skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bitcoin should perish, and quickly, for the reasons outlined. But "other cryptocurrencies" is a generalization that is too broad. Some alternatives are faster, feeless and 1000x more energy efficient. Sure, you may argue that countries may not want some uncontrollable asset to run rampant, but guess what: it's the whole point of cryptocurrencies -- a form of means of exchange that nobody can control. May not sound relevant in countries like US / EU, but look at how other monetary policies around the world are doing, run by incompetent and/or corrupt governments (venezuela, argentina, several african countries).

Maybe "crypto" is not the answer, but a form of global money that no individual country can touch, and is more easily transferrable than physical assets like gold, will emerge.
"Inflation is legalized counterfeiting and counterfeiting is criminalized inflation. "-Robert Breedlove
Because they run their operations from there, and don't mess around where they live. Part of their profits pays for protection. Extracting value, and crippling western companies aligns with the strategic goals of these countries. And ransomware is literally a 10B USD business.
See my simulation code.
two tiny gold spheres, each about the size of a sesame seed and weighing as much as four grains of rice

This was the most infuriating part of the article. How hard is it to use SI units in a popular science magazine?
Also, they’re threatening the Netherlands position as Europe’s own fiscal paradise in disguise.
You can’t make a Dutch sandwich with a double Irish with Bitcoin.
I don't think that's the point. They could just increase price on higher usage.
So everyone pays the same, but those who use more pay more²
The Half-Life 2 leak happened way before launch (13 months) and there were a lot of changes when it actually released. 2042 is much closer (4 months) if the release date keeps.
Surprisingly my LSD experience led me to acceptance of OSI Model ;)

Before that I thought that it was purely academical masturbation without any real connection to reality.
I remember when the idea of time-staggered mixed-use development was novel —- offices over movie theaters to double-dip on the parking space demand.

EV charging creates an opportunity for some kind of 20-minute popular service.

Joe: Man, I could really go for a Starbucks, you know?

Frito: Yeah, well, I really don't think we have time...
> Price the electricity accordingly, and make PoW impossible.

The problem is that other productive things are priced out before "mining".

The environmental cost will be born either way, but mining is by definition not productive. It has been profitable to some people, but it is destructive to civilisation altogether.
> If they use illegal monitoring devices, hacking for info etc, they may fall afoul of federal espionage, wiretapping or CFFA, but it would still not be insider trading.

that would still be trading on material non public information which is prohibited.
But they DO have the chance. They can boot some VM with Ubuntu or get a raspberry pi or a nodemcu and tinker away. They don't have to be able to tinker on EVERY device.

When my kids reach the age that they need a phone, probably sooner than I want to admit right now, I'd rather have them use some restricted device with some level of security checks in place for apps, so an iPhone, than something that is totally open which would make them vulnerable to being phished or persuaded to install viruses, etc. "Best way to play fortnite 10, download here".
"Central Planning Bureau (CPB)" - this is fine...
If you can't exchange your crypto currency against fiat it will become worthless.
Speaking of which, guess what showed up in Wales recently? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-57431322

(This kind of thing is why the UK has national-level contract tracing capabilities. Occasionally something shows up that's not particularly easy to spread, but bad enough that it needs stopping sooner rather than later. I think we've had a few SARS and MERS cases too.)
I'm sorry but you're not making any sense defending your straw man. You're flip flopping your arguments so I can just recursively revert you to my initial answer.
> Any other ideas? :)

Yeah, make it illegal.
> They're "reading your emails" for functionality like spam filtering anyway.

Except for iCloud addresses, I'm pretty sure that that's not true for Apple Mail.
Tulip mania was wildly exaggerated by Calvinists who wanted to create a precautionary tale against consumerism.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...
Now you have two problems, because for high availability you need a failover or better yet, shadow secondary service.

Hot patching wins, but needs good design to work in the first place.
I think they mean it's more efficient to tax/price energy as heavily as needed to reduce emissions across the board. Playing with virtual coins then becomes much, much less appealing to the average user, but we won't need to accumulate edge cases to ban.
Cryptocurrency is absolutely an enabler of ransomware. Is there any ransomware that extorts money in a form other than cryptocurrency?

And yes, who would have thought that running useless hash functions on your computer could have enormous global externalities?

Compute what you like on your own computer, but sending the results is intentionally participating in a worldwide crimewave and environmental disaster.
Errrrr.... did they get the news that crypto already crashed?
Cut off its access to the global banking and finance system. That will curb its usage real quick.
I'm not saying you're wrong but of course it's not that easy. Using your argument we could ban all cars because there are bicycles and they are vastly more efficient.

Or we ban heating in houses because you can just wear warmer clothes instead.
By printing money the government steals value from existing holders of currency.

It’s effectively an undemocratic (amount is not generally voted on) tax on people’s earnings and cash savings.
Good luck getting past the gate keepers for most companies then.
Reprogramming “old” Sennheiser SKM 3072-U – Part 2 – I2C
The economy of every capitalist country is based on the exploitation of the working class.
15-page Roku investment thesis
Your comment assumes heating an entire house to 60-70 in winter was normal.
> I understand the plea deal, but why. I am assuming they had evidence she gave him the data. Why let her off?

"Giving someone the data" is probably a different violation to "trading with illegally obtained data".

She probably got a different penalty (breaking NDA or similar) then he did.
Oh man, I loved that guy. Now I might have to re-watch Rome... again. THIRTEENTH!
No, please don't tax something because it is wasteful or not, but tax something based on how much resources it uses. In fact, tax the resource usage not the activity.

Even an extremely efficient car uses a ton of energy to move around. New cars often have engines in the multiple hundred kW range, which is insane compared to any other appliance you own.

If fossil fuels were taxed properly, that would discourage using/wasting fossil fuels. But please don't tax based on what you feel is acceptable usage was wasteful usage, cause the atmosphere does not care if the CO2 came from kerosene on a plane bringing tourists to vacation, or if it was used to power the ambulance that brings you to the hospital.

But when we tax all fossil fuel uses equally and heavily, I'm sure the ambulances will still drive around cause they save lives, but weekend trips to the other side of the Atlantic will be a thing of the past.
Thank you! This makes a lot of sense!

If I can run any arbitrary lisp program in a cell (assuming the env is global), I was wondering if this was just a 2d text editor for a lisp. But that's awfully reductionist.

But you're right I'm assuming I'll discover interesting things if I keep tinkering with it!
Interesting topic but terrible written article.

Article is impossible to understand without knowing some TV series and cartoons(!), and some pop culture trivia from US :/

It could be done right with some kind of explanation of trivia...
Did you visit public library recently? It is closed or full of homeless people. Scihub and laser printer is much better option!

For $50/hour you can find experts in most fields. You could even hire underpaid postdocs who teach at unis.
Not only deltas, any river meandering over any plain will change its course pretty "quickly" (which creates problems if such a river is defined as the border between two countries BTW)
So you deliberately made things hard for yourself?

I don't get that. I mean, I think it's clever, but also, totally stupid.
We've head many cryptocurrency crashes already so chances are pretty good that he is right ;-)
I'm not commenting on the original quote because I'm not sure I agree with it, but worrying about offending people is destroying the fabric of our society.

By not talking openly and freely, we're keeping our thoughts and feelings inside, which brings emotions to boil. There's no release valve. We can't vent, and because we have less honest discourse with others whose opinions differ, we become internally polarized against different opinions.

By preemptively taking offense on the behalf of others, we're imagining potential victims and dulling our discourse. Over time it erodes critical thinking skills, because everything is encoded in layers of indirection. The meaning is dropped in favor of a soft tone. We begin speaking in hardcoded memes.

Taking offense to words flies in the face of our free speech liberties, individualism, and freedom. We're putting up barriers that don't exist. If we keep it up, we'll soon find ourselves living under the oppression of self-imposed thoughtcrime.

There's something to be said about having a thick skin and being open to those you disagree with.

(I'm liberal, btw.)
I've been in security for ages, ransomware was there but has evolved since then.

Two other reasons can explain the increase in ransomware, that merely correlate with the rise of cryptocurrencies:

1) The innovation of encrypting files hadn't occurred to ransomware operators yet.

2) The value of computer systems, and data, itself increased. Massively increasing the likelihood of victims paying the ransom.

Before crypto currencies 'FBI scareware', which held your computer ransom by disabling your standard UI, simply asked you fork over the cash via Western Union.

This increases the friction for consumers, but if the colonial pipeline was ransomed in the same way, and the ransom only payable over WU, then they would have done that instead.
I remember reading some studies on this, I think it was in the world of game development. 60 hrs/week delivers more than 40 hrs/week for the first few weeks, but then it reduces and after about 6 weeks, you're delivering less working 60 hrs/week than you were at 40.

Of course, there are lots of related issues, like are your employees getting enough sleep? Very varied work might tax employees differently. Is 8hr days, 5 on, 2 off necessarily the optimal pattern? Can people work more efficiently for longer if they're working on something they truly believe in?
A million? Can you back this up somehow? Did you take in account the infrastructure and offices of our existing "technology"?
Deveraux's work is always a treat. Incidentally, so is hearing Latin spoken with an Italian accent - so that it actually sounds spoken, rather than rehearsed.
Unfortunately if I learnt it myself I'd be required to join the Civil Service.

> as well as some very salty Roman writing which I will not bowdlerize in the slightest a little later in the series

Heh, heh, heh. You're going to want to follow this one.
That's right, edited the headline.
Although, without the source code, you have to 100% trust Apple that the option actually disables everything.
I have a bridge to sell you. I mean, a big chunk of the market transactions are favors and unwritten agreements. Someone helps to close an important deal and gets some bitcoins later on an off the books wallet.
> I regret titling the post with the words "good" and "bad".

The title struck me as exactly what I would expect from you (based on various articles/comments and your podcast), and fwiw, I personally really appreciate it.

You're one of the people in the community that communicates in a way that often strikes me as 'overly' opinionated, but the combination of that and your actual experience tends to lead to fruitful discussion (see this thread). Plus, I often find myself wanting to 'prove you wrong' and then I end up doing a bunch of equally fruitful research.

So keep doing your thing, is what I'm saying, I suppose. It's appreciated :).
> Equivalent to the carbon footprint of 1,659,173 VISA transactions or 124,768 hours of watching Youtube.

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
I have some more questions (serious), can I have the number of one of these people?

Point being, it's not that straightforward unless there's someone you already know that is willing to share their contact information and they actually have the time to talk to you.

I totally see the point about going for second-best first until you know you have a question worth their time and not something that's obvious. (Although the answer in this case did seem obvious to me as a software person, or at least I'd have guessed they can see the amount of anti-covid-stuff dropping at different rates.)
I agree with him, but more on philosophical grounds. The idea of crypto is to make taxation impossible and government irrelevant. If democracy is to be preserved, this obviously cannot happen. Therefore government has to fight back.
I've started a new job remotely this year with quite a few junior engineers in the team, and I'm definitely finding it's much harder to mentor and make sure that they're taking the right paths while solving a problem than it was in the office. Flexibility is undoubtedly a good thing, however like you I think there is an element of paying your dues that is perhaps missing in the current environment.
not OP. But the less-buzzwordy argument is this:
the existence of money itself isn't the problem. The problem is that the modern monetary system is built on inflation and supermassive debt, and this combination has a bunch of highly negative outcomes:
-it systematically expropriates poor people. Inflation will make sure your money is worth gradually less, so the only option to save it is though real estate and stocks, which poor people have little access to.
-this goes along with the need for companies, and the economy at large, to keep growing year over year. Our modern infinite-growth mandate, the thing that is actually destroying the planet, is based on the system of money we now have, as saving loses you money: you have to make more, consume more, make more, consume more, or everyone loses the money they have. That is to stay, money is no longer a store of value, which is one of its major functions.
- speaking of destroying the planet, after the end of the gold standard, the current dollar/euro system is backed, in complictaed ways, by their uses in international trade, especially oil. After the fall of their productive capacites (all outsourced), the US now basically exports dollars to finance their internal consumption and worldwide hegemony. Because all nations need USD to trade, esp oil, the US can print and print and sink that into other countries that buy it while keeping inflation mus lower (still there) than it otherwise would be. This is a circle, as it both finances global hegemony, but also needs it: it is that hegemony that enforces the use of USD as a world transactional currency, and US "regime change" operations generally hit countries that try to escape this system.
-a house of cards: central banks don't print most of the money; private banks do. "fractional reserve banking" means that banks only need a fraction of the money that they lend out on reserve, which means that when it has a million, it can make many millions in loans to customers, effectively creating the rest of the money every time it makes the loan. This is margin/leveraged trading on a global and massive scale, and it is what makes banks crash every time a hiccup occurs in that system. It's a time bomb.

These are all massive systemic problems, and the -way- central banking is now organized is the problem. Could states organize this without these problems? sure; "gah states are unfreedom" is not the problem here, the capture of states by global corporate capitalism is. Will states change? no, of course not, not without a massive systemic crash or revolution. Do we need bitcoin to save this? strictly no, but bitcoiners see bitcoin as a sneaky trojan horse to destabilize this system, and -one- hope to overcome this massively cancerous state of affairs, for a host of reasons beyond mere dreaming that would double this already long comment in size. All I'm saying s: like everything, this is much, much more complicated than "bitcoin volatile" or "bitcoin energy bad".
Yes this is the current mainstream media propaganda against cryptos, thanks for that.
Fun fact: most of the money is issued by ordinary banks, not by the bodies presumably in control of the token/currency. (Any such control is rather remote and indirect.)
Top AI Chatbot for Customer Service
(This should be with a reason e.g. if you're working on a part that you don't know too well, trying to learn how it works)
The Central Planning Bureau takes issue with decentralization? I am shocked!
No, you're just turning what I said into a strawman. A bike is far more limited in what it can achieve than a car. And home heating heats a lot more than just the people inside.

Note that I didn't claim it's easy to come up with a good way to do this. You might have to settle for some partial progress. But that doesn't mean I'm putting up a strawman either.
Netherlands is one of the largest channels between the EU and offshore tax havens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich
I'm only talking about Pieter Hasekamp's arguments, which don't seem to be good ones.

If he wants to argue that Bitcoin is a pyramid game, that's a different argument, but I can't see many people taking him seriously.

Pieter's arguments are along the lines of a "Think of the Children"[1] style argument, or an appeal to consequences[2].

"We must ban cryptocurrency because if we don't, people might lose their money!"

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_consequences
I'm really interested to know more about the actual effect this will have on EA. Because other than the problems with potential cheats and bots, there are not much anyone can do. No one will use closed source engine for developing a game without permission. Maybe the only other problem for EA is if there are many exploits that can lead to a serious security implications.
Depends how you obtained that wealth.

The people love personal success stories, but dislike people who show off too much or exploited certain situations.

There is this guy that made quite some money on covid masks. A lot of people were not too happy he made a profit on that.
> Why should others decide if I can run useless hashing functions on my computer? Price the electricity accordingly, and make PoW impossible.

Cultural model. I don't feel like increasing the electricity price for everyone is a better solution.

> Cryptocurrency is no the enabler of ransomware. Ransomware was prevalent before cryptocurrencies. The real enablers of ransomware are the countries that shelter the R10 groups, raking in millions.

Cryptocurrency are a good catalyst. The first does not exclude the last. The "real enabler" is that fast growing systems are juicy and fragile.

> There's a reason some ransomware doesn't run when your system has a Russian language keyboard, and it's not because they know Russians never pay ransom...

Many nations have active "digital warfare" programs, which may or may not take the form of ransomware. I would not be surprised if some would masquerade themselves as Russians masquerading as Israelis masquerading as Frenchs to poke on China, if all it takes is to carefully check and act on keyboard mapping. Don't you dare touching the colemak users.
Shed tears because they're not taking security seriously.
Wow! That's cool! Not everyone has a fat volcano to mine with though :)
One energy-efficient approach is the one used by the Pi network:
- https://minepi.com/

The whitepaper is pretty detailed about how they avoid the proof of work and the energy waste associated:
- https://minepi.com/white-paper

If cryptos really make it in their ideological goal of a truly free capitalistic society, something like Pi which can be mined by everyone will have to win out over Bitcoin which can be "produced" only by already rich.
Cool project! Hope they get a lot of contributors - they are definitely going to need them, already in the default view I can see a lot of room for improvement: in most of Romania they still have the Roman/Greek names in 1850, Serbia is shown as "Servia" (as it was apparently called by the Romans?!) etc.
I feel neither sorrow nor laugh. Just joy about the fact the source code is going to be available.
Yes Calvinism is still a strong influence in the Netherlands today. I really don't like this aspect of the country, I view it as a source of negativity. Things that are fun, new or nice automatically have a sidetone of 'sin', there is this mentality that there can be no enjoyment without enduring hardship and there is a strong sense of servitude and obedience. The other main religion in the Netherlands is Catholicism which is much more forgiving in this sense (you can make mistakes but can be forgiven by repenting) so it's not as strict. They have pretty wild parties around Carnival and then they're forgiven and disgressions forgotten. Letting off some steam. Calvinism doesn't believe in that, there's a saying "Just be normal, that's crazy enough".

Personally I'm from the non-religous areas and I'm very libertarian in societal views (and socialist in economic views - yes those go together :) ) so I'm pretty much diametrically opposed. There is still a strong sense of multiple groups of communities living together in one country, though it used to be a lot stronger. We used to all have our own schools, broadcasting companies, even banks. It was called 'Verzuiling' (meaning making pillars or more contemporary: silos)

But I don't really understand where the strictness comes from either, from their point of view. Calvinism believes in predestination, that our fates (going to heaven or hell) is predetermined. So I don't understand why they lead such rigid lives. Personally if I knew my fate was sealed I would just go all out on making fun since it wouldn't matter what I did anyway :)
That actually happened in Watch Dogs 2. It was a funny tongue-in-cheek mission.
Question: can herd immunity be achieved without vaccinating children?
In the US at least urban gas stations have been closing in droves. Their economics are marginal and the land is more valuable for other purposes. The only limiting factor is the extreme cost of remediating the pollution.

I can easily see a situation where gas stations on interstates start closing because of dwindling demand, and ICE car drivers start experiencing their own form of range anxiety, as in "will I be able to find a gas station before I run out?". It's already the case around Yosemite, for instance. Most likely those stations will add superchargers or the non-Tesla equivalent, and not go out of business altogether, but who knows?
Bit surprising that they didn't override this as there was no fire and take the hit from the over temp.

Also they didn't have breathing gear (and trained staff) so you could go in and restart without waiting and also in case of an accident being able to try and rescue people.

Back when worked in RnD for the lab where we could have had a Freon leak we had breathing gear just outside and some people trained to use it