skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't think my HN problem is quite bad enough to want to quit entirely, but I do want to read it less

For me, social media is a problem when I'm pulling out my phone to use it when I'm on vacation or in the presence of other people.

I have no problem going weeks without checking HN if I'm on vacation, and I don't think I've ever checked HN while at lunch with friends.

By contrast, I check FB more when I'm around other people — it's as if there's a social element to it, and some popularity signaling. If everyone else around the table is checking their notifications, then it makes me look like I've got nothing going on if I'm not checking my notifications also.
Are liquor stores immoral? Owners of liquor stores? Microbreweries? Vineyards?

Something like half of the alcohol industry's revenue comes from people drinking at levels dangerous to their health.
> would allow a province within their country to hold a sovereign wealth fund worth hundreds of billions, or even over a trillion dollars.

This is Alberta we are talking about? If in your hypothetical the Federal Government didn't mess it up the Province would.
fiat here means (roughly) government issued, I think
Dunno, maybe gasoline powered leaf blowers? it moves a problem from one place to another without solving it, wastes valuable energy and makes a lot of noise
What's their reasoning for calling Ethereum a ponzi then?
No but the USD is also inflationary, not deflationary. I don’t understand the comparison.
The fees for Bitcoin are way too high to make sense for citizens in poor authoritarian counties.

The average transaction fee during slow periods is about $5 and it jumps to $20 whenever there is load on the network.

And the lightning network is a poor solution to this because the LN requires a lot of capital to fund channels, something poor people explicitly don't have.

Finally, the fact that Bitcoin proponents have to point to poor authoritarian countries to find legitimate usecases is telling in and of itself. It's basically a blunt admission that the technology is mostly useless in the US.
No, not at all. During my asset freeze, I considered trying to take action against my bank to force something to actually happen and facts to come to light. But I also had access to no money, and and my time was better spent working some cash jobs so I didn't have to lean so much on my friends. And then once my assets were unfrozen, I don't think I really have much grounds for recourse..
The good news is that things like https://github.com/LDNOOBW/List-of-Dirty-Naughty-Obscene-and... exist so getting a source of words to filter is easy enough. And converting numbers to letters isn't too bad.

The hardest problem with the implementation was that with a long list you can't just search for a few dozen inappropriate words (like the Twitch implementation). It would be very expensive to do hundreds or even thousands of checks against every inappropriate word.

The solution we came to was to truncate all the inappropriate words to either 3 or 4 letters and store them in a big set. We then take our generated strings, which are usually 11 characters, and break them up into all possible substrings of lengths 3 and 4. For example, 1a2b3c4d5e6 would be broken down into 1a2 a2b 2b3 b3c 3c4 c4d 4d5 5e6 1a2b a2b3 2b3c b3c4 3c4d c4d5 4d5e d5e6. An 11 character string would always have 16 such substrings. We then check all 16 against the banned set. 16 lookups into a set is pretty cheap and as we have expanded the word set over time (e.g. add a new language) our performance hasn't changed.

One drawback to our approach is that we do have false positives but we did the math and our space was still large enough, the cost of generating a new one was pretty low, and customers never see it so it's just not a big deal to throw out false positives.
The author also fails to realize that #3 of his own definition is not true for bitcoin. Revenues are collected by miners via the transaction fees.

Or is the author going to try to argue that txn fees don't count, and then Visa is also a Ponzi?
>Mining gold on asteroids will likely be more expensive than mining on this planet.

What if I told you they could send asteroids to the planet to be mined _on the planet_ and crash the price of gold?
> You could also argue it lays the foundation for further escalation but that's on whoever chooses to engage in it IMO.

This sounds like victim-blaming. I can imagine neo-nazis using this type of statement to defend someone who yelled the N-word in a black neighborhood.

The truth is that inflammatory language, which GP's quote was, is rarely constructive.
> what applications?

Back in 2010, credit card companies blocked off all donations to wikileaks, even though they had not been found to be breaking any laws.

Yet, people could still donate bitcoin to them.

Censorship resistance, is still useful, even in situations where nobody has broken any laws.
> [2] In addition to packaged solutions, we considered a number of alternatives: switching to another database system such as DynamoDB (deemed too risky for our use case)..

1) Can you please talk more about the risks of using DynamoDB or a similar NoSQL solution?

2) Did you consider Spanner, which is the SQL DB of choice within Google and is available on Google Cloud.

Thanks for the wonderful engineering blog posts!
Please look at this data and then come back and tell me you still think Bitcoin mining is having a meaningful impact on climate change and why.

https://cbeci.org/index/comparisons

I'd be curious to read your thoughts.
Just gave my son my ti-89 for middle school, apparently it’s a big novelty and has gotten him slightly more motivated for math class. Teacher told him to put his name on it and not let it out of sight.
>It's been over a decade guys, try opening your eyes and your minds or you're going to go down with the ship.

In HN's mind, crime is okay if our enlightened government does it.
Is it possible you are not being accurate? That the company is actually receiving cash which has been converted from Bitcoin by a service? Accepting raw Bitcoin would lead to huge problems such as transaction time and price volatility.

Either way, accepting bitcoin is horrifically bad for the environment, and one of the most ecologically destructive things tech companies do. It is not something I would be proud of.
They have a known dangerous substance, so have to check ID, can only sell to people 21+, can't ship across state lines, can't advertise in many mediums, and are heavily regulated. Just like Facebook, right?
If you like that song you will like this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMSdaPTuV8E
It ought to be illegal for a 100B+ market cap company to operate in this way. They can just pour money at the problem until the incumbents shrivel up and die. Hyper fucking bad behavior that leaves the true innovators and people that care out in the cold.

On the other hand, it should be possible for consumers to claim products they own on different platforms by peering a list of their their owned (licensed) products.
https://github.com/dense-analysis/ale/pull/3927
Edward Jenner was hardly the father of Vaccinology. This method was long known in Indian sources.

The best source concerning the Indian method of treatment of smallpox is a report by Dr. John Z. Holwell in 1767 for the College of Physicians in London. This report is an excellent source for understanding the mind of the Ayurvedic doctors of the eighteenth century. [1]

[1] https://swarajyamag.com/books/smallpox
Norway, the prime example of “don’t get high off your own supply” re Oil. Quite disingenuous, if you ask me.

Refer: https://www.ft.com/content/8574bd97-86e2-4665-9192-93dfde877...
> every stock IPO that doesn't pay a dividend is a ponzi scheme

I agree with you in spirit. Stocks that will never pay a dividend (if you can see the future) are worth $0. Most stocks are effectively speculative assets.

The difference is that a stock has a real, legal value: ownership of a company that has cashflows. If that company is liquidated, you have rights as a shareholder. You may also be able to vote on important decisions that the company makes.

Bitcoin is an asset that, by definition, never will pay a dividend. It is a stock that we know with certainty is worth $0. Its only value is speculative.

In that sense, Bitcoin is very much like fiat currency: its value is imaginary and based on how other people value it.

But if we're comparing Bitcoin and, say, USD, then Bitcoin is by far the worse currency because it's deflationary and unbelievably expensive to transact.

That's why, in places with unstable currencies, people mostly shelter their money in USD. If cryptocurrencies factor into it, it's because those currencies are seen as easier ways to transact USD. People who need their assets to be spendable on a daily basis don't hold them in Bitcoin.
Huh, we should move more of those to LED.

But bitcoin uses more than 80 billion.
Only someone on this website would call 122k per year middle class. This is why America is divided. Even if you're the only breadwinner in your household this is solidly above the 85th percentile in income. That's practically the definition of upper class.
By this criteria basically all speculative investments from Pokémon cards to many/most stocks are Ponzis.

Gold is worth more than metals far more rare because of hoarding and resulting scarcity, etc. Historically those who buy early accumulate more value.
It is right under the project name next to the logo.
I used tigcc to write a program that can draw the root locus (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_locus). I had a version that ran in ti basic at first, but it was too slow because it had to solve a polynomial (order 3 or 4) per pixel. It was my way of cheating, because the calculator was allowed in most exams. I considered it not quite cheating, because I figured being able to code the solution should also count.

I also coded up ti basic programs that instead of just spewing out the solution to some types of maths problems also gave the steps. That saved a lot of time in maths exams so that I had more time for the problems that required more thought.
> no way to reverse the transaction

It boggles my mind that people genuinely believe this is a good thing, especially in an ecosystem so rife with scammers.

I get that it's rather integral to the primary use cases of bitcoin, but that doesn't mean you have to pretend it's a good thing when marketing the currency to the average joe as a PayPal replacement.
ArangoDB Series B Funding
Go to a gold exchange and try to figure out how to use it for microchips.

Coinbase has a focus on trading. However, you can use bitcoin to buy things through Coinbase Commerce.
yes, until you "crash the price" by the very act of procuring substantial quantities of it below market value.
By those definitions so is the dollar and real estate yet here we are.

As far as I'm concerned cryptos are backed by cocaine and at a much higher tangible rate than fractional banking the dollar is.
The difference is that both stocks and the general economy produces value. This is what separates them from a Ponzi which is only a redistribution of assets.
Just an FYI. This is from the guy who predicted the death of Bitcoin by mid 2014: https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2014-03-02-ShortHistor...
A casino’s business is getting people to gamble more. Why would you go there seeking info on how to buy things?
It's probably max title length.
Even if this is true (source?) I don't believe it's comparable.

Signal (I know less about Telegram) has no news feed, and doesn't make money from advertisers. It has neither the inherent conflicts of interest nor the history of acting in bad faith that Facebook does.

Facebook makes a lot of decisions about what information to show people, which influences them. At their scale, that's a lot of power, which means they have a lot of responsibility.
> The average transaction fee during slow periods is about $5 and it jumps to $20 whenever there is load on the network.

When people say this, do they mean $5/$20 per bitcoin or per any transaction whatever size?
Indeed, and I don't keep a lot of money for that reason. It's designed to be a relatively temporary store of value. There's no such thing as a guaranteed permanent store of value, because value is driven by markets.
I remember pre 2008 financial collapse when you could call a banker and they’d open an account for you sight unseen.

Now it’s only internet banks that do this. They still require lots of KYC documents to open an account.
Perfect example, thank you. Given the typical wage in Venezuela of late, someone looking to exfiltrate their "wealth" there would be looking at working weeks if not months to afford a single typical BTC transaction fee.

Again, these proposed use cases are absolute fantasies.
Well, if you ask me, I’d like to see an apology for the one-line whitespace change, using !=true, and closing the XML tag without a space.

From the commit which started this whole brouhaha:

https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/commit/cd2cbb807b36dd89b...

That’s some grade A hornet nest kicking right there.

/s
Does regulation make selling liquor to an alcoholic any more moral?
William Shatner, at 90, set to boldly go to space
Bitcoin is a store of value. Why is it a store of value? Because people believe it is, much like gold. You can gesture vaguely at the minor utility that gold has, the ability to be made into things of commercial value, but that's a fig leaf as much as it is to point to Bitcoin's potential use for payments.

Hashrate and mining investment is a reflection of that belief.

Don't take this as advice to buy Bitcoin at 50k.

Normal currencies like USD are, in the end, also based on trust. They're just pieces of paper, and the value is in the belief that those pieces of paper will represent approximately the same thing tomorrow. Trillion dollar pieces of paper could be made worthless tomorrow, but everyone trusts that they won't due to the
dire physical consequences.

Even those currencies, that we consider normal today, were bootstrapped over a very long period by originally representing physical metal that could be redeemed.
Well. Sha1 is not _that_ hard to break. It's a solved algorithm
the graphing calculators are differentiated exactly by being able to do analytical solutions. they run the equivalent of derive, mathematica, and wolfram alpha. you're paying for the software, and similar software for your pc costs more.

in many other countries, they are simply unavailable. in the real world, if you have a bunch of differential equations, you want to not spend time solving them for the hundredth time and work on the actual physics problem.

to give you an example with a non-graphing calculator you seem to confuse the TIs with: why need a calculator for numerical solutions, in your 12th year of school. let's take the multiplication of three 7 digit numbers, and multiply it out by hand. oh, you've done it a thousand times already and it's not bringing value? nah, you should be multiplying them out - the 1001st time will somehow still help you learn.

I know how to take a derivative. I can look up the template it fits into, plug in my equation, and 5 minutes later I got it. This teaches me nothing after the first hundred times. And no, that derivative is not a number.

We have limited time. We want to spend it on learning new analytical problem solving. Not doing repetitive busywork.

>like CS for example
if you are going to compare it, the apt comparison would be a CS degree taught for 4 years only in assembly. Here in the real world, we use tools to not do useless tasks.
I don't know the relative severity, but many countries have some degree of pushback to lockdowns and vaccines mandates. Australia in particular come to mind. This is beyond just a US thing.
You asked for any possible way.

1. Tether defaults.

2. People panic and sell at whatever price they can get. Let's say Bitcoin drops to $10k.

3. All miners that don't make a profit at $10k shut down.

4. With most miner's shut down, block times go from 10 minutes to 1 hour.

5. The fees to transact Bitcoin go up exponentially as people rush to get out. 10 Bitcoin to make it into a block, sure!

6. The price drops further.

7. More miners stop mining.

8. Block times go up so much that it will take the miners YEARS to reach the difficulty adjustment point that normally hits every 2 weeks.

9. Blocks stop being created, and the price is essentially 0.

With China shutting down a lot of their mining, this is less likely than in May. The higher it goes, the more likely that a sudden shock can destroy it all. Eth has shorter block times and would be able to stabilize better. The block fees going up might actually save the system to keep enough miners mining, but I also think they will scare users away from buying at cheaper prices.

I think some of these are a stretch. I think some of these would definitely happen if the things up to them happened.
Amazon engineers are poorly compensated, overworked, abused, and write garbage code.

That's not a formula for winning.

Unfortunately, Amazon has all the money in the world to keep throwing at the problem. Eventually some of the spaghetti will stick to the wall.
Bitcoin is merely a technology. Calling it a Ponzi is the same as calling the Internet a Ponzi. They are merely tools. How one uses ultimately determines the coarse.
Twitch 2FA requires a phone number to enable
Not op but I quickly looked through your link. It's as bad as I thought. There is so need to waste so much energy into a bad database.
So there is bare metal Erlang on the Grisp boards and that's usually a virtual machine. Haven't dug into that at all but seems cool: https://www.grisp.org/

The Nerves project is perhaps a more pragmatic approach that is in production use that I really like which uses a fairly light Linux to get the VM up and running: https://www.nerves-project.org/

With Nerves you mostly write Elixir or Erlang to build your device functionality.
The speling didn’t go as planned
Monero does solve these issues though.
this is not an accurate portrayal of refugees. i can’t be bothered to look for a source atm, but the first wave of refugees out of syria that caused a panic in Europe were not poor, unskilled laborers - they were middle and upper class families who could afford plane tickets. It costs many thousands of dollars to cross borders illegally by the way, so you’re likely to exhaust your savings trying to escape whatever you’re running from.
https://archive.is/HfnQf
That is the average fee across all transactions.

Transaction fees are per kb of data so more complex transactions pay more. The amount transfered is irrelevant.
WhatsApp doesn't have a news feed or advertising either, and people don't exactly seem happy with it. While there are some issues from FB (the TOS scandal), the biggest issues are inherent to the platform (fake news in IIRC brazil, the genocide in myanmar).
They could require it be stored with a reputable escrow company.
How can Signal with absolutely no user data tracking and no algorithms be compared with a product that shows algorithmic feeds?
Explore and analyze Elasticsearch data with Pandas-Compatible API
>>>but it begs the question: where are these refugees with substantial wealth they are looking to exfiltrate? Typical refugees are emigrating from locales where they were earning dollars per day. The use case of shielding hoarded wealth during a journey to a freer locale is a blinkered fantasy.

African migrants trying to cross the US southern border, on the low end. Airfare from West Africa isn't cheap. In this article[1], one migrant says the trip had cost her $5,000. It takes some assets to pull that off, and some of that is probably kept on their person for the duration of the journey. A microSD card in a condom in a....sensitive location....is not likely to be detected if/when narco-smuggler cartels shake you down for cash.

At the high end....government kleptocrats fleeing Afghanistan. Supposedly President Ashraf Ghani and his family had to leave piles of cash because they couldn't carry it all when he boarded a helicopter.[2] Too bad they didn't convert to stablecoins and store them on a wallet on a thumb drive.

[1]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-africa/u-...

[2]https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/russia-says-afgha...
Sure, but...

The story we know was written by him. I wonder what the trolls would say, or the dead dragon, or the town that his actions helped destroy?

Is he a hero, or, just the guy who wrote it all down?

And just when something really important happens, he throws a powerful weapon(the one right) at his nephew and goes away to retire!

A life lead with riches (gold from the trolls), a ring granting him extremely long life and health, and yup.. off he goes, first sign of real trouble.

Poor Bilbo indeed!
Moz Corp is much bigger than the foundation. The tail wags the dog.
...so that's how you get a lot of work for nothing... people, please never sign something without at least clearly stating what you think it means. A sneaky way is printing the document and sending it back together with a statement of how you interprete it - best on the page you should sign... A simple (see email 211007) below your signature often is enough... if you did not sign on paper but just by clicking some buttons, your position is even better, especially if you are in a non us legislation and there is no translation...
Per any transaction, regardless of size.
The Clojure debbugging way with scope capture
I think you'll find most socialists don't care about people having a few million, the issue is those hoarding hundreds of millions, or billions. Of course, I can't speak for everyone.
Can confirm this. I offer some crypto options to pay for my service online. Not BTC because the transaction costs are too high, but Bitcoin Cash and the like.

After about a year, only about 0.3% of checkouts were done with crypto. Even manual bank transfer is used magnitudes more often.
Well, insurance industry is a negative sum game (zero sum minus costs of running it) in which all the buyers expect to lose money and all the sellers make it. Still, it's a good idea to buy insurance in some circumstances as utility of money curve is different different for the insurance buyer and insurance company. Such transactions are good for both sides (as they maximize their utility even though the buyer losses in pure money terms).

Now apply that to Forex. There are players who needs to hedge against target currency devaluing and others who are willing to take the risk premium. That you can gamble on it if another matter but then again, you can gamble on many different otherwise useful financial instruments.
I mean sure, some people make it out of North Korea. A lot are publicly executed to be made an example of too.

I think you fail to understand the power of a true authoritarian government, particularly if they can monitor and limit your access to the outside world.

* Use a VPN, you're guilty of Treason.

* Use a currency other than the North Korean won, you're guilty of treason.

* Use an electronic device other than state sponsored devices, you're guilty of treason.

All executions will be recorded for posterity and broadcast to the people as a reminder of the power of the state.
Most Ponzis and pyramid schemes are built on something that has a legitimate use.

After all, the eponymous scheme by Charles Ponzi was built on legitimate postal reply coupons.

So a list of non-monetary uses for gold is not evidence that its monetary uses are not Ponzis.

Most financial instruments are at least Ponzi-adjacent in that their value is derived from the expectation that other market participants will pay more for them than you did.

Whether it's real estate or equities, precious metals or cryptocurrency, profit requires an infinite cycle of growth that must collapse at some point.
Custodial wallets are also one solution to that. I'm not saying that BTC fee problem isnt real, but there also are ways around it.