skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I’m sorry but what? Was this in the US? Because the intro was “oppressive regime,” and then you gave an example of an oppressive regime, and now I’m realizing you might very well be in the US.

I’m just shocked; never considered this could happen. Was this related to your employer, and… Well, I should just ask rather than guess :) thank you for sharing, and I’m really sorry that happened.

One of the best decisions I’ve made recently is to set up a company for myself. More specifically, I set up a non profit “for the world” (mostly as an intellectual exercise of “how hard would it be to mimic what openai originally set out to do? Turns out, it’s not hard!) which then put me in a position where I knew exactly how to set up an LLC for myself for consulting, and how to set up a bank account (use https://www.mercury.com — don’t use anything else).

The takeaway is that, if you’re in the US, you can have protection from exactly this sort of thing, for roughly zero cost — in Missouri the filing fee for an LLC was a whopping $50. That’s how much it cost me to set everything up, start to finish.

I now have a business banking account, quickbooks takes care of the taxes (admittedly $24/mo isn’t “totally free” but it’s also “pretty cheap” relatively speaking) — which means that yes, someone could freeze my LLC (hello IRS) or freeze my personal account (hello US Bank, you suck) but it’s highly unlikely both will ever be frozen simultaneously, unless both the business and my personal accounts are under scrutiny simultaneously.

The cure for that is very simple, as long as you’re rigorous: income comes in to your Mercury account; it flows out into your personal account, by paying yourself a salary. Never use the Mercury account for anything else. Congratulations, your LLC is almost impervious from problems. (My famous last words; the fact is, I have no idea what I’m talking about, and this is what I’m expecting to be true as t approaches infinity).

So yes. Bitcoin: good solution. LLC: also good solution. Wish I’d taken advantage of it sooner.

Unsure about outside of the US though, sadly. Though I’ve often toyed with the idea of making a company specializing in setting up one of those offshore bank tax havens, and offering a product like Stripe whose sole purpose is to automate that. :) Then everybody gets the loophole, rather than a rich few.

Anyway, thanks again for sharing that very unexpected story; I hope it never happens to you again!
kwh is just as dumb a term though, although correct. you're taking joules per hour and then multiplying it by an hour.

highway speed limit is 90kmkgWlboz/(hkgWlboz).
US pays more for slower internet than European, Canadian, and Asian counterparts
Nginx Config to serve React builds
Ponzu tastes good though.
Bitcoin is a guaranteed permanent store of value. It’s value comes from its scarcity, that isn’t going to change no matter what the markets do.
Every long term store of wealth is a Ponzi scheme.

Prove me wrong.
Its currently $2 on the segwit to confirm 6 blocks (irrespective of the amount)
> Bitcoin is a store of value.

Possibly. It is an asset, after all. The problem is that people are buying it because they expect it to appreciate significantly, hence "when lambo." There's a difference between believing something will retain its value and believing it will appreciate.
People tend to "invest" in bitcoin. I don't "invest" in a bank account.
The difference is USD is backed by the U.S. government. Bitcoin is backed by nothing.
Why would you go to Coinbase instead of Coinmap?

https://coinmap.org/
A hyperbaric chamber treatment generally does both, so raises the partial pressure more than you could without it. And indeed that is what they did here.
It's terrible how unsurpsing this is. :(
100% agreed, my first smart phone and I still miss some features to this day. Really great. Shame no one makes a physical keyboard attachment or a follow up Blackberry device.
And, all the dust and crap they loft into the air. My biggest pet peeve with people using leaf blowers is how the users always seem to throttle them up and down rather than keep them at a steady speed. Up down up down up down, it’s maddening.
"[A] supposed absolute truth" Is that like a redundancy (absolute and truth) wrapped in a contradiction (supposed and absolute truth)?

If there is no such thing (i.e. no objective source) why would one use any term for it?

Why would one modify truth to be "god's own?" Is it a rhetorical claim to the authority/authenticity of an unseen third party?
Some would claim that the "Dollar" is a Ponzi scheme by the Fed...
I dont think there was a way to make a device this small and powerful without making it this tight and difficult to open. Your point is valid for laptops who try this or promote thin and light to have an excuse to do this.
A Philosopher Who Took Happiness Seriously
Wouldn't that only work if you had places (like your landlord) taking Bitcoin off the blockchain directly for payment? Otherwise, transacting still requires the cooperation of intermediaries subject to sanctions. Maybe you can launder through a friend, but... it doesn't seem any easier.
would have being better to have the data source in a json/csv formate, like an array of RegExpression. SQL is not compatible with different dbs.
But its net debt is something like 40% of GDP, whereas Norway's is something like -110%.

https://knoema.com/atlas/Australia/topics/Economy/Financial-...
https://knoema.com/atlas/Norway/topics/Economy/Financial-Sec...
Thank you for the citation!
"Civilization is a Ponzi" is essentially my conclusion. The thing holding up government backing as the standard of real asset is simply its capacity as the just middleman enforcer. Subtract that and currency, real estate, stocks, bonds, contracts, credit ratings and IP rights all go poof. You're left with clothes-on-your-back and local community trust.

That's why I see crypto tokenization as an important step towards having another "financial material" to work with. It doesn't commandeer enforcement at a global level, so it doesn't compete with governments on their own terms, but it can help build trust at scale by being designed around the trustless scenario, which reduces reliance on enforcement and bureaucratic methodology in many applications. Crypto projects with a focus on achieving good governance are some of the most promising out there, even as they are hidden in the endless waves of scams.
> I don't hold bitcoin because I think it'll go up in value, I hold it because I don't want someone to tell me I can't pay rent because ... well they can't tell me why, because "sorry, I don't have access to that information"

Well you certainly can't do that with Bitcoin unless your landlord has a similarly anarchocapitalist worldview. You'd have to cash it out at an exchange and pay the individual in question. This choke point would leave you similarly locked out.

This applies to only a fringe minority of the participants in the Ponzi.

More sympathetically, even if this was a real problem that doesn't mean a Ponzi scheme is the way out. It's like saying you got burned in 2001 so decided to invest with Madoff knowing full well he was a Ponzi, but at least he wasn't a tech company.
In the 90s, the relevant user-facing OSes for computers were MacOS and Windows.

There were at least real, meaningful attempts at competition in the consumer space with, most notably, OS/2 and BeOS. (OS/2 is seen as a commercial failure these days but quite a lot of people ran it.) MS-DOS from Microsoft was also competing with IBM PC DOS and Digital Research/Novell DR-DOS.

In the early 90s, Atari TOS, RISC OS and AmigaOS were not completely down for the count yet.

In the UNIX workstation market you still had SGI IRIX, Solaris, HP/UX, and more.

Now, looking even in that space -- well, maybe there's a Linux box or two, but more likely you're going to find even more macOS and Windows.
> Nevertheless, investing in gold at the current price seems unwise, since its price is many times its "natural" price as commodity and so it is more likely to go down than up.

This is a misconception and a fundamental misunderstanding of gold's primary utility for thousands of years.

While it is true that gold's price reflects a significant premium beyond the "natural" market price, this has been the case for millennia. Since ancient times, most demand for gold has not been for industrial uses or jewelry, but rather as a store of a value. This results in gold having a "monetary premium".

It's also worth mentioning that it is no coincidence that humans happened to chose gold as money. Among all chemical elements, gold has a favorable combination of chemical properties and rarity in the earth's crust that make it a suitable choice for storing value over long periods of time. In fact, nearly all gold mined in human history is still around today. We've been hoarding it since the time of the pharaohs.

I'm sympathetic to crypto skepticism, but I'm afraid many people are missing the forest for the trees. I'm curious for those that still truly believe Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme or a bubble - at what price point and time would you start to consider that you may be tragically wrong?
I for one have sold many things on Facebook marketplace. That provides value for both me and the buyer as they're getting items at a discount and I get cash.

Another positive is my drone hobby has lots of groups on Facebook where members share information and help each other across the globe.

Another positive is that my local buy nothing group helps neighbors out by giving things away for free to neighbors in need.

Almost none of the negatives of Facebook brought up in recent discussions apply to me because I don't go looking for it and if I see them I tell Facebook not to show me things like that and then it doesn't. People act like you can't curate your experience.
No. Their only purpose is to act as a kind of receipt: "look, I actually really did waste all this energy".

The solution to the puzzle itself is irrelevant - it's an operation that would be extremely simple but that's made very, very hard on purpose. And the sole purpose is to align incentives by using lots of energy.
I remember talking to my friend about alternatives to DOS. (I had just found out about 386BSD.) He tells me he got this thing called Warp for Windows. "But it still needs Windows" I say. He then has to explain that it really doesn't and the name only means that it will import your old settings as it replaces the operating system. It struck me then, and still does, as a dumb name and bad marketing move.

Turns out he didn't stick with OS/2 very long after getting into the beta program for NT 3.5.
Cute passage:

> bitcoins can be earned and spent, not just bought and sold. That makes no difference for the purpose of this discussion. If you buy a $2000 laptop directly with bitcoin, for financial analysis it is the same as if you had sold the coins for $2000 and bought the laptop with that.

The core of the post seems to be a claim that demand for Bitcoin is a recursion with no base case. But then this passage gets to the base case and just dismisses it as irrelevant -- since it could counterfactually transit through dollars. If you think a state currency is the only logically possible currency, that needs an argument (and an difficult one, given history).

The rest I'd call rhetoric and side issues.
> While Bitcoin‘s value might be grossly overestimated

While Bitcoin‘s value might be grossly underestimated
But if you're actually curious to know it only takes a quick search to find info about proportions of use around the world

https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-global-crypto-adop...

It's very hard to get exact numbers of users, because of how Bitcoin works, but this should give you a good sense of proportions and you could infer numbers of people based on known population sizes for each country
>A Ponzi scheme, or "ponzi" for short, is a type of investment fraud with these five features:
>People invest into it because they expect good profits, and

>that expectation is sustained by such profits being paid to those who choose to cash out. However,

>there is no external source of revenue for those payoffs. Instead,

>the payoffs come entirely from new investment money, while

>the operators take away a large portion of this money.

This seems to perfectly fit financial markets.
If the allegations are true, I think crazy goes without saying.
I could collect dividends for a time and then sell the share for what I paid.
Your best bet atm is to just look through reddit/hn comments/posts people make as they find stuff. The leak's too big for one person/team to quickly find all spicy stuff.
There should be an open source or even Official RFC(tm) for this. The use case is very generic.
$5-$20 for any amount is comparable or much less than almost any international transaction fee. If you're other option is transferring money out of the authoritarian country into your destination then this could be very attractive.
It's pretty terrible for that because it's easily traceable.
For a cracked up society valueing sociopathic players above all else, there is only the need for speed.

Hence boomsupersonic and the like. Or some hyped loops for tunnel rats. Or rattling rockets by whomever.
A Mind in Pain
It is unfortunately quite factual that the vast majority of refugees worldwide functionally have no assets and often end up in debt at the end of their journey from home. Anecdotes of relative handfuls of affluent migrants are hardly compelling vis a vis the utility of e.g. BTC, especially given the lofty claims being made.
I did do the reading. It's an O(n) db insert. The blockchain's the DB and the insert needs PoW.

throughput of a blockchain is contingent upon tweaking but for the original bitcoin, still used, it's 6 mb/hour. electricity consumption is 14 gigawatts. if i were given 14 gigawatts of electricity i think i could do better than 6 megabytes/hour.
Yeah, I keep thinking I should write a book on it - especially now that many of the places have been gentrified out of existence - which could also be an interesting part of the book.

If the Oprah show was still a thing it would make for a couple of good segments for sure.
IaC is faster than doing things manually. If you're spending weeks on it, that sounds to me like you either haven't yet practiced enough or you're working in an environment that's already a mess.

Once you have a bit of practice, using IaC tools is just better in every way compared to creating resources manually.

It's faster, it's more consistent and robust, serves as emergency documentation and allows easy and usable change tracking and management because you can put the code in a git repository.

If your Terraform manifests are going out of sync, that means your team is not actually using it and the manual, untrackable change is messing with you.

I wrote the initial set of manifests for one setup (dozens of components and 3 identical environments) about 5 years ago. Since then, a different team has been expanding and managing the system and I really have no idea of everything that's there nowadays, but I do still occasionally need to go in and make changes and I can do that confidently because they kept using Terraform and I can just read the code to know what's new. I did make some mistakes (choosing Chef for CM, it wasn't a good fit in retrospect), but aggressively automating everything was not one of them.

I also have one environment that I wrote which consists of a VPC, an EIP, a single EC2 instance and S3 buckets and policies for cross-account backups. I also automated that, and it definitely resulted in a better result faster than doing it manually. Turns out, even setting up a single server to run a single piece of well-packaged software (plus a local database) has a lot you need to take into account if you want to do everything properly, including backups and monitoring. On top of it, testing my backups was easy because I could just delete the whole environment and run my automation again to rebuild it, so I know that as long as there's a backup in a bucket somewhere, the system can be recovered in minutes.
> In other words, act like a person who is trying to make friends with another person.

Nah, I'm good.
Given that Facebook was originally conceived as a way to compare female students in a "Hot or Not" list, there is no conscience to be found, just a black hole.

A database company for example could be run by ruthless salespeople (such as Oracle) or have clients with questionable ethics, but at the end of the day the product itself is morally neutral. Facebook however rests on a bedrock of amorality.
They have been thinking about it. You haven't:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/09/porsches-new-synthetic-...

https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/news/magazine/2021/...
No. It's literally just busywork to burn resources, to prove that you aren't using the resources for anything better. PoW needs to be made illegal at this rate.
Lots of people disagree with you about that. Sorry you see it as a waste, but we're going to keep using it and dedicating more energy towards it because we understand its value.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-7dMVcVWgc
What if you crash the price but buy alternative asset first? That would be smart.
Then get a pi-top instead of this. That takes a normal rasbperry pi 4 and puts it into a huge case and takes away part of the use case for the pi being so small
But you shared a hash of an uncommon password. We probably have the salt (probably somewhere in the code) and people dont use password managers. So rainbow tables are enough.
Oh, I thought the first sentence was you and not quoted. Agreed with the above
Considering that large RTGs generally pump out less power than is needed to run a modern graphics card I doubt they would ever turn a profit.

The RTG in this picture is five feet tall and is probably worth several million. For that you get a total of about 300watts of power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RTG_radiation_measurement...
knives are tools
So you or you child is being tortured but you are "happy" that your bitcoins are safe ? This whole thing omits the question of how a person under oppressive regime came into possession of bitcoin in the first place
Yes, a lesson that TypeScript also took into account.
It might not be obvious if you don't use the application, but I've met countless people throughout facebook, including my now-wife, and have kept in touch with my friends throughout the world thanks to that app. I've lost touch with a few people, who sadly have deleted their facebook accounts, but whenever I travel I get to meet old friends thanks to fb. I also reconnected with childhood friends who I managed to find through the app.

I know my wife basically keeps in touch with all of her family through Facebook. I try to avoid that because I've always posted more liberally there, but I connect with all my family (including my 90 year-old grand mother) through whatsapp.

There's a real benefit from having a public registry that everyone signs up to.
Yep, even something mindless like candy crush is probably better than social media. But... what's actually missing for a lot of people is actual community. So many of us live in tiny bubbles in big cities, we crave human interaction... so the lure of social media is powerful. It's actually a miasma of drama (if my family is indication) that appears to shatter actual community, both on and offline, sending people further into their increasingly socially inept bubbles. I wish I had solutions to offer. It's a goddamn mess.
WebGPU clustered rendering in PlayCanvas
You can go back 5 years and find all the exact same arguments in the comments on any bitcoin article. It's basically a HN circlejerk at this point and incredibly rare to find something new actually added to the conversation.
I also think investing in gold compared to let's say stocks is a sort of ponzi scheme in the sense of OPs article. So no price point. Until bitcoin intrinsically generates value I'm not putting money in it.
Quantum proof encryption already exists.
There's great reasons not to. Unless we nip this in the bud, we face a potential repeat of the 1997 Albanian Ponzi crisis that brought about the total collapse of their economy. Everyone in Albania jumped in and started participating in a number of big Ponzi schemes. Their finance minister tried to stop them, so they threw him in jail. They then had a civil war about it, and the IMF had to drop in big bags of money. [1]

This is what the maxis are after.

If we don't cut this off ASAP, we all stand to lose.

[1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/03/jarvis.ht...
Iran's armed drone prowess reshapes security in middle east
Ask HN: Is PostgreSQL Your Goto DBMS?
Noticed for me, whenever new project starts, PostgreSQL is chosen as a DBMS.

We don't even consider other DBMS. PostgreSQL has proven it's efficiency even in big tech.

P.S. No offense to other DBMS
If you claim that they knew what they were doing then you must believe that Facebook somehow knows at scale:

1. exactly what content is misinformation and what is not

2. exactly what content creates political division

3. exactly what content harms children's mental health

If you want Facebook to "do something about these" you're asking Facebook (in reality a poorly paid human moderator or an ML model) to become the arbiter of each these for billions of users worldwide. Do you really want that?
Exactly. And the argument crypto = ponzi is so wrong. What about other investment vehicles? Gold? Real estate? Stock market. Come on!
what are her "bad faith implications" ?
> The kind of thing where, for upstream, you’d spend 90% of your time landing a framework just to even be able to implement your feature with the final 10% patch.

I feel this was a fair description of CGroups.
I used to work for a company that automated customer service. While we were trialing with new a client, our ai service responded to a customer: "Hey B**, thanks for reaching out."

To our surprise, the end user did not feel offended at all. In fact, they were happy because we responded instantly instead of the usual 24 to 48 hours.

[Story]: https://idiallo.com/blog/do-you-make-your-customers-wait
I don't know how /r/hn is so out of touch for some tech things
Many/most teams internally using AWS use CloudFormation; an AWS service I was a part of was almost entirely built on top of other AWS services, and the standard development mechanism is to use CFN to maintain your infra. You only do drastic things like "stringing CLI calls" if there's something missing from CFN and not coming out soon enough, in which case maybe someone writes a custom CFN resource and you run it in your service account.

Depending on how old the service is, the ownership of the CFN resource may be on the CFN service team (from back when they white-gloved everything) in which case there are massive development bottlenecks (there are campaigns to migrate these to service team ownership) or more often the resource is maintained by the service team itself, in which case the team may not be properly prioritizing CFN support. There can be a whole lot of crap to deal with for releasing a new CFN _resource_, though features within a resource are relatively easy.

On my last team, we did not consider an API feature delivered until it was available in CFN, and we typically turned it around within a couple of weeks of general API availability.
Twitch, it seems https://sizeof.cat/post/twitch-leaks/#secrets-exposed
AT&T is a POS. They own CNN too. The Republicans make fun of CNN, CNN is controlled by republicans. "Controlled opposition". All the projection the GOP could ever want.
no I did not.