skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People are already catching a devastating disease against their will, and are already suffering ill effects. Are you beginning to see how all of your speculation about hypotheticals has real world analogs that are already occuring?
You don’t need to completely repay the principal to benefit from that cash flow.
Hmmmm.....what about cobbling together RTG batteries to power a mining rig?
Because it encourages more of the same, and it's rarely completely covert. Often and increasingly, it's racial dogwhistling and just devolves every thread to wasteful, antagonistic and unproductive conversation. You might've heard the line/story about accommodating nazis in your bar.
This is addressed in the article. As is gold, but it doesn't seem like people read it.
To be entirely clear, a company I work with accepts Bitcoin, then ships physical products.
yeah but i’m not going to create a new element on the period table
> Profits aren't paid out from Bitcoin. There are no profits being paid out. That's sort of the key difference. Bitcoin doesn't send you a check if you own it.

That's a pedantic evasion. You're conflating profit ("making net money") with dividends or other rent mechanisms. Selling an investment is colloquially "profit taking" too. And you can only sell, on balance, to those entering the bitcoin system.
No, people expect inflation of USD, devaluing held dollars.
car insurance is optional in some countries like NZ
Marriage and parenthood are separate concepts.
Concatenate all the code into a single file and use vim to regexp search and annotate it.

A good way to get up to speed on a complicated pile of C++ filth.
> Nobody has ever gotten anything useful from a facebook news feed.

Millions of people disagree, and frankly it's not our place to judge what is useful for others. It's not all snark and misinformation.

> The core difference is that while Facebook seeks to keep our eyes on facebook, places like HN actively encourage people to post links to material outside the core service.

But that's just an opinion, that staying on-site on FB is somehow bad. They would argue that they're encouraging users to hold discussions with people they know, highly social and relatively unmoderated.
I feel like there was at least one additional generation of corporate muzak between these two movements, but I am slightly too young to really put words to it. I remember bank and tech commercials being full of xylophones and marimbas around the turn of the century. Think the soundtrack to American Beauty. James Ferraro's Far Side Virtual definitely touches upon it too.
Signal and Telegram facilitate the commission of crimes and the spread of child pornography. Are their authors immoral?
They'll just subtly say you're overthinking it or this is irrelevant to today.

People just have a compulsion to put others down.

Some years later when someone else comes up with the same idea, it's gold.
No it is not a pedantic evasion, with a Ponzi scheme, you get sent money. On a regular legally defined basis. That money has to come from somewhere.

Bitcoin doesn't have to send you a check every month or it collapses.
https://www.usfunds.com/slideshows/the-many-uses-of-gold/

Go to Coinbase and try to figure out how to use Bitcoin to buy something with. All they talk about is Bitcoin as an investment.

A currency can’t be an investment as the expectation that it will rise in value undermines the main quality of a currency, which is to maintain a stable value, so it can be used as intermediary.
Staying power has nothing to do with what the article is saying. Casinos also have staying power, but they're 100% gambling.
I made a sibling comment where I said a company I work for accepts Bitcoin and ships orders once confirmed.

So, in the past month, the customers who paid via Bitcoin... presumably bought it with the intent of making normal commerce-related transactions.
well you had to have something of value that you had to trade for bitcoin. Also in oppressive regimes the act of attempting to leave the country already makes you a suspect.
Isn't that what follower counts are, effectively? In some ways, follower count is even more powerful than karma because it affects how many people see your posts/comments.
You could argue that civilization itself is a Ponzi scheme.

One day, there will be a final generation left holding the bag.
Stolfi has been around the crypto scene a long time, long enough to have gotten a pretty good idea of what motivates people.

The news media did not create the gold rush mentality around crypto, it has been there almost from the beginning. Go and read the bitcointalk forums for evidence, if you want.
That sounds absolutely terrible. Were you ever able to take legal recourse?
Interestingly the known physics of fluid dynamics are more or less limited to viscous fluids. That’s why wind tunnels[1] are still a critical engineering tool.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/factsheets/windtun...
I get alerted to every new thread, and when I'm online my response rate is also very fast. When the message count was under 1,000/week, I used to get an email for every single post too. But if other moderators aren't around and I'm offline, I am out of luck. Shadow-banning can be effective. I also give regulars the ability to sin-bin any post which removes it from view and leaves it for me to check.

Having a dozen reviewers, especially if spread across timezones, would be a dream!
You are not living in an authoritarian country. That's why you think that the shiny chains that you wear are just a nice decoration, because they were never used to strangle you.
This isn't correct. People hold cash for its liquidity. They generally expect USD to lose a small amount of its value over short periods of time, and that is the price one pays for keeping a portion of one's assets liquid.
Because my other comment got flagged. Reposting:

> Hitler came to power before Facebook was a thing. There are periodic waves of fascism. It’s a thing.
So basically he believes bitcoin is a ponzi because bitcoin investors "expect good profits" yet also believes "few if any gold investors have expectations of profits".

I laughed a little, but then I realized he was serious.
The reason to hold USD is that it is one of the most accepted forms of payment around, and the cost/benefit of any other way to store wealth is likely to eat more than the slow rot of inflation.
Bitcoin isn’t exciting because it doesn’t solve very many problems relative to the massive energy expenditure needed to create it. It’s like a fire at an oil well or a gas pipeline break. The arguments for why we should use it remind me a lot of arguments for why this year is the year of the Linux desktop. Bitcoin may be eating a lot of speculation but I can’t buy beans with it.
It's been more than a decade of innovation. Gary Gensler (SEC Chairman) has acknowledged the value of Bitcoin. Lets ignore idiots like Jorge Stolfi. He's no different from the BSV characters...
Ford knows that children get injured, even killed, in traffic accidents in Ford vehicles. Yet, knowing this, they still sell these vehicles and profit from them. Does this mean they are choosing profit over people?
LuLaRoe is a lot of different things to a lot of different people. The fact that it satisfies a certain set of conditions of a pyramid scheme does not invalidate the myriad current and future applications of MLM.
You can offset the inflation with your 0.5% savings account though... /s
hmm… you mean the people who sold the tools made most of the profit …and the vast majority of miners destroyed the environment to lose a gamble…
These figures aren't adjusted for Delta-V, or inflation, but here are some dollar figures for asteroid and lunar sample return missions:

Hayabusa, 2005 - $100 billion dollars per kg

Hayabusa 2, 2019 - $33.3 billion dollars per kg

OSIRIS-REx - 2020 - $491.7 million per kg

Chang'e - 2020 - $104 million per kg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY6aCg5InzY&t=170s

Seems to be trending downward... Who knows if it'll be enough.

I was curious if a similar downward trend existed for solar panels...

"In 1956, solar panels cost roughly $300 per watt. By 1975, that figure had dropped to just over $100 a watt. Today, a solar panel can cost as little as $0.50 a watt."

https://news.energysage.com/the-history-and-invention-of-sol...

So, that's a factor of 600 to get to present costs. Gold currently costs $56,500 per kg. So, $33,900,000/kg. So, who knows where we could be in 50-70 years. Plenty of time to switch the entire global economy to Bitcoin, I suppose!
CDK is a higher-level (and awesome in my experience) way to just generate CloudFormation specs. In other words, you need both CloudFormation and CDK support for features to become available there.

In terms of getting new features fast CDK is strictly worse than CloudFormation.
It means big brother in Korean.
There is no carbon neutral fuel before we have a surplus of carbon neutral energy. Currently, any kWh you use to synthesize fuel could instead be used for something else. It's probably less carbon intensive to keep on burning regular fuel, because it takes a lot of energy to make synfuel.

Of course it's nice that they subsidize R&D for synfuels (we might need them for niche applications after all), but selling them as "carbon neutral" is just greenwashing.
Wait, that's fungible right?

* BTC forks (how many have there been, cause I forget.)

* If the BTC community wanted it to change, they could.

* The 100 other cryptocurrencies created every day.
Thank you for the great article. I would argue, that a lot of the negative side effects you discuss vary due to the country you live in.

Countries who do have achieved a working balance between eco, social and market- economy (some in Europe or Asia) suffer, as platforms like Facebook attack their foundations - a bit like a trojan horse - offering a neutral platform for products and ideas often not subject to the laws, taxes and regulations that make the balance work ...
Blocking ads by accident isn't an ad blocker. I'm glad the "Tracking Protection" feature is there, but it isn't enough.
> Nobody has ever gotten anything useful from a facebook news feed.

This might be far too broad. Facebook feeds have been really useful for me when I use it for obscure hobbies or to buy/sell used expensive things (think college furniture) based on region.
The cars and equipment themselves are also airlifted around the world. The whole entourage is a massive waste of resources.
Considering many of these people advocate for "eating the rich," you don't find it hypocritical that they're... rich?
Hi, I re-submitted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28777589
Ah, interesting! I know quite a few people who took a similar path--started off in the academic math/physics/statistics route but winded up doing programming as a career. Thanks again for sharing the story. "Mathematical functions dancing across the screen" is a phrase that will stick around with me for a bit.
Re: Congress using it like a piggy bank - citation needed.
It's not a question of whether they express their emotion, but how they express it.

It's possible to express anger without burning bridges.
Does signal present you with an algorithmically generated feed tuned for engagement no matter the consequence?
I'm the founder of usegravity.app

I've been dedicated to this product for years and provide weekly updates, daily support and video tutorials. I can't do that for free/cheap hence the price. If I charged less, it simply wouldn't be sustainable for me to provide the current level of service and maintenance.

Also, paying a developer to build the same features and invest the time that I have is going to cost a heck of a lot more than $995. It's not just the development hours either, Gravity has been battle tested in over 300+ commercial products and iterated on hundreds of times to incorporate the feedback from those deployments in the field.
Of course. But the addiction supported by physiological mechanisms (like opiates, alcohol, nicotine, barbiturates, etc.) or powerful psychological one (gambling, risk) is much stronger than just "I am bored, why don't I browse Facebook".
Soon as a payment for CSAM... wait.. that already exists I'm sure.
Hi,

I submitted a Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28777589 after revamping the landing page. What do you think?
Serious question: Let's say I'm using Django or Rails, and I just want to write the code with the ORM. What database am I using that you think makes sense?

I would see an argument that Notion's structure should have made this problem more important for them to resolve earlier in the process (like some document-based DB), but Postgres works well!
Is it not fair to say most investing in Bitcoin expects large profits?
Pseudonymous, censorship-resistent, permissionless, peer-to-peer. Many people in authoritarian or monetarily irresponsible countries use these features to protect, store, and transfer their wealth[0].

[0]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jul/31/out-of-co...
I don’t think this will pass there.
Who cares? Whenever this bull run stalls and crashes, people who don't think this way will sell out thinking the party is over.

Meanwhile, the total number of people who view bitcoin as a permanent allocation in their asset portfolio will have increased drastically, and they'll keep on stacking sats.

Each boom bust cycle operates this way. A minority of new investors become true believers, and the rest of the chaff wash away in the crash.
Reading the parent post, I found the monetary aspect less as some kind of anti-capitalist moralism, but more an observation regarding incentives:

There's nothing wrong with making money. However, when your historical business model relies on leveraging monopolistic positions to make said money, any contribution you make is tainted by your ultimate goals of embracing, extending and extinguishing competition to those monopolistic, proprietary offerings. I simply don't trust Microsoft: anything they present isn't a Trojan horse of one flavor or another; proprietary addons in vsc, all the Github nonsense, poisoned "foundation" governance structures - all of it has the effect of luring developers into doing work that benefits the Microsoft ecosystem over open ecosystems. It is naive in the extreme to assert that just because a benefit exists in any form, all harms associated with that benefit must be ignored.

Nothing wrong with making money from software. Lots is wrong with Microsoft attempting to bamboozle developers out of the rights to their work in a transparent attempt to extend corporate lock-in. When Microsoft GPLs their codebase, I'll take their contributions to open source at face value. They can take donations like everyone else.
Well, if the cost of mining is less than the value of the gold, I’d imagine there’s plenty of incentive.
I don't know, does Ford try to get you drive as fast as possible, as long as possible?
Back to my nasty habit. I said I do not open my mouth unless I know what I am talking about and I do enough research to confirm it. This also means I am constantly checking my assumptions.

Back to energy and electric vehicles. I told you that my models predicted a requirement for a massive increase in energy generation capacity to be able to go to full electric vehicles. I then shared an image from one of my simulation model run calculations. This one:

https://i.imgur.com/wTwm82a.png

It shows a "new energy" need in the range of roughly 900 to 1,400 GW. Unimaginable. Right? That's over a thousand 1 GW class nuclear power plants.

I am delusional. Right?

Well, I decided to, once again, check my assumptions and math. They make sense to me. And then, looking around some more, I came across this from earlier this year:

https://youtu.be/ESIjxVudERY?t=3680

Here you have Elon Musk saying (paraphrasing) "If we convert all of our transportation to electric, electricity demand more than doubles". He goes on to explain that it isn't just about generation, it is, as I said, about transportation as well (which really means it is about POWER, not energy).

So, what does "more than doubles" mean?

Well, let's start with what our current energy generation capacity is in the US:

https://www.publicpower.org/resource/americas-electricity-ge...

As of February of this year, it sits at 1,200 GW.

Elon's "more than doubles" means we need more than 1,200 GW in new energy generation capacity. Interestingly enough, my model gave a range of between 900 GW and 1,400 GW. I created these models about five years ago.

Yeah, I think I know what I am talking about.
CDK is terrible and way too low level for most apps, and worst of both worlds for code/declarative IaC (verbose & cognitive overhead heavy way to try to author code that generates a CF template - that still may not work).

Use AWS Copilot, it's like a reboot of Elastic Beanstalk complete with good CLI, made for the Fargate age and lets you extend it with bits of CF. (https://aws.github.io/copilot-cli/)
Roughly 50% of gold's demand comes from private investors and central banks, with another 40% of demand being driven by (para-investment) jewelry.

https://www.gold.org/goldhub/data/gold-supply-and-demand-sta...
> Do you know how many people use Bitcoin in this way?

Do you?
No, people hold cash because they can get things done on short notice. Like if a storm blows over your fence, you can write a check and have it replaced. If you held stocks, bonds, or real estate, you’d have to sell that asset and withdraw cash to get your fence back up which is pretty unacceptable.

I hold cash knowing full well that I’m bleeding due to inflation, but the versatility is well worth it. That’s pretty much everyone who is holding cash other than a small handful of forex traders speculating on USD vs euros or whatever
That claim has been and is made about all manner of financial instruments and most of that isn't Ponzi either. To be a Ponzi scheme you need the fraud; "it's safe, legitimate, consistently profitable investment backed by high quality equities with little to no risk, and it's going to the moon!" That's a Ponzi Scheme. Bitcoin doesn't claim to be a low risk AAA investment vehicle.
Those are physiological addictions that literally rewire your body chemistry and how your brain perceives reality. There's addiction and there's addiction.
Among whom, and for what? Average transaction fees were substantially above $5 - $10 for nearly a year, and have now settled around $2 - $3. No one was looking to transact in BTC before that spike, and that goes double now.
So if you were paid in BTC, would you keep it in BTC or move much of it back to cash in case BTC plummets?

If it's an investment, no more than 30% of your net worth should be wrapped up in one investment. If it's a currency and you're happy if the price takes a plunge.

It seems to me, as long as the price fluctuates, I would prefer cash because I would be able to buy BTC during the dips.
Lol at most of HN thinking Bitcoin is a ponzi and the fractionally reserved US dollar monetary&banking system is not. It's been over a decade guys, try opening your eyes and your minds or you're going to go down with the ship.
> If the user is allowed according with their contract or law to delete their account they should be able to request that themselves from within the app. This is what I understand from what Apple is requiring the apps to do.

But now you're exposing the huge problem. It goes from "everybody has to be able to cancel their account in the app" to having to be a contract lawyer steeped in the specifics of every business arrangement and know the law in a hundred different countries to be able to determine if you're allowed to cancel within the app.

Then the app reviewers would either have to be lawyers with plenty of time to make an accurate determination, or they'll be getting it wrong left and right. And it'll obviously be the second one. So now what does the dog kennel owner do, or the OP above, when the app reviewer rejects their excuse?
it's as old as android with like 5 orders of magnitude less societal impact and worse societal impact when there is societal impact than android. it's eaten a material amount of all gains in renewable energy basically using cycles to heat the world for what ends up being an O(n) database insert.
Sure you can. Create a new chemical and call it a "rare substance". It will probably get about as little traction as the long tail of 99% of the cryptocurrencies out there.
>The use case of shielding hoarded wealth during a journey to a freer locale is a blinkered fantasy.

A very privileged thing to say. Do you think there are not wealthy people trying to escape the Wests' wars?
sigh...you haven't even begun to understand how bitcoin actually works.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Quantum_computing_and_Bitcoin#Mit...
If you use google or apple photos, they both have visual analysis features. Searching “tattoo”, for example, in my apple photos brings up all the photos of tattoos in my library.
Then, you could maybe select all the matches and export to different folders, run further actions, etc. Whatever you need to do to them from there.
That's not inherently built into the Bitcoin spec. People commit fraud with cash since, forever.
A bitcoin transaction and a bank transaction are very different things.

A bitcoin transaction is settled as soon as the block is mined. Without any third parties or trust involved, and no way to reverse the transaction. While a bank transaction could settle in days and always with some trusted third party.

Try making a transaction over the lightning network (layer 2 tech of bitcoin), it’s instantly settled and almost for free. The whole country of El Salvador is making transactions within the country using this technology and they’re getting remittance from outside the country far cheaper than banks.
I'm not complaining, I'm saying that google is complaining or at least everybody here is treating google like "oh boo hoo look how much work they have", and they shouldn't, they made the choices they made, it's just technical debt.
That's why they are called meme stock, two of them at least.
The entire consumer economy?
Within 20 years Bitcoin will be having a security crisis since they'll have gone through a few block halvings yet their fee revenue isn't growing.
I'm not sure if I'm the only one here but when i read "Dubai ruler hacked ex-wife" I thought hacked referred to chopped into pieces. I don't think my first thought of "hacked" has ever gone to chopping for any other post/person.
> the act of attempting to leave the country

They aren't going to immediately execute everyone who is crossing the border. Even in authoritarian regimes, some people may be able to leave, and borders are not completely shutdown.

And in that situation, for those people, it is useful to be able to carry money, in a way where they do not know that you have it.
In the 90s, the relevant user-facing OSes for computers were MacOS and Windows.

In the 2020s, the relevant user-facing OSes for computers are MacOS and Windows.

(However, to be fair, all the rage is now in phones, where Windows is surprisingly non-existent. Apple's OS is still the other one, though.)
> if the value of a stock really is primarily based on its ability to produce an external source of revenue, it would take 38 years for an investor to recoup the cost of a share of a company

Since a minority of stocks return a dividend, then the holder of said stock likely never sees a cent of company earnings. Time duration to recoup cost of stock by P/E is NaN.

The vast majority of gains from the stock market have to do with inability to invest in new ideas (on both supply and demand side).

https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-publicly-traded-com...
App store was my expectation, but this has probably been in the works for a longer time.
It was memory hungry.

I remember how shocked the computer shop was when I asked for 2 MB of RAM, so that I could run OS/2.

Bad times....
US Dollars would be a wise investment if the supply was fixed but also continued being used as a medium of exchange.
Bitcoin is a ponzi

Bitcoin is fraud

Bitcoin is a bubble

Bitcoin is OpenSource