skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What happened instead was that the technology turned out to be one of the worst threats to global warming since farting cows (yes,yes, i know, ethereum makes it all better)

This has been overstated by critics. It's currently at something like a half a percent of world electricity usage. Which as an absolute number is really big, but as a contribution to global warming it's just not a meaningful percentage. And even ignoring something like proof of stake or Chia, it gets solved the same way as the rest of the problem -- replace generation capacity with non-carbon sources. Institute a carbon tax. Then people will mine Bitcoin using renewables and that'll be the end of it.

> the intermediary- and fee-free part never actually worked out at all (because people need accounts somewhere, sorry, wallets)

It turns out people often want this because they don't want to lose all their money if they accidentally drop their phone in a river.

The key is to make sure that it's still possible to do it without an intermediary, because that's what keeps the intermediary from becoming an abusive chokepoint for authoritarian policies, since any attempt to implement them there would only overtake the benefit of their convenience and cause people to switch to direct transactions.

> bitcoin and others turned into a speculating collectors' frenzy that while technically, perhaps, not as absurd as beanie babies or dutch bulbs, is generally adjacent to such historical fancies.

This was made significantly worse by the design of Bitcoin in particular since there is a limit to the amount of Bitcoin that will ever exist. Which makes it not only not inflationary but heavily deflationary, which promotes speculation.

It's plausible that some other cryptocurrency that limits volume only in proportion to some scarcity (whether or not it's still compute) but has no fixed maximum number of coins would be less subject to speculation and therefore less volatile. And then the lower volatility might cause it to have higher adoption in the long term.
I'm really amazed at these comments.

Every time Bitcoin goes through a major move, the "bubble" crowd comes out of the woodwork, while having done absolutely no effort in understanding what Bitcoin is.
Except Monero. Funnily enough, Monero is the crypto that failed as speculative asset.
>Newton spent as much time on alchemy as he did physics

I don't think that was an act of unbrilliance. It just didn't happen to work out.
Rather balanced article, but like many fails to mention one really important aspect of Bitcoin:

There is a IMO a very tangible market demand for a financial product that allows one to completely shield value from the myriad of value-eroding propositions that have been baked into the traditional financial system to essentially bleed you dry on a long enough timeline.

- "management" fees
- capital gain taxes
- death taxes (inheritance taxes)
- asset seizures (divorces, bankruptcy, random court decisions against you, Cyprus Bank Disaster [1], etc...)
- inflation (govt mandated or otherwise)
- etc ...

No such product exists today in traditional finance, and imo quite a bit of the demand for Bitcoin comes from there.

For example, many of the traditional way to shield your wealth (stock market, commodities, real-estate) fail to be prone to some of the events I list above.

You may not agree that Bitcoin solves all of the above, in which case please list something that gets as close.

The fact that some of the things listed above will be viewed by some as "morally reprehensible" is irrelevant to the conversation: moral or not, the demand still exists.

And for folks who look at Bitcoin for this (shielding wealth) the fact that Bitcoin has gone parabolic in the last 10 years is kind of a nice cherry on the cake.

Yes, if you decide to use BTC to shield value, you are taking a rather big risk (volatility, BTC could be hurt by govt cracking down on it, there will be a huge "event" when Tether finally implodes, etc ...).

But again, please list something that comes any closer to solving the problem.

The above is why I believe people who claim Bitcoin has no "intrinsic value" (a term I consider to be entirely meaningless) are wrong, even using their own definition of "intrinsic value".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%932013_Cypriot_fina...
Scripting manipulation of the AST is something that tooling can make much nicer. That might not exist (yet) for Go, but I think there is a lot of value in making the language easy to understand for tooling. Compare for example the quality of IDEs for Java vs C++.

But this is of course orthogonal to generics, as you can make generics friendly to tooling as well, see Java.
This sounded great, but then I realized that we have a PR based workflow. My issue with that was that I cannot resolve conflicts for all three target branches on the single branch.

It works fine locally, when you just run merge and fix conflicts in one action.

But I need to push my branches to bitbucket/github to go through a review process, so you can’t stay with one branch.

I guess I could run the merge, and resolve the conflicts locally, then push a separate branch to make a PR with for each target with the original+merge commit inside.
Mainstream media is very cautious about causing a mass exodus of their customers. That’s why this whole thing is scary: a random group of people, easy to ignite deliberately, can shift what many people see or hear. That’s scary.
Thought you were summoning the mod for a minute there.
Maybe. I'm just an armchair economist. I don't have quantitative evidence, but you can imagine that the overall degree of leveraging can affect the local-in-time price dynamics and push them into a phase change from a flash crash regime to a `bigger problems` regime. The saving grace to date has been that Bitcoin is a fundamentally financialization-resistant technology, but it still lives in and interacts with the real world, which is financialized. That has crept in.
Things feel different this time (and there is good reason to believe it could be so), is all I'm saying.

When in the past the cute phrase was, "I knew when to pull out because my shoeshine boy was giving me advice" maybe now it's, "I knew when to pull out because George Soros is in" (as an indicator of leverage participation)
>It has honestly surprised me that a bunch of people I thought were smart really think NFTs are a good long term investment.

How is this relevant to a Bitcoin conversation?
The opposite. I care about the"little man" as opposed to those with the wherewithal to mount sustained challenges just because the proposed action "disfigures" their local landscape.

Like Trump vetoing a wind farm because it could be seen from one of his golf courses in Scotland.
You seem to be under the impression they actually watched it.
Yep, that's precisely the scenario which git-move is intended to improve on.

I also recommend that you try out a solution like git-stack to manage stacked PRs: https://github.com/epage/git-stack
US Spy Plane Footage Showing Rubber Duck Shaped UFO Flying 200 MPH
The author appears to be a CCP mouthpiece.

Note three things not mentioned in the article:

- the Sino* vaccines are only 51% effective, so 85% vaccination rate means nothing

- Xi is a clone of Mao, who once said that 50% of the total population dying to achieve a goal was an acceptable loss.

- the CCP is has been sending BRI workers globally, spreading the coronavirus with them.
I use python. I don’t love it but it has a good selection of libraries for what I do. It’s not blazing fast but not terribly slow either.

As for multiprocess, I currently have 150 python process running on the work cluster. Each doing their bit of a large task. The heavy lifting is in a python library but it’s C code. but it’s actually not bad performance wise and frankly wasn’t to bad to code up. I think for my use case threads would make it harder.

Maybe Im liking python more over time..
Intervention by the Central Bank is not a good thing. There are a few economist who are warning against the lack of moral hazard currently pervasive in the Traditional Finance sector. Crypto will be the refuge from aggressive monetary policy going tits up. Aka like in 2008.
Or they could easily just forget all that and selectively refuse to cash out anyone that is not a favored inside participant in the fraud --- as per their revised TOS.
Even if it isn't, if you login to youtube briefly on a computer, you can set it there, then it should be reflected on your tv.
How has it failed?
He also tried his hand at investing, without much success:

https://www.businessinsider.com/isaac-newton-lost-a-fortune-...
Wow, this is so incredible. Thank you!
I daily drive Pop OS on my Thinkpad and love it. It’s just… easy. Everything works out of the box and it’s a nice reliable system for general usage.

I used to be all about Arch and heavily modified OSes refined down to minute detail but these days I just want the OS to stay out of my way and let me get my work done, and that’s exactly what Pop OS is good for.
True, good point.

It appears you may be right to some extent, but a bit of reading indicates dairy farmers to to have their cows birth a calf every one year to 400 days.

Older practices may vary, haven’t looked in to that.
The main performance challenge is hardware not software, it's power management on mobile devices. After a new iPhone will be able to work for a few days on battery, while constantly transmitting data at 10-100 megabits/second, P2P will be good again.

Before iPhone, peer 2 peer tech were doing OK. Then mobile broadband came, and centralized services basically won.

Now we (at least in some places) have mobile broadband of symmetrical 50-100 mbit/sec, yet p2p still doesn't work on mobile. Despite the bandwidth is now good, electricity and thermals still aren't.
> If you want reliable power that will be available but a significant premium over the unreliable version, and there will be a limited supply of that reliable power.

Ah yes. What a libertarian view of the world. The rich will get the power while the unfortunate ones won't even be able to refrigerate their food. Medical equipment will fail. People will freeze in winter. Trains will not run. etc.

Also. How do you propose to separate reliable and non-reliable energy sources? By building a parallel energy grid?

How is this a realistic policy?

> Rationing of critical resources has many historical precedents, it's time we realized that power is not infinitely available at will

It's not unlimited. However, it's not as scarce and limited as you want to make it.
Michael Burry found a specific, verifiable problem with mortgages. That's how he predicated and capitalized on the 2008 crisis.

What specific problem has he verified that pertains to Bitcoin?
In a general one. In a general crash everything tends to drop because everyone is selling assets to cover debts. I can't see crypto doing anything other than drop more than anything has ever dropped.

It would recover later probably if investor confidence is not completely destroyed. Because as we all know, the entire space is still completely without any real world use case and entirely useless other than speculation.
Jones and Tanner created clip mapping, first in SGI hardware, then in software. That's what made Keyhole and thus Google Earth possible on consumer machines. Is the allegation that it was all stolen? They could have invalidated SGI's patents. And no, Terravision didn't run on a stock PC, it ran on Onyx hardware. Plus it relied on an ATM connection! Even then, the demo has a bunch of glitches and gaps, plus the zooming is so slow, all of which doesn't look like superior technology for Intrinsic/Keyhole to copy.
I mean, what is it if not a worse gold? All assets can be roughly divided into few categories: currency, debt, equity, derivatives/bets, collectibles. It's not an equity or debt instrument, it's not a derivative, and it's not a currency as nobody settles transactions in it. It's a collectible (like gold or paintings), with a short history (unlike gold), that delivers zero value for the holder in the meantime (unlike paintings).

(And please spare the tech; people really do understand it, at least to the level that matters)
There is still only one implementation of the protocol and no fully functioning Python API. (Disclaimer: I love IPFS, but until it has better support for programmers who don't want to use Go, it's unlikely to get much traction).
Congratulations! If one is feeling depressed despite simply doing what everyone else is doing, that shouldn't be a time to start asking questions. There is no need to think about the effect one's actions are having. There is no reason to feel guilty for participating in activities that are causing avoidable harm. There is no reason or need to change one's behavior. Drugs, not integrity, bring happiness. Drugs will give you salvation.
>The 10th root of x takes you from a measurement of an 10 dimensional object to the measurement of a 9 dimensional object.

Doesn't it take you from 10d to 1d? For instance, 10^10 is the hypervolume of a 10-cube with all side lengths = 10.
You aren't wrong, but you would think they would then create an excellent podcast player, yet they can't even get simple things like the order of the episodes correctly, and I still haven't figured out how to setup a next queue.

Not to mention that I might listen to podcasts at home and one the way to work, but at work I won't want to listen to anything spoken, but half the time I end up accidentally starting the podcast anyway. That now means I am not using Spotify for podcasts.
https://archive.is/qatlA
> The end-user does not have to worry about the complexity of the protocol. If that was an issue we would have definitely gone rid of SIP and H.323, FTP and other protocols that don’t cope well with NAT and are decades old.

Well, to be fair, we probably SHOULD get rid of SIP and H.323
Services Design
I think you are replying to the wrong post, I'm not making that argument.
I think what you say is generally spot-on and I am conscious of the hard brick wall I am up against in these respects.
Oh, honestly that's way better for the reason you specified. Nice.
Your setup implies hub-and-spoke, does it not? Tailscale on each device is a mesh network.
> Renewable energy is cheap, so it doesn’t matter if you can’t store it efficiently.

What does being cheap have to do with availability?

If there's no wind, you won't have that cheap energy from wind turbines. If there's no sun, you won't have that cheap energy from solar. When you have neither, there goes your energy grid.

> You can connect different climates with high voltage power lines such that if one area experiences low solar and low wind at the same time for weeks at a time, excess power generated from adjacent regions could compensate

Ah, yes. Because "neighboring regions" are immediately adjacent, and have immediate power availability and enough of it to cover any levels of power consumption for weeks on end.
Michael Burry found a specific, verifiable problem with mortgages. That's how he predicated and capitalized on the 2008 crisis.

What specific problem has he verified that pertains to Bitcoin?

And here's another clue (about life and how the universe actually works): It's probably not a bubble if every idiot you meet prattles on about how it's a bubble. Exuberance can't be irrational if it doesn't exist to begin with.
Obviously they should have.

But it's like the Elvis Presley of password crackers.
There are some efforts underway to bring ETH-like smart contracts to BTC, which - if they succeed - will allow all the ETH-powered paraphernalia to happen on top of BTC. But the going is slow.

Other than that, there already are some "NFT's" embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain.

To give you an example of what I mean, consider the Genesis block, which, while its reward can't be spent still has a private key attached to it.

I'm willing to bet that the day the person who owns that key (Satoshi, assuming he's still alive) decides to put it up for auction, the bids won't be zero :)
> a non-dark theme is a must

Why?
You've surely heard about Tor, socks proxies, VPNs, SSH tunnels.
I'm kind of seething at the idea of you expecting me to do work for you and thinking I'd care about your update spam.
> It clearly has no value beyond speculation and the bubble will pop.

Many things have actually no intrinsic value (like art) yet don't lose value over time that much.
> If 5% of companies were coop, you'd at least expect 5% of leaders to be coop, or they control 5% of the market share.

This not how hegemony works in statistics. If you have 10.000 companies and 9.500 are capitalist hierarchical corporations, all else being equal, if you take the top 300 companies by profit (assuming profit is not uniformly distributed), the chances of the sample of 300 having the same distribution as the total 10.000 is very slim.

Think about it this way: Take two normal curves. Align them so that they have the same mean and variance. Now shrink one of them so that it is only 5% of mass of the other. Now go to the right extreme of the unmodified curve (say 2 standard deviations where 2.3% of the unmodified samples are), do you think you’ll get the same proportion of the smaller curve or do you think it will be much smaller?

> why can't coops do the same? consolidate, gain economies of scale, making all of their members better off?

Now this is a more interesting question. The answer is not statistical but sociological, because statistically accumulation of wealth happens regardless of the system, and would happen also if most corporations were worker owned (I believe I even stated it above). However this question is also a bit of a distraction since the claim here is that market share is a poor metric to evaluate efficiency. And whether wealth accumulates in a primerly socialist economy like it does in a capitalist one takes nothing from that claim. A worker owned monopoly earning most of the profit can afford to be just as inefficient as a company earning it’s shareholders the pretty buck.
Facts:
- Things like APIs and coding libraries aside, the bulk of documented interface complexity could be made obsolete in a design phase.

- Blaming users is usually what happens when developers don’t understand why their software is poorly designed.

- Most open source software doesn’t even have a design phase— it just gets built, and the warts get documented… hopefully. And if those warts change, the docs get updated… hopefully. Also, documentation is difficult to write, especially for a non-developer audience. Companies that make products with unavoidable complex interfaces or configurations have departments of technical writers who do nothing but build and refine documentation. Most of what developers consider to be carelessness in reading docs is really poorly written or constructed docs.

- Because of that, reading technical documentation is a skill. Remember the first time you looked at a man page? When you did that, you were probably vastly more technical than a typical end user. Technical documentation is just opaque to most users.

- Most end user focused commercial software is barely documented because it doesn’t need to be. Most end users wouldn’t even think to consult documentation, let alone know how to find documentation. Hell, even in the 90s the very first thing people threw away was the booklet that came with the CD ROM.

- FOSS developers embracing design knowledge can bring FOSS software to a commercial level of usability, which will vastly increase adoption. That alone is a worthy goal.

Nobody has the right to demand anything of anybody who’s volunteering their time. Never said they did. But we who develop FOSS should view usability and interface concerns just as seriously as technical concerns.
Some UX/UI design comment: The screen is oriented to be read from the side - why not from where the user is?
Indeed, the proposal explicitly covers maintaining existing guarantees, which is why I was confused that so many people just assumed it would break them.
Yes. I can't stand that IPFS basically took the Freenet model, stripped out all the anonymity & privacy, and added the weird "interplanetary" marketing push.
Some of the items you listed apply to crypto assets just like regular assets. It’s just the enforcement of the laws hasn’t been as consistent as with other physical financial assets.

Specifically:

“
- capital gain taxes
- death taxes (inheritance taxes)
- asset seizures (divorces, bankruptcy, random court decisions against you, Cyprus Bank Disaster [1], etc...)”

And

> The fact that some of the things listed above will be viewed by some as "morally reprehensible" is irrelevant to the conversation: moral or not, the demand still exists.

Isn’t it more a legal issue than moral? Evading tax is a criminal matter I thought.
> never gone through a major economic crisis

COVID and the massive supply of dollars since last year is not one?
My school's domain admin password was 'school' (later changed to the school's name with O->0 substitution). It's marginally better than their VNC password though, which was 'vnc' (VNC Server was installed on every machine in the school).
> There is a IMO a very tangible market demand for a financial product that allows one to completely shield value from the myriad of value-eroding propositions that have been baked into the traditional financial system to essentially bleed you dry on a long enough timeline.
- "management" fees
- capital gain taxes
- death taxes (inheritance taxes)
- asset seizures (divorces, bankruptcy, random court decisions against you, Cyprus Bank Disaster [1], etc...)
- inflation (govt mandated or otherwise)
- etc ...

Bitcoin does not shield you from capital gains taxes [0] or asset seizures since it's classified as property by the government. At least not in the US.

0: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/19/do-you-owe-taxes-on-bitcoin....
Math does not describe reality, Physics does. Math is just pure thought. If anything, Math is an abstraction of how we think about things, but not the things themselves.
Michael Burry was also famously (and vocally) short TSLA for many years until he finally folded and closed his positions recently. I'm not crazy bullish on crypto myself, but it is pointless to hold the opinion of a few analysts/fund managers above the rest just because they made some good bets in the past. The one thing that the market has shown is that no one knows which way any security will go tomorrow – not Buffett, not Burry and not you or me.
What you're describing sounds a lot like Functional Domain Modeling[0]

You mention "compactness" and "invalid states". FDM places great emphasis on ensuring your data model cannot represent illegal/impossible states. I think this is the essence of what you are describing, and the "compactness" is the result.

[0] https://www.47deg.com/blog/functional-domain-modeling/
Or.. is Goldman Sach trying to spruik the market so they can get out before a crash they think is coming...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28893726
> This just sounds so crazy complex.

It sounds like the market. Hayek was right: we don't need to plan this, we just need to let lots of people try to seize opportunities, and we'll get fairly close to an optimum.

And as I have said elsewhere, the costs are inevitable. Existing plant is wearing out and has to be replaced, one way or another.

What we're arguing about is who gets the money: fossil fuel miners, or entrepreneurs. Let the market sort it out.
Congrats, how did you do it?
You can absolutely get rid of the legal concept of capital. It's supported and encoded by a set of laws. Delete the laws. Whether or not this is the best approach is up for debate.
Do you have this level of indignance against car manufacturers, who also use the existence of public streets to benefit their shareholders?

> What does Google give back to the public in return?

Free, searchable maps and outstanding directions that allow all taxpayers to benefit from all the roads they pay for, instead of reserving certain roads for the use of an exclusionary group of locals.