that too. not a fan since it really doesn’t reduce cognitive load or complexity.