skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The standard of living in Texas is higher than the national average, the rate of poverty is lower, the cost of housing is lower, the tax burden on lower incomes is lower, the infrastructure quality is higher than most states, the cost of that infrastructure is lower. I can find you a plethora of ways in which Texas is better functioning as a state than comparable size economies as well as national average, and I can find you ways in which it isn't also that probably need attention, but you want to see the real result of the differences in the way the state is run, look at interstate migration patterns.
> What I don't understand about the crypto remittances argument is how the people sending and receiving them are supposed to convert them into spendable currency.

The final goal is not to be able to convert crypto to fiat, the goal is to keep everything in crypto. Do you think all this infrastructure is being build just to convert it back to fiat, what cypherpunks want is to destroy fiat.
I get why they are shutting it down. I and many like me only use one button on our remote, the power button. Everything else is on my truly universal remote, my smartphone. If my tv was able to turn on and off from my phone, then I'd never touch a remote again.
The Establishment Strikes Back – For Now
I don't understand how tech people can't be excited about decentralized programmable money. Bitcoin, maybe, it's so limited, but the sky's the limit on programmable money on Ethereum and chains like it.
These questions have no effect on crypto's adoption, perhaps these questions are an exercise to the reader.
I read a Blockchain book from O'Reilly in 2015, when it came out and it left me with the distinct impression that this "technology" is vaporous. It could do anything, yet, almost no examples to try out, let alone real-world successes.

Over time I witnessed many "new" things, and the ones which stick typically have a specific aura to them, like a 10x simplification, or speedup or reduction in "noise". These things are really rare; most things are incremental and that's good, too.

Blockchain did not seemed to have any of that.

PS. Merkle trees are super interesting and I use them daily (in git) - so all the tech ideas are certainly worth considering, it's just that they are not fit for the advertised purpose plus it has gotten an enormous drag on resources, for nothing.

PPS. I typically have an "tech instinct" to see new things, but I currently cannot really see anything that looks like a major tech shifts from the past. ML is incremental and despite its grande successes is mostly applied by the surveillance industry, which makes it much less attractive. Cloud seems much more profound and the whole apification of the world transformation - although I do not like the centralization, even if it is more economical. In general, the real revolutionary tool or technology does not need to sell itself, it is picked up by the weird and intelligent first, then trickles down to the masses (also: tech can be great w/o mainstream adoption, too - it just not a revolution then).

PPPS: Wild speculation: With 5G, everyone with a phone could host their business directly on their device, instead on other peoples servers. When phones hit a TB in storage, you can run your socnet with your friends - and you probably will, because mainstream money will have moved to something much more immersive, addictive, profitable like glasses, vr, ar.
I see what you mean now -- they certainly don't make that obvious.
Yeah, the funny thing for me is that I run my business on Haskell exactly for the sake of pragmatism.

The last time I had a job was on a Clojure team, and that team has since abandoned Clojure and some of my former colleagues have come to me and essentially said that they got tired of fighting with runtime errors.
More people need to appreciate this
The most famous of these is the Chernobyl reactor design, the RBMK. It could be run on natural uranium rather than enriched uranium and would self enrich the uranium via neutron bombardment inside the reactor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK

Of course there are some flaws in a reactor that breeds it's own enriched uranium. There's states that the neutron flux is too low so the enriched elements aren't burnt off quickly as intended. This leads to a state where the whole reactor is a highly enriched weapons grade bomb.
> The average consumer is an idiot

Excuse me?
> The value of say, Bitcoin, isn't even connected to its value as a method of money laundering or extortion through ransomware.

No. Money launderers and extorters drive demand for cryptocurrencies. This affects its price.

See: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
How does consensus work in git?
Depends on which army, decade, and type of object you're talking about.

E.g. British wire cutters, German parkas, French boots, etc.
Bitcoin is terrible technology and stupidly wasteful, but there are new blockchain networks coming along that are about a million times more efficient, so use those instead.
I apologize as I wasn't clear enough: I was not focused on the appliances themselves but, rather, the water valves, and hoses, used to supply the water. The small but really important stuff.

Crummy valves break. Most builders use the cheapest crap they can get. They save a couple thousand dollars building a house but replacing the $2 crap can sometimes cost a fortune. One of the worst offenses I have had to deal with is the use of C-PVC pipe which is brittle and will eventually crack or burst.

Ideally, the site I thought about would be to educate folks about the kinds of things, components, they should specify when building or remodeling.
Cantus for Benjamin Britton is based on a simpler linear sequence. And beautiful
Are there numbers on what the primary uses of cryptocurrency are? I would guess remittances, purchasing illegal things, purchasing legal things, and ransomware - but I'm not sure in what order.
As I wrote below machines are n-times more expensive, and alloys themselves are far from being common, or cheap too.
One of the most tiring retorts is that if someone is negative about cryptocurrency then that means they don't understand cryptocurrency. I assure you many of us do understand it and still think it's an absolute scam and pure wealth distribution from the naive, to the slightly less naive, to the scammers.
It's actually a whataboutism but otherwise I agree.
I don't agree with this. It's fine to have an opinion, but I don't think it should be represented as a consensus when it's not.

(edited to add) There is an important difference between having downsides and being a scam. Downsides of the U.S. dollar or "petrodollar" system include global warming, international wars, and regulatory capture. The U.S. financial system has all the kinds of fraud, blackmail, and crime mentioned here and more. Doesn't mean the dollar is a scam.
One thing that I find so confusing in the crypto maximalist sphere is the obsession with decentralization of everything but also with mainstream adoption.

Coinbase is centralization, bank adoption is centralization, etc...

Also if “fear of regulation” causes massive sell-offs, doesn’t it totally fail at being the “anti-government” centralized currency?

I’m also just not convinced total decentralization is good? I mean sure markets are a decentralized way of pricing things and allow distributed decision making blah blah blah, but they have limits. I feel like far too many people are drawn in by the answer to the wrong question “what does crypto solve?” Instead of the more interesting one “what problems does it create”
Credit card chargeback...
this.

The tone deaf tech elite have done it again and thought that the US is the entire world.

Please leave your americentrism at the door.

edit: flagged for the truth now? pathetic.
Your comment is unclear.

> What is surprising is how large the number of techies who don’t get this.

What do you mean by "this"? Do you mean all of the points made by the author in the tweets?

Or do you mean "the following" instead of "this", referring to what you think is most innovative about Bitcoin?
Some analysts joke that the first thing you’re shown when you arrive in hell in a chart of the S&P divided by the Fed balance sheet
True, but people often just use oil as shorthand for oil futures.
Tell that to people in Nigeria, Venezuela and Argentina that have no control over their money.

In Venezuela there is absolutely absurd inflation number there: like over 1,000%.

Argentina it’s over 30% each year for several years.

Bitcoin is a tool against oppressive governments
Did you watch the video? It's not just about cheap materials. It's literal design decisions made for the express reason so that the product will fail.

The iphone not having a replaceable battery is a design decision, it doesn't make the phone cheaper.

You are taking two independent phenomenons and trying to group them together as if they are the same phenomenon. Yes making a product cheaper has the side effect of reducing its' lifetime but the video and what I'm talking about is DIRECT engineering decisions for the purpose of shortening lifetimes NOT making things cheaper.

You obviously didn't watch the video.
I had an XPS M1330 about 10 years ago, and if I could figure out the apparent thermal issue I might still use it sometimes. At the time I found it incredibly portable (compared to my iBook and ThinkPad) without being slow, and the design was striking yet professional. Dell still isn't my favorite brand, but they've come a long way from the crappy Dimensions I had in the early 2000s.
You would want to start with cheapest thing cause usually you don't know how good things you actually need.

Using cheep tools gives you a freedom to experiment and know the limitations of the domain area and then invest in things that you exactly need without the risk of overpaying or underpaying, all for a minimum investment.
> Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

Couldn't agree more
Bitcoin is also a protocol and there are several implementations. The same applies to the lightening protocol which has about 7 different client implementations and growing.
Came to the same realization recently when shopping for kitchen appliances. I couldn't find any blender that wasn't breaking or acting dodgy after a few months. These of course don't come up when you search for them as a consumer but there are for sure industrial blenders used at bars and such. I realized that going forward if I don't want ot have to buy a new one every year or so pretty much for anything I'd have to research and go this route. The beaker glasses is a good example because you sometimes have to get creative to find the industrial version of something.
Would you be alarmed if your untouched savings account debased by 50% or so in purchasing power since then?
But how, you can't use Bitcoin for day to day transactions due to slow settling times and high transaction costs. You could use some of the alt-coins, but how do you coordinate which to use and why would you trust it?
Why would I trust a source whose own outdated site looks terrible on mobile and is not even on a secure connection? "A bookmarking site for introverts" -- what amazing innovation! It sounds more like Pinboard is looking for engagement by shitposting on Twitter.
Banking penetration in India is at 80+% mainly due to DBT pushing straight to bank accounts.

India’s smartphone penetration is at 41%.

All exchanges in India require a Savings Bank account for Fiat transfers. How are these unbanked people meant to use crypto really?
It's kind of cute you think youtube and other google services aren't geolocating you (approximately) by the IP of the ISP you're on at any given time, and your pattern of life analysis using the internet at work vs home vs friends' wifi. And when your traffic shows up as coming from IP blocks belonging to your LTE mobile phone carrier vs a terrestrial ISP.

If they have a data set from a hundred other people whose behavior you can't control, using android phones in a default configuration, in a residential /24 DHCP IP block belonging to some last-mile ISP, where those people do turn on location and GPS services, and you regularly show up with traffic from the same block, you're being correlated with your neighbours.

Additionally lots of other people with fully-default android or ios location/advertising permissions are using other social media apps from the same netblocks that your traffic regularly appears from in a predictable daily wake/sleep pattern (facebook, instagram, twitter, reddit, tiktok, etc).
Most Bitcoin enthusiast that yell at me "HAVE YOU READ THE WHITE-PAPER??!" and "DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE TECHNOLOGY??!" have never actually downloaded the source code and ran the damn thing! At least back in 2011 I was mining on my computer to see what this thing is!

Everyone is using some sort of hosted wallet that defeats the entire propose of it!
Software engineering is taught as a part of the field that's called computer science, but the original question was about whether the field called computer science is actually a science.

I guess the difference in that regard would be that (software) engineering doesn't necessarily follow the formal scientific method of formulating a hypothesis and then testing it experimentally. That would, in some sense, make it distinct from science. The same would practically apply to many areas in computer science that are studied experimentally, not just software engineering.

To elaborate on that a little, (software) engineering does build on experience and empiricism, as well as analytical thinking, but in practice it may be more in the form of "lessons learned" than in the form of hypothesis testing.

That doesn't make it any less valuable, or even any less valid as an academic area of research. It just, in some sense, makes it possibly distinct from the sciences.

Of course there are also problems in CS that can actually be studied with the scientific method, but I think amelius might have meant that publications such as Dijkstra's and Knuth's papers on goto would be more in the "lessons learned" category than in the "results from the scientific method" category. They would thus not really make computer science a science even though they're not really in the "CS as a part of math" category either.
Antivirus has always seemed like malware itself. It gives itself special management rights, is unclear about what it does, and is incredibly hard to remove. This seems like a natural progression in the age of data mining.
Could you expand on why you seem to think (if I’ve interpreted your words correctly), that a project is potentially doomed if the programmers aren’t from your country? That sounds awfully prejudicial to me.
Really? This one aligns pretty well with what I've learned.

It seems that the entire stack of people in software development is tasked with identifying problems and subdividing them in to smaller problems. This goes for coders structuring lines, architects structuring modules as well as managers structuring teams of architects and coders.

The quality of a software engineer shines through all these layers.
Multiple peer reviewers look at a pull request and when it passes muster, it gets merged to the longest chain. You can always make a fork and keep going with a new chain.

Same as bitcoin. You can always split off a new chain. You might not convince everyone that your new chain is the chain, but you’re welcome to try.
"see Apple ISA Extensions to ARMv8: version H14, chapter 23". If only it were available outside Apple...
Europe also has laws that require a mandatory "No questions asked" minimum 14 day return period after delivery date. Doesn't mandate free return shipping, but for a € 500 piece of electronics paying a € 4.95 shipping fee in the rare case that you return it isn't so bad.
They never transact with people in countries that have strict financial controls, so the problem does not exist for them. I pay people in Venezuela in cryptocurrency because nothing else is a viable option.
But of course hyperinflation will never ever come to the first world
It is against the GDPR, but this of course lacks teeth.
Just because you don't understand the sentence, doesn't mean you have to insult the guy. Other replies have explained it for you.
Out of curiosity, is there anything modern like the reverse of this project -- write LaTeX (e.g. with a `tufte` documentclass) and end up with a beautiful, similarly rendered webpage?
An Escalator Made of Cardboard
Tweets like those are why Pinboard is one of the few Twitter accounts I've blocked. On certain issues, the author loves to righteously sneer. It annoys the hell out of me because when he's not sneering, he can be a knowledgeable and clear thinker. He's like a glass of wine with a single fly in it.

This behavior isn't just annoying to others; it's harmful to his own goals. If Maciej had hedged his bets and accepted Bitcoin payments for Pinboard in 2013[1], it would most have been the most cost-effective action of his entire life. He would be worth millions more today. He could have used that money to further causes he cares about, such as climate change and social issues.

Instead, he's trying to ban cryptocurrency. We had this same debate with cryptography in the 1990s and DRM removal software in the 2000s. Back then, technically-inclined people agreed that you can't ban math. But now many are trying to do just that. What exactly would a cryptocurrency ban look like? Would calculating lots of SHA-256 hashes cause men with guns to come to your home and put you in a cage? It sounds more absurd than what happened to DVD Jon.[2]

1. https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/376953671655100416

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Lech_Johansen
What a strange, nasty blog post. I think it should remain on the front page as an example of how not to provide criticism.

The LLVM community is one of the friendliest and most inviting groups I've met in tech. As a newcomer, I've received generous guidance on getting patches accepted, and had great conversations with contributors at the Bay Area meetups. The tone of the article leaves me dumbfounded.

(Edit: The content mostly seems based on the author's similarly disrespectful posts to the llvm-dev mailing list between 2018 and 2020.)
They did, but they were an insular community as a result. NFTs allow for a common open standard to be interoperable between games. That helps create an economy where, for example, you can buy a digital artwork at a Christie's auction and display it in Decentraland and have it be verifiably authentic.

Second Life was awesome! This Metaverse trend is pushing that concept much, much further and it's giving ownership and utility to the makers.
And adds copyright notice under his suggestions :)
Absolutely.

And of course new sectors that are not established can seem like snake oil, simply because they are new industries.

The internet has steamrollered many industries and fundamentally changed the way they work.

Manufacturing, Music, Politics and now The final big boss, money.

It will take another ten years for this industry to mature. But in amongst the sham and drudgery we have the first non-violent system of currencies.
An intriguing idea. Very nice. Will study further.
A commercial dishwasher is like an entirely different appliance. It is designed to be fast. It achieves this by requiring rinsing, being hotter (and staying hot) and more aggressive, and by not having a dry cycle (you just open the door and let the steam out).

Time is important in cleaning, and home dishwashers take advantage of that by running for several hours at low power, it is not like you are going to need these plates immediately after you have finished eating.

About commercial espresso machines, another thing to consider is that these machines usually require plumbing. There are high end home espresso machines that are also built like tanks and will serve you better unless you are planning to pull hundreds of shots a day. Commercial machines have an advantage when it comes to temperature stability because they are so big and heavy but smaller machines are still able to do an impressive job.
I loved your first paragraph but I choked your second.

All modern fields of study use quantitative measurement so splits in practice now would have to do with different ideas of rigor rather than rigor-nonrigor.

The problem of AI/ML isn't the blatant cheating but the way that the goal is often getting n% higher than soto on X benchmark. Just chasing benchmarks makes any connection to broad dubious imo. It might or might-not give you something practically useful but definitely give you something career-wise useful.

But just as much, when the field is just a giant race where no cares about any broader understanding, cynicism seems like a natural result. The ideal of academia, for all it's failings, is to give people some amount of space to speculate and explore wider vistas.

It would be good if X number of people had the space to explore a variety of visions of "AI" other than the dominant one. But despite the vast number of people being sucked into the field, my guess is this is getting harder, not easier. And, of course, the mere appearance of "rigor", of quantitative measurement, is not helping things, again in my opinion as someone of no authority at all in field.
That’s the real point. For the author, me, or you to claim what most tech people think is ridiculous.
Ironically enough the Pinboard account is engaging in the same nonsense and rhetoric it accuses cryptocurrency supporters of, hoping no one will notice.
How's bitcoin stupidly wasteful?
These tweets are a pretty decent sample, though I suspect these factors (association with other phones/users and such) are more active in bid optimisation than list generation. Hands off stuff is gradually overtaking the "hand coded" elements. These, I imagine, can take advantage of wider set of heuristics.

List generation is dumber, and feels more hand coded. Basic demographics, facebook/instagram interests.
Pauli, what are you talking about? Bitcoin, Ethereum or Cryptokitties?

What group are you talking about when you accuse them of "Scientology-like groupthink"? What comparisons can you draw? I think it's important you back up and explain what you're saying.
tl;dr preview -

1. “People like us make our money in the seams of things”

2. “Know what people are asking you to be an expert in”

3. “Before you can make things better, you have to stop making them worse”

4. “To go left, turn right”

5. “Thinking is also work”
Oh the Ballmer peak definitely exists for POCs, school work and side projects. A couple beers in and then you lose the fear of doing something stupid and start cranking out code.

Not sure about producfion code though, the values are different
Tons of other risky assets have high "interest rates". Sell puts on high volatility stocks for example.
It’s not on tech people to evaluate business impact or societal impact or economic impact. Sure, tech people could do that but most of our time is spent on designing or implementing software.

Let other people (non-tech or hybrid) comment on the idea. They have time to think about this.

Tech people can only help by explaining in understandable ways how blockchain/cryptocurrencies work. 3Blue1Brown has a good video on it.

Let’s keep the culture of not deriding ideas. We can’t predict human behavior or the future of it. Maybe something beautiful comes out of it, or maybe it accelerates global warming. I trust other disciplines to comment on that.
Can you elaborate? I think I know what you mean, but when I clicked the link it already seemed to be a "more advanced bc" to me. What are you missing, big numbers (that's what came to my mind)?
Make easy money just by signing up
True, and people can use it today, that's for sure.