skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The numbers I have seen usually comes from something like this

https://docsend.com/view/adwmdeeyfvqwecj2

However, it's a terribly bad faith argument.

Essentially, they wrap up everything that isn't involved with ledger maintenance (ATM power, data center power for running the website, Air conditioning at branches power usage) and compare that to Bitcoin, which is only doing ledger maintenance. They do that, because if you had a true apples to apples comparison, you'd end up with kwh of power usage. That's because a ledger is computationally cheap to maintain over a trust network. We were able to do that in the 70s with servers that had no more power than today's raspberry pis.

And how do we know it's garbage? Because if banks stopped doing their own ledgers and instead did everything through bitcoin, would their power usage drop? Absolutely not. They'd still have branches, ATMs, and data centers running their websites. In fact, some banks do manage BTC. Do those banks have lower power footprints compared to like banks without BTC? Absolutely not.
How would cryptocurrency free us from financial tyranny? At some scale finance becomes a state affair, and regulated by law backed by a monopoly on violence. Or, otherwise, you end up with crypto-warlords with private military companies. In neither sense would the average user be meaningfully "free"; it seems like you're replacing democratic checks-and-balances with harder-to-regulate digital capital, which is "freedom" only to the super-rich.

It's like somebody at the bottom of the Ponzi scheme defending it to death because someday, maybe, just maybe, he'll rise to the top...
> but disagree that that's a critical feature

I imagine you've probably never lost your phone while traveling.
They did address the ownership. It's a non-profit. The people running the show are associated with many of the greatest open source projects. Projects where literal geniuses have donated thousands of hours to make software and services available to you and I free of charge.

You know how Discord now has a channel for every game or new service that comes out? Freenode IRC has always been like that, except for core and interesting FOSS systems. For example, actual Linux maintainers might be in a #linux channel, and the guy who invented the Nim programming language would hang out in #nim.

The people running the show are those people and friends of those people.

The guy who was f'ing with it was just some greedy guy who got control of the domain name and lied and said he wouldn't interfere with the non-profit activities. But then he started advertising lame services on the home page and messing with the networking etc.

So they fixed it by getting a new domain. Because they are problem solvers.
If you are native English speaker, then start with kind of "caniuse" site, but for terminals and VT, please. It will help a lot if we will be just aware of available features in existing terminals and their compatibility with standards.
Value != trait

If anything a value is something honored because the breech is more common, valued in part due to scarcity.
Can somebody please explain me what is the big deal for me if the government cannot print more currency? I remember old readings saying that inflation was a useful tool - is this not an argument anymore?
> They don't seem to get into the "snake oil privacy" marketing that so many VPN providers seem to be doing

Do you mean the "hide your IP address <from vague/unspecified parties for similarly vague/unspecified reasons" stuff? Because over time I've heard many paid sponsorship shout-outs (and also direct adverts) in podcasts & youtube clips to PIA quoting that and related stuff.
I agree with you, although it would be nice if there were some real sources instead of just a pile of invective.
sounds interesting
It's funny to me that you see Subway as junk food because I see it as one of my healthiest options.
I was under the impression that the militant wing was only loosely affiliated with the political wing. There was discussion after 2001 when they were updating the list of terrorist organizations.
I don't like wasting a lot of energy in this kind of stuff. Also gpu prices...
The stock should drop based on the increased risks and volatility of bitcoins
I wonder what % of the population would have to be obese for this to be considered a serious problem. Right now we are at about half, are we talking 70%, 90%, 95%?

I am often reminded of the movie Wall-E, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we are headed there on some level.
Do you think fiat can’t do that?
Actual value is a true Scotsman.
Nah. I've never used any Apple products besides occasionally using someone's iPhone. I'm not used to the UX and to the gestures, but the interface is strikingly consistent. There's still so much clutter in Android. Fortunately, on Android you can customize most things, but Google is restricting more and more what apps can actually touch.
> what's the benefit of bitcoin compared to say, USD for paying for things?

You help enrich the Bitcoin speculators. Spending in USD doesn't do that.
Do we know why there has been no update to IRC protocol to ensure end to end encryption?
I understand that doing e2e for public chats is extremely complex - so these could remain public, but private messages could easily be encrypted.
When I first moved to Europe, I am ashamed to say my first meal was a Subway, because I wanted to give my digestive system something familiar before starting a new life.
Not a surprise here. Immune to being thrown into the lost and banned though.
I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I was the only person who would say hello to the cleaning lady as she meekly made her rounds around us when we worked late. Everyone else had a long habit of ignoring anyone like her.

Never fucking do this. Learn the name of everyone who comes into the office, greet them, and if they have a foreign native language, learn to say hello in it.

I absolutely remember and judge those of you who treat your fellow humans like furniture. I see you. There will never not be a moment that I remember this, no matter how groovy you are, no matter your political posturing, no matter your accomplishments.
Still, the market believes him (or rather follows him blindly).
It's funny you see it that way:

Subway rolls ruled too sugary to be bread in Ireland https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54370056

Subway 'bread' contains 10% sugar, the EU limit is 2%.
A couple of things. First these are companies that are building up. They are not fully instituted. Second they have many partners that are helping them build out. As far as customers, yes both THETA and VET have customers....including some .gov customers.
A measurement system that only works when you can't calibrate it isn't a useful system.

Also we live in a world where instantaneous communication at arbitrary locations is possible. How hard would it be to make an app where the evaluator can check if the canine's response warrants a treat?
I have yet to see an effective version of these "wonder" tools actually work in practice. That said, they make great snake oil for testing automation teams that often end up doing manual testing because the promises of the "easy" automation were never fulfilled.

Too many people looking for silver bullets.
I am having severe PTSD flashbacks of 'In the Night Garden'. This was supposed to help my children sleep, but only served to haunt my nightmares.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcD2Y_ciHCw
>In another meaning, currency is a thing that is traded and has an expectation of growing value over time.

What? A painting is currency? A house is currency? No.
Then you shouldn't use qualifiers such as 'poor' to describe their risk assessment. Don't give the idiots pushing anti-masking rhetoric in this forum more wind than they deserve by propagating their memes.
"somebody who got a death penalty won't come back"

What percentage of the US prison population is on death row?
Title says unit tests. But to GP's point, it isn't really automatic, the developer still decides what to test. It is transforming REPL logs, not generating tests based directly on the code (which isn't useful in my experience).

To be honest, my development REPL logs have a lot of junk, so it would be extra work to write a clean one, and then make the right assertion (maybe I was looking for "even number" not "exactly 132"). Lisp-y REPLs are friendlier than some, but it would be cool to associate it with something like a notebook where it is easier to update imports/mocks/etc out of order. Cool idea though.
How to create L-Systems – Houdini Kitchen
The GDPR has been replaced by the "UK GDPR" with the same requirements as part of Brexit. Unless the UK government decides to change it, you have the same protections.
I don't think hacker-oriented channels or IRC featured this greeting as often as general chat (ICQ/AIM).
>People always say that, but only one of the full-time jobs I've had in my thirty-year career has come from networking.

Funny, only one of the gigs I've gotten in my 30 year career has come from not networking...my first one. Every job after that has come about because of people I know recommending me for the job.

This has been super helpful over the past 15 years as I've been an independent consultant. In fact, I went indie because I had a network.

I don't need to look for gigs anymore, people come to me. I turn down way more gigs than I can take. And I haven't had to have an actual interview for a job in over 20 years.

I'm sure this isn't the norm, but it certainly makes work life a lot easier.
You can sort yourself, it's only O(n*logn), so it's still gonna be better than O(n^2), even when you include the linear scan to get the intersection.
No, if it's spent buying stuff in the US it stimulates the economy.
International transactions where PayPal locks your account for no reason comes to mind.
The nazis are mostly gone from Germany now, it’s possible.
Laying Personal Finance Foundation: Wingocard Raises $1.7M for Teen Banking App
Interesting thoughts. Language is indeed interpreted syntax, and requires an interpreter or else it's just non-random arrangements of matter.

"If communication is just translation, how much meaning is lost in the process?"

I don't think it's 'just' translation. It includes it, but translation is a form of interpretation that doesn't move between layers of abstractions and instead moves laterally along the same "plane of abstraction" to another syntax/encoding... which can literally be called "translation" (like in vector space movement), and could even possibly be the same mathematically speaking. Therefore, in theory, translation can be lossy or isomorphic (not losing any information), and the latter means that you can go back to where you started from because you have all the information still there.

"If language is the tool with which we represent abstractions, what does a richer language (rich in terms of how much information it can represent) than what we currently have look like?"

That Sci-fi movie, Arrival (circa 2017) is about this. I don't want to give any details, but it's pretty good if you're into atmospheric sci-fi's.
Domain names can be held in escrow by escrow.com. So theoretically it's possible to at least get that part back if the transaction goes south.
> But poor people hate feeling like they have to change their appearance to get the approval of the privileged classes.

You say that like everyone else isn't doing the exact same thing. Being privileged is all about playing the "get everyone else's approval" game. But coming from a different social context it's even more basically a way of showing others respect and earning their trust, so it's not without consequence.
Yep. Lots of (non-wealthy) South Asians freaking out on social media right now.

I suspect if a major mass media outlet popularized a story on the inequities of who wins and loses with cryptocurrency, the cancel culture people would be out in force, backed by environmentalists.
I think my concern is that if you talk to a bot in a certain manner, it normalizes talking to humans in that manner, if the bot is "human enough".

I wonder if the solution is to stop building bots to emulate humans: Natural language processing is important so humans can make ordinary requests of a computer without having to remember specific syntax. But perhaps we should stop trying to make the computer respond the way a human would, so that people don't view it like a human or personality.
Chia is great (and the one real alternative to oPoW for low energy consumption that I am aware of), however the security assumptions are very different from PoW (it uses VDFs etc).

Bitcoin is conservative by nature, so the likelihood of adoption for a PoW with the same fundamental game theory and security assumptions is much higher.

Regarding targeting commodity hardware:

This has a good ring to it but introduces some 51% attack vectors. A lot of the security in BTC comes from the fact that miners will make their hardware worthless if they collude to double spend in a 51% attack. That's not true if the hardware is a real commodity and has resale/reuse value outside the system. Probably there will be specialized hw for Chia though as people often point out.
Patent trolls can be head of USPTO under Biden
I'm sure people are still lamenting Google Reader's shutdown, but luckily RSS never really went away, and hopefully this will provide more incentive to those who do not provide a feed today to start providing one.
Am I the only one who is getting kind of ill from the amount of blogs out there (farnam street is just an example) that have a business about selling ideas/advice to people?

Maybe I've been listening to too many podcasts and I'm jaded but when people selling the ideas and their entire business model is constantly pushing out new ideas and interviewing thought leaders at some point quality content drops off and the pressure to publish probably makes the content suspect. Not sure I'm describing this right but just something I've been noticing lately.
No, I don’t see anything bad about this, because I don’t see how a user misses out.

What lock-in does ALAC afford Apple? If Apple took FLAC and tweaked it a bit to make it work with their streaming better, would you have a similar objection? The outcome is the same.

It might be the case (I’m not sure) that Apple invented ALAC because they thought they could shape the future of lossless audio to their advantage, and get some royalties for the format. But that certainly hasn’t happened, so I’m just really not sure what there is to lament here outside the ideological adherence to open standards.
100-Year-Old Lungs Yield Genetic Samples of 1918 Flu Viruses
Central banks don't do fixed supply money.
Investment banks don't do payments and financial products that don't involve a middleman.

Bitcoin is a censorship resistant, neutral money and payment network. Banks don't do that. Banks don't consume "kWh of power" by the way. From the endless wars to protect the US (dollar) hegemony to 50 floor buildings draped in marble. Thats all cost + energy.
Obviously what I wrote doesn't apply to 100% of people.
Wheat does not require "fortification with vitamins and minerals just to not kill the consumer."

Wheat is a viable staple, up until recently a luxury staple, that forms the basis for a healthy diet when eaten alongside a modest amount of vegetables. For those with gluten intolerances, and also for those without, rice accomplishes the same.
The UK has comparably large problems as well. I don't think NZ has many prisons at all, but I don't know about the situation there, don't know about their incarceration rate. It is still not a contest between countries, but if it pleases I will state that the US is awesome.
It means people don't care if it is a store of value because they don't care if their savings are locked up until the next bubble, they can afford to wait because they have savings somewhere else.
I'm talking about bitcoin, not stock options. Why even bring it up? I'm talking about bitcoin specifically, not cryptocurrencies in general.

you've said a bunch of things but haven't explained the value.
Do you mean healthiest amongst the others named, or that you don't have acces to fresh vegetables and the likes?
I use to feed the crows at my parents house in FL. One evening I toss some seeds and a crow tried to dive and pick up but crashed and tumbled. The other crows on the fence started squawking very loud and a few of them even mimicked the movement by fake crashing in the same spot. This continued for a good few minutes.

Must have been the funniest thing they ever saw.
I agree.

But also try taking a step back: why are they gambling? Sure, greed is ever-present in human history—that's a given. But also listen to the doubt in the present establishment. I know what it's like to be poor and what the banks do to you in that state. It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that there's so much being thrown at it. The chances of and potential returns are almost guaranteed better than a savings account. That's a problem, isn't it?
Of course they can collect addresses for this if they want. It's not a general-purpose database, either.

One problem we're having in this pandemic is the squeamish and "can't do" attitude on about everything.
Tesla is the preeminent electric vehicle and is pushing the entire industry forward as every manufacturer races towards producing their own luxury electric vehicle to compete with Tesla. It's a very similar dynamic to how the iPhone revolutionized mobile phones.

With that stated, I don't attribute this success to Elon Musk beyond his ability to lie his way into sustaining the company's valuation so that the engineers could do the hard work.
> Try straying a bit outside the most commonly used documentation pages, most commonly used customer journeys or even use macOS for extended bit of time and you'll see how your claim simply doesn't hold up

I've experienced this recently, as a competent (DSLR) photographer trying to find out what I could do with the camera on my new iPhone Pro. I picked up more by browsing TikTok than from Apple's own material. One example was how to create long-exposure photographs from a 'live' photo. The function was actually discoverable through the iOS interface but I wouldn't have thought to try it in the way it was being used in TikTok tutorial.

(whether the long exposure effect is comparable with the equivalent from a dedicated camera is a different question)
vhemt.org = The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement

I imagine that people attracted to this movement to either stay true to the "voluntary" aspect and pay with genetic demise for their mental susceptibility, or realize that their movement will be never manage to voluntarily attract the number of people necessary for movement's "success" and at some point look for more effective ways of achieving the said human extinction. Anyway, this is next level kind of awkward stuff.
Step Inside Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis's Sustainable L.A. Farmhouse
Hyntrospect
The argument to not buy lottery tickets, is if you have no need of the return so it's not worth giving up the 5% of your portfolio that could be reliably generating returns for you.

Software engineers for example are easily capable of reliably earning six figures in the US, outside of the Bay Area. With stock compensation their earnings potential is that much higher. It's a solid multi-millionaire track if you grind away at that career path and keep your expenses in line.

So why bother with the lottery in that case? Because a few million dollars isn't enough?

If you're earning $40,000 per year with an inability to generate much in the way of savings (compared to the software engineer), your job prospects are highly capped, you do manual labor in a factory in a 2nd tier city, your education level is weak, and your shot at a multi-millionaire outcome is essentially zero, maybe giving up 5% of your savings makes sense for a shot at an epic outcome to escape that lower middle class trap.
Because they have enough volunteers not to need to pay people.

Really we simply doing pay based on risks. It’s far more dangerous to be a long distance trucker than a police officer, but truckers don’t get respect, pensions, or high pay.
Bitcoin, and other alt-currencies, are mostly owned by a very small number of people: https://blog.dshr.org/2018/10/gini-coefficients-of-cryptocur...

On paper, they are very, very rich.

In reality, they can very quickly and easily crash bitcoin by flooding the market.

No thanks.
Yes, but it is going to phased out when everybody who wants to has had the shot, not when the most vulnerable has had it, over we get over 60%.
A lot of people find Matrix completely unpalatable. Why would they support it in this way?

IRC works and has worked for decades. Its minimal, text-only, no bs, no distractions nature is its greatest asset. Client support, programmability, and ease of integration too.

The folks that like Matrix are already using it. The folks that have stuck with IRC for decades will not abandon it for a protocol they deem to be inferior.
> Early in BTC the talk was about the tech and possibilities

People who care about that have already moved on. Bitcoin has failed in that aspect, only speculators still care about it. The fact it's still the number one coin despite the existence of coins with better fundamentals like Monero and Ethereum is proof of how irrational this market is.
People have been using the tulip comparison for over ten years and yet bitcoin is still worth over 30k euro today, a price never reached until last January. When will you eventually get tired of saying the same repetitive trope?
A stock market crash is usually defined as a drop > 10 %.

We've just seen a 20% (or worse) drop in cryptos in a single 24 hour period.

So to me, calling this a "crash" makes perfect sense.

Will it come back? Yes, but it's still a crash.
Anyone here who has had doubts about installing a “Home Assistant” in their home, or procuring a modern “Smart” TV, or anyone who recognizes themselves in this meme: (https://imgur.com/6wbgy2L) are essentially having the same kinds of thoughts as the Amish have about technology: Who is this technology serving? Is it really to the ultimate benefit of me, or my society?
Did anyone else notice that the 'store of value' thesis is almost a verbatim rehash of Jim Rickards gold theories around the time of his book 'Currency Wars' (2011)?
A failure of imagination to do something useful with crystalized math is more a commentary on the failure of imagination vs. the utility of math.

If you compare any esoteric financial instrument against the melted rock utility test that you mention, the laity will err on the side of melted rocks.
So you quit your job to work on this game full time and after 5 months, you're deciding to go back to work full time.

Did you quit your job with the hopes this game would sustain you? If so, did you do any market research to validate that hypothesis.
I think in principle reducing the barriers to trading on stock markets is a good thing, but gamifying it is not. How much Robinhood are guilty of the latter, I don't know.
I agree, though this time there's big money behind taking local control away.
This doesn't hold up to the smallest amount of rational thought. Is everyone from a poor country less intelligent? How about a poorer city, they are stupider? This sounds like an argument made by a lucky person who wants to attribute that luck to some personal superiority.
Bitcoin up ~300% from this day last year
How has your fiat performed in comparison? Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies are still in their infancies, and are known to be very volatile. Arguments that bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are purely speculative are ignorant. It is not clear what the exact value of cryptocurrencies are today, but it is a rich area of opportunity with this new technology. If you are selling your crypto holdings for a significant loss today you are going to be upset in a few years from now. For a little perspective take a trip back to the year 1995: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gipL_CEw-fk