skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Forex trading is zero-sum, your expected gain on a trade is zero minus expenses. The average user of forex is moving money from point A to point B and simply trying to minimize their loss. The ones making money in the market are those the other players are paying for the service, and the odd speculator like George Soros who's big enough to exploit market inefficiencies like currency pegs.
Don't marry a woman, unless she is a virgin.
Nobody "invest" in USD. You invest in assets which you expect to appreciate. People investing in Bitcoin do so expecting to control a portion of a finite supply, which defeats its purpose of liquidity.
Tandy 3-voice can play midi without an add on card.
People who have US dollars, nearly always use it as a currency (a medium of exchange), not as investment.
And knives are weapons.
in the US I don't like the use of plywood indoors and vinyl outdoors of a house. Solid wood I have no problem with - although it matters a lot what it's treated/painted with.
In Europe I have a house made of (a lot of) cement and bricks. To me plywood was only for sheds, but personally I woulnd't use it even for that. Why expose me to the nasty VOC?
> Stocks have an external source of revenue, namely the profit that the company makes by selling its products and services to customers

Hahaha somebody let GameStop, Tesla, and Virgin Galactic know about this rule.
People are about to be coerced into an injection against their will and could suffer ill effects, with no legal recourse. If it turns out they were right, then they were screaming the truth the whole time and nobody listened. Are you okay with all that?
There you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme
Let's not jump to conclusions. We don't know where this specific filter was used, is it an automated blocker or just flagging for moderation, is it the only layer, or is it even the currently used one.
The crucial difference that excludes Bitcoin (and any other such blockchain currency) is that a Ponzi scheme deceives investors by pretending it is profitable and the profits are derived from legitimate investments. Bitcoin et al. does not do this; there is no deception, no fraud and, therefore, no Ponzi.
Most likely not, unless power is basically free where you are and the hardware they're using was surplus.
Except that it increases software complexity, possibly bugs as well as security vulnerabilities.

I definitely don’t won’t this kind of “features” in software I use.
cryptos are a currency even if the US don't want to admit it...
It's like this for day-day operations when leadership is absent and no CSI ever gets prioritized over new development. You can say the org is dysfunctional, but there's less leverage workers can use to change such situations. Especially when efficiency measures get rewarded with layoffs.
> Is there any other “technology” that’s so wasteful as-well as it’s completely useless?

Screen savers?
What’s Behind the War on Big Tech?
AFAICT yes, but you mine ether or some other coin and either get paid in Bitcoin by a pool like ‘Nicehash’ or exchange it yourself.

The others have become a proxy for Bitcoin.
So is Mike Hunt.

Poor Mike.
I wonder if it's seen as a necessary evil for perceived relevance. If you aren't running a presidential candidate, it feels like an admission that you're a local player without the resources to run a big, expensive campaign.

I wonder if there's anything to be learned from those weird "secondary" parties you see in some states. It will be like "Working Families Party" or whatever, with a Democratic or Republican candidate for President and few unique of down-ballot names.

I'm not sure exactly how those work. Might be just a way to use some legacy "default ballot access" In my state, a candidate supplied by any of the four largest parties would get on the ballot, even if only 15 people actually voted for the Green or Libertarian.
No, it’s not possible. All mining, for probably the past 4 or 5 years, is done on ASICs, typically in places selected for favorable energy or climate reasons.
Leaked might be a better word. It was information that was supposed to be secret and became public.
Not all of them, some are even advertised as Ponzi schemes.
You can say the exact same thing about investing foreign currencies, like the Euro.
More and more, I'm hearing only the ETH value rather than dollar denomination. Personally, when I bid (or receive bids) on any of my NFTs, I'm only considering the ETH price.

It's a new shift, but I think quite profound.

Edit: If you're referring to mainstream media, the dollar value is all that most would be able to put into context. For those deep in the space, we're thinking about dollar values less and less. My primary benchmark on overall portfolio value is the value denominated in ETH, not USD.
Tell HN: The Gitlab compensation calculator is no longer public
It used to be here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation/compensation-calculator/calculator/

But now it says: "The compensation calculator is available to all our team members through this url."

This is the last version available on the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20201019140406/https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation/compensation-calculator/calculator/
Being an App Store developer is like intentionally walking into an abusive relationship and hoping that the pay-off will be worth the trouble.

I'm sure you're aware but, as an app developer, the review process seems random at many times.

Depending upon the phase of the moon certain features or metadata may be accepted or rejected in apps. Even when the exact same features have been accepted in prior app versions and app reviews (without changes to the actual guidelines).

In such cases, perhaps Apple's interpretation of the guidelines have changed. If so, there's no way for app developers to know this until they get hit with a rejection. Rejections rarely include explanation of the interpretation so it's up to the developer to try and interpret what the real issue is.

This is on top of the fact that, in many cases, Apple deliberately uses the guidelines and shifting interpretations to delay or destroy competitors. This occurs even if competitors are acting within the guidelines and all prior known interpretations of those guidelines.
This looks great, will gladly try it out!

Would you mind telling your story behind building Shisho? That could really interesting.
Fishing boat sinks at San Francisco's Hyde Street Pier, leaks oil into bay
They weren't given the freedom. They took the freedom.
How Germany's Economy Is Hurt by Supply Chain Shortages
Zucc has, time and time again, chosen profit over people. Facebook over country. They knew what they were doing (spreading misinformation, creating political division, harming childrens' mental health) and actively chose to not do anything about it. If no private entity can be trusted to do better than that, maybe facebook shouldn't be a private entity IMO.
There was that before gasoline times when a lot of newly invented cars were electric. Jay Leno drove one around from the 1900s.
CVS' Covid-19 test results system is down
The patient portal CVS uses to provide Minute clinic patients with COVID-19 test results has been unable to authenticate users for 8 at least hours: https://mychart.cvshealth.com/
The book qualifies this by giving everyone a perfect memory of every moment of their lives.

> I found I could recall every detail of my life; every event ever experienced I could remember with perfect clarity. I could remember every word on every page I'd ever read. Every conversation. Every tax form I'd ever filled out. I could reconstruct every second of every day I'd been alive from the moment of my birth until the day I finally shut my eyes at the end.

> This clarity of memory surprised me the first time I tried reviewing the past, but it was all there. (This was to be the greatest curse of Hell. Sometimes I would reply my entire life again and again for thousands of years. Remembering all the things I could have done differently, all the things... No. I won't go there now. I must tell this story).
"By that definition, stocks too are ponzis. No. Stocks have an external source of revenue, namely the profit that the company makes by selling its products and services to customers..."

This is a very simplistic view of equities markets and does not explain penny stocks, meme stocks (GME/AMC), TSLA, and other things that seem to escape traditional fundamental analyses.
“Do your own research”, the tag line of quacks and kranks everywhere…
Quantum computing is going to bring this entire house down.

Money without an army is just paper. Or, in this case, imaginary numbers.

There will be no one to cry to when the machines start cracking all the hashes and wipe away the entire ecosystem.

I'd wager the NSA already has this capability, but they won't blow it on something so stupid.
One of the problems I see is that we are now in the era of what one might call "population scale mind control", actually delivering on the promises of propaganda. Given enough data you can find a large enough subset of the population you can persuade/trick/threaten into acting in a way you want, taking the moderate remainder in a direction completely contrary to their best interests.

This is after all, what they claim as their major selling point to advertisers.

So if we shut Facebook down tomorrow, would the problems disappear? Only if we took out Google and any other organizations pursuing the same dystopian models.
Presumably because people are currently most familiar with the price of everything else in dollars.
If they're covert and only members of the group using them know what they mean, then why fight it? Seems like a helpful way to communicate about things that others might not like to hear. The paper you linked said that too - "Such signals may allow coordination and enhanced cooperation while also avoiding the alienation or hostile reactions of individuals with different preferences.".

This happens all the time in cartoons that appeal to children but also contain subtle adult jokes so everyone can enjoy them on different levels.
Ah, the many eras of corporate music. Canyon.mid exemplifies the late 80s / early 90s aesthetic - gets me fired up to optimize my multimedia strategy.

The current era is mostly inspiring 4 chord repetitions with muted guitar and piano, with B-roll of cinematic nature footage and racially diverse businesspeople shaking hands. Also jaunty ukulele riffs with dance claps and some kind of "oh oh ayy-oh" vocal hook.

What creative bounties will the coming decades bring?
A headache isnt even listed as an adverse reaction. Please base your argument in fact. Getting the vaccine is not risk free and can rarely result in death. The chance of a natural immunity person getting COVID again and dying is lower than a vaccinated person.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...
Bitcoin? No. Not even a little bit. Bitcoin mining has been dominated by ASICs since 2012 or so. Some other cryptocurrencies can still be mined on GPUs, but the profit margins are rather narrow.
Similarly, I simply do not trust them to not do the absolute most malicious and evil things possible. If they one day start secretly keylogging people and then get hacked revealing keylogs for millions of people, I frankly wouldn't be surprised at this point.
I agree with your sentiment, however I wouldn't use Michael Saylor's quotes as strong ground to stand on, he also said BTC can scale to millions of transactions per second which is impossible.

IMO he comes off a grifter who needed to save his company and kept buying loads of BTC to start the "institutions are buying" FOMO.
Blame financial news media, things like Fortune magazine's list of new crypto billionaires.

The author of this blog post's claim that 99.99% of people in crypto are only participating because of expectations of future profit is unsourced and a fiction that he has created based on preconceived notions.

Don't participate if you don't want - I like participating in a system that isn't being tracked by agencies especially with news of Treasury actively building out systematic functionality to investigate any bank accounts with transactions exceeding $600
A lot of the "Common Objections" relate to the REASONS people choose to own Bitcoin and how those cases make it a Ponzi.

There are many different reasons to own Bitcoin, however the author seems to only view it through the lens of someone living in a wealthy and developed country with financial stability.

The properties of it being difficult/impossible to confiscate and its privacy make it valuable in oppressive regimes. A refugee could store their wealth in Bitcoin, leave their country, settle somewhere else, and access their Bitcoin without the risk of it being confiscated during the journey, because they can simply memorise the seed phrase (24 words).

It's predictable issuance schedule also makes it valuable in countries suffering from high inflation or hyper-inflation.

This is a good article to rethink the use cases of Bitcoin: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/check-your-financial-pri...

Alex Gladstein works for the Human Rights Foundation and does lots of good work in Bitcoin advocacy. His other articles are worth checking out.

And the data backs this up. Some of the biggest growth in Bitcoin users around the world have been in places around Africa and Vietnam who are subject to some of the situations mentioned above.

Do you think these people see Bitcoin as a "Ponzi"? Do you think they care if such a definition doesn't change the properties they find useful/valuable?
> What if people are seeing [...]

What if my grandmother had wheels?

More seriously, how many people do you know are seeing what you are talking about?

Everyone I know that invested in crypto did so hoping to trade it back later on for more fiat than they paid. Sure, maybe it's a biased sample, but it's a sizeable sample and I do not know even a single person that traded their fiat for crypto definitly.
I didn't see any comparison with ambient pressure O2 treatment. Wearing a nasal cannula with 6 LPM O2 from a bottle or concentrator is easy to do at home. But nobody has a hyperbaric chamber at home. Is the hyperbaric treatment absolutely necessary and if so why?
Using this dumb definition of a ponzi scheme, every stock IPO that doesn't pay a dividend is a ponzi scheme. Bitcoin is valuable because people agree on using it as a form of money, and it is limited in supply. Nobody is making more bitcoins from nowhere to pay out existing bitcoin holders.

Idiotic definition of a ponzi scheme crafted intentionally to include bitcoin, fails to include bitcoin, but does cover many valid economic activities.
This was my take as well. A key feature of a Ponzi scheme is the deception needed to pass the scheme off as “legitimate”
> what if we shutdown Facebook tomorrow, will all these problems disappear?

TBH other sites like reddit are just as bad or worse, large communities built on ephermeral content will always breed garbage

it's likely people will generally grow to not want to consume it anymore espcially once good altearntives gain traction or just out of bordem eg. tiktok is more fun for a lot of people
Dollars are accepted everywhere. BTC is not.

Edit: Not sure why the downvotes, but it's still true and still likely true for the forseeable future.
DeFi (Beyond a currency, a whole trustless financial system where no one can cheat)

NFTs (Not just art but concert tickets like GET protocol, gaming like Axie Infinity, collectibles like Crypto Punks, etc)

DAOs (Internet scale corporations/governments)

Identity systems (ENS, BrightID, Proof of Humanity, etc which allow for supranational products that build on top of reputation and uniqueness. The Sign-In With Ethereum standard is bringing self-custody OAuth authentication to Web 2.0 applications)

Enterprise interoperability (Baseline)

There's a ton of stuff going on and it's almost impossible for any one person to keep up with everything. It's easy to write everything off as a scam but there's hundreds of thousands of really smart and high integrity developers working in this space and it's worth keeping an eye on.
The vast majority of equities by value are not penny stocks or meme stocks.
> Oh well. Not much we can do about it, I suppose.

And that's a good thing.

Calif. is one giant earthquake zone, with plants built on known fault lines. Norcal is overdue for another Big One (it's thought that hydrologic engineering projects have temporarily damped tremors based on seismic analysis near dams.)

The fact that we can shut them down now in an affordable manner is fantastic. The taxpayers in Japan and the Ukraine can only dream of having that option.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
And bitcoin has value to some people who wish to avoid local hyper-inflation or who wish to do transactions not allowed by financial institutions.
> It’s viewing Bitcoin through a lens of a traditional Ponzi scheme...

And? Should we should look at it through a lens of a non-traditional Ponzi scheme? Ponzi 2.0 is better than Ponzi 1.0?

> What if people are seeing discussion of minting a trillion dollar coin, trillions in QE, 25% of all dollars created in the last 12 months…and concluding that fiat currency is in an endgame and they are permanently trading what fiat they have now for one of a finite number of digital assets that will ever be created.

If the Debt Bubble is nearing its end and fiat currency is in grave jeopardy, what is the mechanism by which the people holding these "digital assets" will save themselves from the economic hell that awaits the world?
Once the deception is dispelled it ceases to be a Ponzi scheme, the BS spewed by marketers not withstanding. Ponzi is fraud; deception is imperative. Everything is else Not Ponzi.

I'm no crypto currency fanboi, but I feel no need to commit the intellectual fraud of misapplying well understood concepts to denigrate it. Every couple of months, however, someone decides they can score some clicks by yelling 'Ponzi' and we get this headline again.

In addition to being tedious it's also dangerous. Blockchain and cryptocurrency is new phenomena and we don't yet know what value there is here. We can, however, confidently assume that if the false narrative that Bitcoin is a Ponzi Scheme is successfully applied The Great And The Good will suddenly discover the moral obligation to crush it out of existence and criminalize everyone involved.

That possibility worries me far more than whatever part of the status quo bitcoin might disrupt.
People use BTC/ETH/etc. in exchange for goods. I mean, I'm not a fan of cryptocurrency, but calling it a Ponzi scheme is just wrong.

There are plenty of shitcoins out there that are purely pump and dumps, but it seems like BTC is here to stay.
I love HN but have watched for years as much in the community have completely missed the boat on crypto and blockchain. It's a strange disconnect...
Yes, when you need certainty that data hasn't been tempered with. Logistics, being able to trace back where a certain item came from. How about trading cards, be certain that the trading card you are possessing is the only one and it is genuine. (NFTs)
Terraform CDK is very very far behind AWS SDK. There’s essentially no Level 2 constructs.
> I strongly believe bitcoin will be the new gold one day, if it doesn't pan out as a currency. It sounds insane, but I actually believe the Winklevoss twins when they say Elon and SpaceX will be able to mine gold on asteroids within the next 20 years, which would crash the price of gold. Not to mention as everything inevitably moves digital, we need to have a digital store of value.

What is the energy cost to get a refined kilo of gold back to Earth?
Why specify non-currency? Doesn't Bitcoin provide a more convenient/less expensive way to send money between countries (or both). Those are pretty powerful uses. (I don't know money laundering and drug dealing are still more convenient in Bitcoin)
A bit ridiculous simplistic clickbait article... if the author had any intellectual honesty he would realize his arguments on gold NOT being a ponzi could be used exactly the same for Bitcoin:

"First, few if any gold investors have expectations of profits. They generally invest in gold as a hedge -- a "store of value" -- that they hope will retain its value in case other assets go sour."

Actually almost every other point he tries to make on things NOT a Ponzi could be made for Bitcoin too.
No Deflationary Cryptocurrencies
The US seems to be pulling it off for the last few months.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/273418/unadjusted-monthl...
Bitcoin is now being considered as official currency in Brazil where the author is. It will be interesting to see how this develops
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/cryptocurrency/...
Strong disagree. Ads vary wildly, including "native advertising" where companies pay news outlets to report some development on the company and pretend it's some sort of real journalism. It's still an ad.
Great Article; What a serendipitous and fortunate occurrence for Norway !

Norwegians need to erect monuments to this guy and help other countries like he helped them.
You could have something similar to dyed diesel for tires, where, say, orange tires are untaxed and can only be used on private property/off-road, and regular tires can be used on public roadways.
It's been done:)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaOS

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)
No, this discussion ended when bitcoin was ratified as legal tender. Regardless of how you define it, the cat has left the bag.
Still the value compared to profits are way off in traditional finance at the moment
I wonder why they didn't go with syllables and something like a levenshtein distance to syllables?

That way they could more easily maintain similar looking and sounding words, including leetspeak and other variants.

Because with this kind of approach, something like "yolocaust" will get through, as most checks only go with exact matches and permutations will always get around it easily...

Whereas with something like a levenshtein distance you could compare it with a set of words and syllables and if it's too similar looking, e.g. 90% the same distance compared to username length, you could simply block it.
Do we actually have a source for the polarization factoid delivered here? The only source I can find with a quick google is a 2020 study based on relatively old data from about 8 western countries. Further this focused on party-aligned polarization, rather than any other political axis. For instance my perception from UK politics is that was very polarized around Brexit, but less so around particular parties. For other countries like Germany that don't have the two party system going on, looking at at simple party polarization seems even less relevant, though we again see a rise in extreme ideologies such as those represented by AfD.
It is absolutely not finite. Coinmarketcap.com lists 7048 cryptocurrencies, with 96 of them having nominal values over $1 billion.
Glad to see the word Niger (as in the country) wasn’t blocked. Ran into this with Venmo a little while ago and they thankfully backpedaled. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24042742
They'll make new quantum proof encryption - isn't this an active area of cryptography research?

JQI at UMD, NIST's Quantum Computing Group - these teams must be doing something with all the grant money
> Blame financial news media, things like Fortune magazine's list of new crypto billionaires.

The crypto financial news community was writing about this long before Fortune picked it up.