skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article literally covers each of those cases and explains exactly why those are not Ponzi schemes while Bitcoin is ([edit] under "Common Objections" - which should really read "Common Whataboutisms").

> 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 (not investors); and these profits eventually return to the investors through dividends or cash buybacks. In time, those profits are expected to exceed the amount invested, with a significant profit for all investors -- that is, they are expected to be positive-sum games. The market value of stocks reflects these expectations among investors. While some companies fail to achieve this goal, enough of them succeed to make stocks the favorite option of savvy investors.

> By that definition, real estate too is a ponzi. No. Like stocks, real estate creates value while it is being owned, namely the sheltering service it provides to those who live in it. That value returns to the investor (owner) either by him living in the property, or by renting it to others.

> By that definition, gold too is a ponzi. No, gold clearly fails to satisfy that definition on two counts...
Do you understand the tradeoffs of why it works that way?

That for an open and fully accessible, decentralised system that exists in an adversarial environment there has to be a large cost to any attacks?

Of course there are much more efficient ways to store data, but those are centralised and vulnerable to the problems of centralisation. The blockchain's and proof-of-work's purpose is to be decentralised.
To be fair, the article does address your questions.
Didn't even have to click through it to predict that it'd be Jake Kaufman's take on it - although he's now known for Shantae and Shovel Knight among other things :)
It sounds like he wasn't even the first among his contemporaries.

But it is known for certain that in the years following 1770, at least six people in England and Germany (Sevel, Jensen, Jesty 1774, Rendall, Plett 1791) tested successfully the possibility of using the cowpox vaccine as an immunization for smallpox in humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine#Early_vaccina...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2279376/
Cash doesn’t intrinsically generate value. It’s value comes from your belief in it.
Microscope slide that could improve cancer diagnosis by revealing their ‘colour’
> How's it bad?

Because there's absolutely no protection against fraud. This is somewhat of a problem when there's such a gigantic amount of fraud going on.

> You have to accept responsibility when making transactions

Yes, and so does the other party.

What irreversible transactions do is give the receiving party the ability to shirk all responsibilities, because it's significantly more difficult (if not impossible) to hold them to account.
Yeah... if Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme, then any investment bubble where stocks etc. rise to values which have nothing to do with reality is a Ponzi scheme too. There too the inverstors who have held the stocks the longest and who sell before the bubble bursts will get the most profits, while the ones who got in late will lose money. Which is also unfair of course, but not fraudulent per se...
I am fine with this, but maybe Firefox should try something better, like at startup offer checkmarks for ways to help fund Firefox sorta like how NPR does, but way less annoying. Allow a user to select ways ads are offered to help Firefox, but have them all unchecked by default.
that's the correct distinction, but the poster I was replying to was trying to make some arbitrary distinction.
Shelly Pro 4pm now integrated into Home Assistant core version 2021.10.0
That must hurt.
Crypto Kidnapping in Kaliningrad
Thanks for sharing, spot on.

I like the Tcl example, that is how we worked at a .com startup I was part of.
The Myth of Oscar Wilde’s Martyrdom
By this articles definition WeWork is a Ponzi scheme, as would most startups.
Keep in mind that this purely the onchain transaction fee.

You are also going to paying exchange fees each way and those fees are likely to be quite large in authoritarian countries (as any illegal activity is generally more expensive).
right. everything is a tradeoff. but in almost every other part of the tradeoff space you can do better than 6 mb/hour for 14 gigawatts.
It might be a different magnet story, but the one I remember was from a knockoff toy where the magnets broke loose due to a defective design. The original toy did not have this same problem as precautions had been taken to make sure the magnets did not come loose.
This is the section:

>To help you find information faster, Firefox Suggest uses a service provided by us to offer relevant suggestions to the text you are typing. When contextual suggestions are enabled, Mozilla receives your search queries. When you see or click on a Firefox Suggest result, Mozilla collects and sends your search queries and the result you click on to our partners through a Mozilla-owned proxy service. The data we share with partners does not include personally identifying information and is only shared when you see or click on a suggestion.

I don't think it reads the way your comment implies.
The reason MetaMask went out of business years ago
Oh man qtek flashbacks. I had a 5050, great device but good lord the battery life ducked as soon as you connected to anything (and it only had mobile data, no WiFi, unless you put in an sd expansion card). No more battery? Then your data gets wiped
I know a lot of immigrants/expats and Facebook is pretty much the one thing they have to keep in touch with family and friends back home.

Personally I loathe the company and would be happy if some fatal DNS or other issue took it down for good or if it were legislated out of existence by the EU/US. But we also need to be aware of the value it provides other than as a bullhorn for anti-vaxxers and other nutjobs and perhaps think of how to build a safer and more ethical alternative.
"anti-prime" is just Brady trying to rebrand an old boring name to sound cooler (as he does). "highly composite" has a perfectly well defined meaning already, trying to shift it to shoehorn in some artificial distinction between it and "anti-prime" is counterproductive. If the aim is to produce a more descriptive name for a similar sequence of numbers that includes 480, I think GP's "weakly highly composite" is much better. I might propose just "weakly composite" or "mediocrely composite".

Edit: Actually, this was (also) already done by Ramanujan and has a better name than any proposed here: http://oeis.org/A067128 - "largely composite numbers" which does in fact contain 480. Perhaps every sharded system should choose a shard count from this list?
This is great! Finally putting an end to that stupid growth hack of “sign up online, cancel via phone”.
Assembly is faster and safer than rust. Rust is a fad it will fad.
More high-profile profanity filters open for viewing: edit filters used in Wikimedia projects, which also together encompass many languages.

The main 'bad words' filter of English Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:AbuseFilter/384

The page (on en:wiki) listing all filters, which also have uses other than detecting abuse:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:AbuseFilter

The special page has the same title in other editions of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia wikis, though many filters are set to hidden. Dutch Wikipedia, for example:

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:AbuseFilter/10
To begin with this assumes a refugee with substantial enough assets to transmit abroad. Before Bitcoin such people paid a bribe to get those assets out. Now they pay some broker a purchase fee and withstand the market volatility. A big loss either way.
> This is what the maxis are after.

When you find yourself saying that the people you disagree with are deliberately seeking catastrophic outcomes, it's time to take a step back and reconsider. I don't think anyone wants to destroy the global economy and cause a global war. Maybe the Bitcoin maxis are wrong about the long-term viability of Bitcoin, but I doubt very much they are some kind of nihilistic death cult bent on destroying civilization. Maybe dial it back a notch.
"..bitcoin may be dead by the middle of 2014.." reminds me of https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/
No it's not real, the cost to do a simple transfer up until yesterday has been in the ballpark of 0.1-0.15. This very moment it's around $1. You can see the current estimated cost here: https://mempool.space

In addition to that, there's always the Lightning Network as well wherein you can transact for fractions of pennies.
(Nevertheless, investing in gold at the current price seems unwise, since its price is many times its "natural" price as commodity...)

You left out the most important and contentious part. It is not surprising because the author of the article itself made the single, most important point a fine print because it hurts their argument.
Maybe when cryptocurrency enthusiasts stop running around with bullhorns telling people about how they're going to save the world.

You're not saving anything. There are valid criticisms of the current financial system, but cryptocurrencies are not a good answer to them.
Even more awkward is when you're having a conversation with someone who is trying even harder to get you to talk about yourself, while you're trying to do some of the same. Then it's a competition to see who can say the least before asking "and what about you?"
Oh, okay. I was thrown off because the annoyances of rebooting aren't really about uptime, per se.
Gold doesn't have a source of revenue.
wework is
I don't won't you
I agree with you that the whole economy needs to shift eventually. But as I see it, the most utilitarian way to reduce emissions would be to reduce the overconsumption of carbon emissions in the rich world. The market will not produce the "correct signal" to achieve this because of the enormous income disparity in the global economy.

Example: India vs Us carbon emissions per Capita is 4 times higher than India GDP vs Us GDP per Capita.

Any price increase on carbon will be felt 4x more by an Indian than by an American.
I don't follow? They are saying that in order to run a business in which one sells goods or services for cryptocoins, that in order to pay for one's business costs, one must spend fiat,

and that therefore, someone selling goods for cryptocoins, must, in addition to using cryptocoins, also use fiat currencies (because most of their business expenses can only be paid in fiat currencies).
I understand your concern over the lack of "intrinsic value" in the sense that it is not a productive asset generating economic value (like a business). That said, I'd really encourage you to consider that monetary value is real. I don't necessarily recommend investing in it, but there's a reason humans have valued gold for so long.
Show HN: map.xplr – It's xargs in a TUI
The Tandy 1000 RSX has several ISA expansion slots. Putting a Sound Blaster in it is no problem.
That's fair, and I walk that back. I don't think they're intentionally taking us into a Mad Max future, but I don't think their intent changes much if they get their way.
> they're prevented by parenting

assisted by sensible legislation and product design.
Actually it helps a lot in steering them away from complex bullshit that generates decision paralysis. I you read books about the latest diet fad or take a course, or buy weight loss products, you are actually consuming a lot of energy and willpower that you could use in simple lifestyle changes like "first step drop all junk food and sugar".
Seems to fluctuate quarterly and I was saying the article addresses the point and makes an argument that BTC is not “like gold” in this way because the majority of demand for gold comes from non-investors (which appears to be the case in I think most quarters but perhaps not most recently). Jewelry is its own category but it does have “utility” if viewed through the lens of human behavior across civilizations over time.
I just recently saw a randomly generated ID of ours in production that starts with "doggy". Thankfully "doggy" is pretty innocent, but it really made me think "wow what if it was something bad". Unfortunate that that exact scenario seems to have happened to you already.
Assessing the Oberth Maneuver for Interstellar Probe
People should learn about how much money the Fed is printing these days.

Bitcoin is getting a lot of attention from a lot of very smart financial people around the world because they see that with so much USD being printed, inflation is bound to happen and Bitcoin is one of many ways they can hedge against it.

HN is where you can find great commentary about tech related stuff. But outside of that eg. financial matters .. no.
Yeah, it was the US. Funnily enough, I never found out why it happened. Everyone claimed to not know, have no access to it, and the people who were supposed to be in touch with me never were. A week earlier I did send a reasonable amount of money to someone in country that is most well known for it's illegal drug industry. Although I have nothing to do with drugs or anything illegal, and no way of knowing if that was even related or not (no one even asked me about it, so hard to tell if it was a coincidence or not)
I got in to crypto years ago, I'm still holding a bag of BTCs right now, but not that much anymore, from 100% back then, now down to 20%ish, majority of my assets right now is in altcoins. Why? Aside from the waining market dominance, there is this nagging feeling of fear that it might signifficantly drop in value.

I am little bit paranoid of holding 100% in BTC, the reason for this is because of Satoshi Nakamoto still holding 1 million BTCs. Nobody knows who this guy is, if he's going to spend all his bag, that's a sure fire way of bringing down BTC significantly.

Anyway, I'm still in to BTC, it significantly changed my life. I wish Nakamoto would publicly burn most of what it is in his bag.
It's a 386SX, which absolutely will run Windows 3.1 but if you're going to be real picky, it definitely won't be as snappy as in the video ;)
Even finding Mersenne primes would be a more useful proof of work.
Yeah it's definitely taking off and with the improved support for kubernetes it's going to take off even more.
Facebook isn't really in the business of connecting people, as the article notes briefly: they're in the business of growth.

Growth of daily user count, growth of daily time on Facebook per user, growth of ad revenue, and ultimately growth of profits.

And indeed, these are where most of Facebook's evils come from.

If Facebook was ambivalent about eyeball time, they wouldn't need to juice user's feeds or create addictive engagement loops. If they were ambivalent about ad revenue, then their data collection could be massively curtailed.

Facebook as a not-for-profit would not need to act in evil ways, and Facebook as a for-profit cannot help but do so.
WeWork is, startups are not. This is also covered in the article.
Also don't forget multisig or Shamir secret sharing.
It's more a matter of game theory.

With wealth like gold, land, oil, or any other physical resources, an oppressive regime can just kill all dissenters and take control of everything. The payoff to violence is huge.

But with a digital wealth like bitcoin, which can flee the country at the speed of light, even if the owners can't go with it, the payoff to violence evaporates. The oppressive regime that spends a lot of time and energy torturing and killing people will have no spoils to show for it.
The lightning network only allows you to transact if you fund a channel first, which requires an on-chain Bitcoin transaction to create and eventually one to close, thus incurring transaction costs twice.

You should fund a LN channel for more than one transaction because you cannot change the channel funds after creation, so you better make sure enough is in it. This makes it unsuitable for things that require more than a tiny fraction of your monthly income, e.g. rent.

LN channels also need to be constantly monitored to not get scammed, which the LN whitepaper suggests you to pay third parties for.

The LN whitepaper completely obmits the routing problem, too. It more or less says "we don't want to think about that now". A network whitepaper that doesn't think about routing, imagine that.
OpenStack gains new momentum, as deployments increase during the pandemic
What you say is also largely true of the British, Canadian, Australian, etc. monarchy.
If you want to get it on the other side in a reasonable timeframe, yes
My understanding is that it requires the burning of a ludicrous amount of electricity to get a transaction written on the main chain.
Oh, sorry, I didn't want my post to get long, however I also agree that investing in gold is unwise generally speaking. I don't believe in investing in unproductive assets period. Unintentional miss, and totally relevant, so thanks for adding that color.
the extreme limit (anarchy) isn't a practical possibility, since no government, however small, would give up its coercive power that way. it's more fruitful to talk about varying levels of policing and varying legal consequences, and the prevailing conclusion there is that murder rates aren't particularly sensitive to these variables in the practical bands of interest. but note that "policing" need not be done by a police force--in tribal groups for instance, tribal members generally police each other.

we'd be better served by having many more detectives, and far fewer gun-toting beat cops, if we were interested in solving more murder cases though. that's the kind of policy discussion we should be having, not the politically-driven narratives that currently prevail around the topic.
also ++C is faster
What about this? https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/likely-cause-of-al...
> which is a lot of people buying a lot of stuff.

Could you share some numbers?
What measure of safety has assembly basically ever win?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/link-global-bitcoin-m... [Aug 2021]
The PR is one tiny part of what the discussion is about.
“The shortest horror story:

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.”

― Frederic Brown

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knock_(short_story)
Clickbait title responding to yet more clickbait.
I'll save you the trouble:
"Spoiler: C++ is not faster or slower – that's not the point, actually. This article continues our good tradition of busting myths about the Rust language shared by some big-name Russian companies." (Yandex)
The point of the article is that this is that people don't invest in Bitcoin because it's great refuge money. They expect prices to rise.
That's amusing, but I think it also highlights the effectiveness of the strategy. WNKR is excusable and defensible. WANK would not be.

Edit: But I'll concede that when your outputs are only four characters long and end users will actively interact with them (write them down, type them again later, etc.), additional safeguards might be appropriate. Or simply omit all alphas and use only numerics.
Yup, but that explanation is not satisfactory IMHO. Of course stocks, real estate etc. have an "underlying value", but in case of a market bubble, these values lose all connection with reality, and some will profit while others (typically the late comers) will lose out when the bubble bursts. And Bitcoin's value is currenty overinflated in the same way...
TLDR; From article:

> Spoiler: C++ is not faster or slower – that's not the point, actually. This article continues our good tradition of busting myths about the Rust language shared by some big-name Russian companies.
I know about PWAs; those don't have all the capabilities of an Electron app (being distributable as a file/archive, file system access, and many other things)
There's no undefined behaviour in assembly language.
Vaccines have been pushed for over a year now and I've never really seen it pan out. I wouldn't be too hopeful about it.
While this is great news for B2C users/apps, I'm not sure this is ideal for B2B users/apps. I guess you don't want an employee to be able to delete his pro account without any checks.
I’ve thought of doing this, but how would it work if you have a normal day job? Can you have your job pay you through the LLC?
You must pay your taxes in national currency. That alone gives it value beyond trust.
Take away the Bitcoin miners and speculators and see how much a Bitcoin is worth.
It's massively easier. If at the time I had my money in bitcoin, I would just need to find willing trader (someone who would trade my bitcoin for making my rent payment). But because I didn't, and my bank account was frozen, I had to find someone to pay my rent _on credit_. I was lucky to have someone to turn to, I suspect not everyone is fortunate to have friends who are willing and able to help and trust someone with a frozen bank account.

And what also is scary, if I had been a real target and not bycatch, I bet anyone who helped me would've also faced the same asset freeze for helping me.
Not here. "Difficult to take apart" are the finicky plastic latches all around the seam between the 2 halves of the case. The ones that you can sort of open by sliding the credit card around the seam for half an hour. Or give up, pry them with a screwdriver, and scratch the whole thing in numerous places. I would give Valve credit here for the sole act of not putting them.

That said, I would call BS on SSD vs Wi-Fi interference and semi-BS on the ESD gloves and anchoring. Unless you are handling 100 devices per day while wearing your comfy sweater and sitting on a carpet, just make sure you touch any grounded object beforehand, and you will be fine in most of the cases.
Amusing to see the is_hateful query which used to just be an unreadable mess of regex for validation. Clearly the infra has grown/changed over 10 years, and this is obviously neater, but boy does it LOOK a lot bigger now (and I'm sure they've added yet more new words that try to hurt people...)
I mean my bank (Monzo) charges $0.40 for a small international transfer, and $3.20 for one that is $1000, so depending on the transaction size in most scenarios for me personally bitcoins fees would be WAY higher and will presumably only grow more if Bitcoin gains further adoption.

The problem is that the Bitcoin fee is also payable on all domestic transfers too, which of course are free in traditional banking.
Thanks for pointing this out. People have different reasons why they believe in bitcoin (and other cryptos). Where I live the government has in the past 20 years wiped out citizens' savings at least 3 times, arbitrarily, without any notice. In such a situation using bitcoin, regardless of the risk/skepticism, is a far better alternative than having all your money disappear on the whims and or experiments of politicians. Once I get sufficiently knowledgeable about cryptos I will happily take my chances, and I'm sure many in my situation will see it that way.
I think the author misses one service that Bitcoin provides (that is referenced many times) which is to transact. The movement of transactions on the ledger is the value that Bitcoin (and others like it) provide.

Now it is absolutely shit at that job. Cost per transaction, transaction throughput, time to assurance a transaction won't be rolled back, all make Visa/Mastercard look amazing except for certain business domains. As such people offer it up as an investment, and that is the reality the average person engages. Like the gold rush, the people making money are the ones selling shovels (as pointed out in the article).

Does that make it a Ponzi scheme? I am not an economist, but I don't think so.

A horrible investment? I refuse to deal with crypto, volatility and environmental concerns are my primary reasons.
Because they're living in the past and are constantly digging in other people's lives?