skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've gotten this feeling, ever since about 2008 or so, that the map that is asset prices is slowly, inexorably becoming uncoupled from the territory of the physical world.

This economy-scale decoupling is the dual of each and every one of our very own psychological uncoupling from our own physical worlds, which has occurred because of the computerization of work, socialization, and life itself (the shimmering neuralink dream).

Cryptocurrencies are what happens if you completely decouple the asset price from the physical world. To create the "value" of cryptocurrencies, we purposefully do nothing at all. The asset is valuable only because of the flow of entropy. Not the flow of energy (which generally has some physically useful function). But entropy itself -- a thing that exists only in the "map" of information, not the "territory" of the real world.

Typically, moving entropy around is useful to us, because it actually corresponds to changes in an underlying physical process. Like, your job doing excel spreadsheets for warehouse inventory management is just changing the flow of entropy -- to you, it is decoupled from the physical world. But there is a link to the physical world: when you change a cell in a spreadsheet, so too a physical good moves somewhere else in the warehouse.

With cryptocurrencies, not so. All this entropy is moving for the sake of itself. It's all virtual -- none of it can be coupled with the physical world (by design! if it could be, some physical force could go in and take your crypto-coins).

Now, here's the delusion: unfortunately for us, moving entropy around is actually still coupled with moving energy around. It actually has a tremendous physical effect on the world around us.

Something I've noticed about cryptocurrency people is that they are very, very plugged in. The evangelists never have a physical job; always a computer job, and they are always online, and believe in being online to the greatest extent possible. And I think, actually, there is a very obvious reason for that.
Thanks! Exactly that! I always tell that customers and their response is:

-But google/facebook/amazon...

-But uptime needs to be 99.999

-But everyone uses cloud

Most businesses are not a trading-market, have less then 100 peoples (aka you are probably not another amazon), and no bonus using a cloud/kubernetes etc.

But it's the same old story, in the 00's i used the ~same arguments against buying OracleDB ;)
Your proposal doesn't really make sense from a technical or financial perspective.

Technically, most games aren't interchangeable with assets. There's a wide array of asset formats and bespoke optimizations. It's very hard to take something from one game to another unless they share an engine.

The alternative is the second developer would need to make a corresponding asset for every other one. Though they won't get financially rewarded for it and there's no guarantee that the users will buy the future assets from them instead of elsewhere.

I see this suggestion come up a lot in crypto circles and it's almost certainly always from people who have no experience with game or other real time development, trivializing the cost of asset creation.
Oh, that's actually really cool that you've supported them, I respect that. I know they're not fully anarchist but there are anarchist elements within their society, as you say.

There are a few different economic models within leftism, including market socialism, which still involves trade but replaces corporations with worker cooperatives. Obviously that's incompatible with anarchism but they can exist alongside each other and mixed together - these ideas don't have to be purist.

> So I bought it and now what if I need it 24/7 to run PnP on boards that pay for my family? You're gonna tank the economy by repurposing capital used efficiently and profitably and instead just open up for somebody to just take over the production capability I paid for? That's not consensual.

Again, under an anarchist system you wouldn't need to pay to feed your family. Imagine for a moment, our current society but instead of everybody withholding their goods with demand of payment, these goods are just available to those who need them. No currency, no trade, just sharing and cooperation. Operation of machinery can still be restricted to the qualified through a syndicate (kind of like a medieval guild) but the labour is performed cooperatively. You could still do the job you love (if you love it - otherwise, you're free to explore other options), your family would be fed, you would have a house and so on. I wouldn't be in favour of any economic system that increased the amount of human suffering. I like people, I have a lot of empathy.
If you're accelerating towards an orbital object you are by definition not in the same orbit as the target object. If you were you would be moving at the exact same speed. This effect makes getting yourself close enough for docking all sorts of tricky if you don't know what you're doing. Once you get close enough (like in the linked simulator) you can mostly ignore the problem since the effects are small given the relative speeds involved.

I can heartily recommend messing around with orbital maneuvers in KSP to get a feel for the problem. It's not exactly intuitive.
5.25 inch.

Damn you 47 year old brain! Too soon for dementia, behave or I shall poke you with a Q-tip!
Or if the earth gets hit by an asteroid? How do you take care about your various online accounts then?

I would just pass a note to my relatives with my passwords and they then may delete accounts, or not. I rather care about my real life to be honest, and not my virtual legacy.
Between this and your other comment:

> The point of interviewing is to make judgements. There is no irony. This judgement is: people who assume the worst of others are toxic to work with.

Whew.

The saving grace here is you're so cavalier about this sort of borderline paranoia and megalomania.

It tells me you won't hide it well, and the shrewd candidates will run for the hills.
> It almost never takes a decade to see the use,

If you study the history of technology, its ultimate impact is never manifest within a decade. It took decades for the Gutenberg Printing Press to spread around Europe and centuries for the consequences to see be seen (Protestant Reformation, newspapers, birth of the modern media, on and on.) This is the case for pretty much every other invention.

> Crypto doesn't really solve a problem that needed solving

Again, this may be because the problem hasn't arisen yet or isn't obvious yet. We have only just begun the era of networked communications.
Sure, if it were agreed upon, backed by some real value and not solely speculation, and rather stable.

You can get pretty close to that today by just having an online bank account that can issue checks(to yourself).

I think the problem isn't necessarily the idea, but the implementation (all 25k of them).
This is a great way to incentivise people to work outside of business hours.
That’s an option.

The other option is that the price of the flight, which should include the damage it does to our planet, gets spread out to the 7 people on the plane.

So they could still fly, but at 20.000$ instead of 200$.

At that point it might be much cheaper for that plane to be canceled and for those 7 people to fly on a smaller private plane at 1000$ per person, doing less damage to the planet.

IMO any environmental damage tax should be required to be passed at least partially to the actual person being transported.

That makes it obvious to the passengers why flying 7 people on a 747 is wasteful.
I haven't seen much written about the impact of porn on technological advancement. I guess its rather a dark, parallel history that no one really talks
about
Lenovo’s 2022 laptop lineup is ready for the year’s video calls
Impressive work, congratulations! Do you know if any organization is already using it somewhere? What were the biggest challenges when you took up this project?

I'll try to run it with podman, it's interesting to see more container runtimes.
Kazakhstan internet shutdown sheds light on a big Bitcoin mining mystery
You can pick up the basics of Python in an afternoon.

Perhaps the strangest bit for people used to other languages is signifiant indentation. Some hate it, but most people seem to adjust to it OK.
Would suck, for sure.

In fact, for a couple of quarters, I was asked to name the lowest performer on my team, and then that person got ranked as one of the lowest performers across my manager's org, and it put me in a shitty situation as a manager because the engineer wasn't actually at PIP stage yet (and we didn't ever go to PIP) but it basically soiled their chance of being promoted for however long the other managers will remember seeing that name on the "low performer" list.
Ah, this brings back memories of a friend getting hold of some pixelated gifs and bringing them in on a 3.5" floppy, the anticipation as we copied them over in the lab, then the mixed excitement and disappointment on trying to load them up at home and finding out half of the files were corrupted, followed by in-hindsight-amusing panic on the discovery of the Recent Documents list. :D
I am glad we are talking about crypto pro/cons but this article was a huge miss imho.

The arguments against are these beaten dead horses that many within crypto know already and frankly not well versed.

NFTs were an unenforceable joke, integrating the physical world and the digital world doesn't exist (yet?), there are alternatives to the PoW model in use, legal aspects and oracles in the Ethereum network need to be addressed still...what about the DAO reversing the hack which was essentially a loophole in the contract. When loopholes happen in current legal systems it's frowned upon and demands precedent. How about the ridiculous pump and dumps, the toxicity that is speculation amidst many other things.

Governments didn't pop up in one day whole cloth and this will take iterations as well. There is some evolutionary approach to things where what "theoretically works" is tested in reality and deduction is provn out against induction.

There is more transparency in some ways, a lot of confusion in regulation, and misinformation galore. Look no further than the current dealings in Wallstreet to see that existing systems are not currently solved with digital money having been tested for decades now.

I think there are many deserved "good, bad, and ugly" articles to be written but this one was lacking in depth, context, and what I feel is missing most frequently...contrast
How does this enable new people to play? The rich can still gamble the most and come in early to earn the biggest rewards.

The poor still take the highest risk. As the poor buy more into it , the rich get richer as well. Maybe the poor get richer but how much money can they lock away? What stopped them from investing that money in the stock market before crypto was around?

I fail to see how this creates a new economy. It's the same economy just wearing a new skin. The players are the same players. The winners are the same winners with the same luck of making it big or not to inspire others to get into the hype.
I believe that there are no such pens, because I have also searched without success.

For large writing, with chisel point width of 1.0 mm or larger, there are many felt-tip pens from at least 4 or 5 manufacturers, and also fountain pens with wide nibs suitable for variable-width lines, e.g. Pilot Parallel pens or Rotring Art pens.

For small writing with variable-width lines caused by nib shape, like you want, I have seen only dip pen nibs, which are inconvenient for casual usage.
Do you realize how tautological your argument is?

The tech is interesting, but the full impact of the invention isn't yet discovered. Focussing on the scamminess of the loudest players in the current tech environment is unfair to the tech. But you can't critizise the current state and environment of said tech, because it's full potential hasn't been discovered yet.
I can imagine. It feels like these transformable living solutions require you to adopt an ultra-minimalist approach to everything. Can't have a stray plant or fuzzy carpet. You have to obey the intricacies of the furniture.

In some situations and for some people I guess it pays off. Seems like a hassle to me.
sure, as a piece of engineering it sucks, but think of it as the setup for a slapstick comedic scene that has not yet paid off.
Any characterization of corporations as neofeudal shows a fundamental complete and utter ignorance to what feudalism actually is, in a way that only communists could manage to get so wrong.

Feudalism is a system of rule by networks of oaths and obligations, with military service as the top links. Its practicioners also historically depised merchants and traders from the top and bottom of the hierarchy. It aims for lifetime oaths.

And it is capitalism which cannot accept its ideological death, not communism? The one who proclaimed its inevitability loudly only to die in a single human lifetime, and is preoccupied with 19th century writings and works from unquestioned imperatives rather than experimentation? I think there is some major projection going on here.
Yes, PoW is the major problem here.

I just don’t agree that it can be dismissed as easily as the article does there, by saying that you can choose not to use it.

We only have one planet we share and other people’s choices are also important.
I guess it's a technicality whether the tx fee is part of the donation or not.
Bitcoin's hashrate has dropped by 50% a number of times and no transactions have been undone, censored or reordered. This is pretty solid evidence that at least a large percentage (if not all) of the energy spent by bitcoin is wasted.
Gentoo Linux 2021 Review
Bitpay accepts plenty of cryptocurrencies with very low tx fees.
I love the scheme of repeatedly building up towards the answer to one of the central questions of the subject and then yanking the rug, digressing into some backstory of a minor personage or historic aside to pad out another page.

And by love I mean absolutely despise.
Starlink offers full duplex lines compared to classical satellite connections that require a secondary line for sending data.
Where did I say you couldn't criticize it? I just said that making final declarations is foolish, and that criticisms of the technology are often just criticisms of people using it.
Oh man, I don't want to be the guy on call during Creeper's time!
This assumes that higher efficiency leads to lower total consumption of energy, the data says otherwise. [1]

It is interesting that "saving energy" has been established as a dogma that does not even get questioned. I guess the propaganda by big energy monopolists about "carbon footprint" was very successful.

Currently nearly the whole world is running a economic system that is based on economic growth and leads to maximizing resource consumption. Sure using resources efficiently does increase the value society can gain from them but not total consumption. If you stop Bitcoin, people will find other means to use the excess energy.

The reasonable way to solve this is to make energy PRODUCTION stop using fossil fuels anymore. Simple as that. That is why we need to keep talking about our carbon footprints so we don't take any action that might go against the interest of certain corporations.

[1]
> The data and
analyses presented here show that historically, over long time periods, improvements in
efficiency have not succeeded in outpacing increases in the quantity of goods and services
provided.

https://web.mit.edu/2.813/www/readings/DahmusGutowskiEfficie...
Slightly offtopic:

How is the state of art for digital pens and hardware?

Are they slowly about to get to the level of real pens?

Because I would much rather prefer doing straight digital notes, but the combinations I tried out(some time ago), were not really satisfying. Which is why I also still am using a real pen. But with the right tech, I might switch, even though I am aware, that the real feel of a pen on a paper will likely not be achievable.
It took years for the printing press to spread around the world in a time when that was difficult for any physical object to spread around the world.

It did not take years for it to be seen as incredibly useful and it was clear fairly early what the use for it was.

Saying the problem isn't obvious yet is bizarre. The printing press's use case was apparent immediately, even if the extent of its impact wasn't.

You're conflating impact and problem space conveniently.
And you can tell them all of those are possible, but they need to have a massive budget, not just for the monthly bills but also to hire experts to set things up with those constraints.

I worked at a company once that, from higher up, said that they had to have five nines of uptime. We had some really good cloud engineers there (one guy set up a server / internet container for the military in Afghanistan; in hindsight he said they should've just sent a container of porn dvd's), and they really went to town. For that five nines uptime, you're already pretty much required to set up your infrastructure to use multiple availability zones, everything redundant multiple times, etc.

Of course, the actual software we wrote was just a bunch of CRUD services written in nodejs (later scala because IDK), on top of a pile of shit java that abstracted away decades of legacy mainframes.
Just like that, “fix” production?

Wow, glad to know you have the global carbon emissions problem in hand!

Back in the real world, until we have actually got that problem in hand, PoW cryptocurrencies are a huge extra amount of consumption, where we already have more consumption than green energy producers can keep up with. And now crypto miners are bringing decommissioned fossil fuel plants back on line in some places, purely to service PoW.

The planet burners are the buyers. Sorry.
I went down the rabbit hole of cross platform dev and opted for React-native-web because I already knew React. I sure hope Flutter is a better experience because it just made me want to jump jobs to a native gig.
If you are talking banks and checks, you are missing the point entirely.. In 2013 the Cyprus government confiscated 47.5% of all bank deposits above €100,000. Let that sink in. Banks are the last place you want to trust your life savings.
The quality problems often come from the poor proxy. Money being fungible means that the rich get higher weight in determining what's considered valuable. In this marketized system, who will value journalism - especially the kind that people in power need to hear, not what they want to hear. If the rich want to suppress a fact, they can buy fake news - and because price = value, the fake news becomes the new truth.

Quality of content is not quite "subjective" in general. Perhaps in entertainment.
https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1478883199510265857: look at /etc/sudo.conf + askpass.
I've written a comment in a similar previous thread on why bitcoin / PoW's energy usage is different from other seemingly wasteful uses of energy. That was over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29367100

Not to repeat it in full, but the short of it is that bitcoin's usage of energy is not for the amount of energy, but because it must expend a certain economic value of energy in order to keep the network secure. If energy becomes cheaper or more efficient, bitcoin must burn more. Bitcoin's energy usage has an adversarial relationship with efficiency. Practically every other use of energy does not have an adversarial relationship, and will accept the same total amount of cheaper energy to do the exact same work with no complaints.

A helicopter will not require twice as much gas to fly the same distance if we happen to make gas twice as cheap.

As a result, yes I think we should single out PoW.
What are you serving on a static site/ blog worth 80TB? I also said CDN makes sense for huge files. Please don’t nitpick.
Before this, there was line printer art; see "The IBM 1401 mainframe runs 'Edith'": https://youtube.com/watch?v=LtlrITxB5qg
Having a "best pens" article and not mentioning the Caran d'Ache 849 either Fountain or the famous ballpoint pen somehow invalidates the article for me.

For technical staff in the field as well as in the office, a Caran d'Ache 849 ballpoint can be used for years and years, as refill tubes are available for decades.
Thank you, I was searching for the word to describe it and Tautological is exactly it.

The "we haven't found a use case yet but it'll happen so keep doing it till a use case is found" arguments are so common and nonsensical
Because money is a different weighting scheme than costless engagement. Money weighted things behave differently than vote weighted things. Whether or not it will be better remains to be seen, but it should be interesting.
Reminder: an interview by Alex Jones Lite with scientists isn't science.

Regarding Malone, he said things like kids don't have strokes[0] and basically all of them are caused by the vaccines, even though paediatric stroke is among the top 10 causes of death in children[1]. There are a lot of wacky things in what he said in direct contradiction of available evidence while providing no evidence, or cherry picking it. Personally I found the transcript painful to read, and basically gish gallop in podcast form.

Interestingly, most of his controversial claims don't seem to make it into publications, despite having been prolific during the pandemic[2]. Is the peer-review process censorship, too?

[0] https://nehls.house.gov/posts/joe-rogan-experience-1757-dr-r...

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29695585/

[2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=Jf1bApYAAAAJ...
I find the opposite:

1. The HN frontpage updates more slowly than Reddit

I don't live on the reddit frontpage, I hangout out at /r/learnpython/new and a few similar subreddits. There's much less chance there of disappearing into a twisty maze of little passages, all alike. That's what youtube is for. I only scan the 30 entries on the HN "new" page a few times a day.

2. I don't feel compelled to engage in the Reddit karma game.

Never understood the karma points thing. Anyway, on /r/learnpython (and similar) it's all about helping others. A single karma upvote is nice but relatively rare. It's better to get a simple "thanks" comment.

If anything drives me away from reddit it'll be the constant effort by reddit management to "appize" the platform, making it more annoying for people to actually use.
> Is that really what's holding this idea back, though?

I personally don't believe it is, but some people seem convinced. Also, there's a lot of money to be made for the early entrants who are promoting this idea.
I've just read the intro, but imo the PRIMARY reason for the hype is simply money. People got rich off of crypto. Rich people that want to get richer simply pay people to hype up crypto (and stonks). And like the 2016 elections, this hype ended up having a snowball effect with people who do not get paid for it hopping onto the hype train to generate more hype.

I'm not saying crypto is some fad or whatever, I'm just not convinced there's anyone into it that doesn't just want to get rich.
No mention of Sam fox strip poker on the zx spectrum in 1986. By the time 16 machines came along and disk swapping was common things became quite convincing. High chance of getting a virus that way though.
OK I'm curious, this is computer graphics crap like z-buffers (I would probably say form a binary space partition tree, color all the polygons one color and a default background as black, rasterize the view, and then trace the outline)?

Or is this some trick?
Again, if you had made any declarations on the printing press a decade after it was invented, you'd have missed pretty much its entire impact.

There are clear use cases for blockchain which have been laid out ad infinitum by other people. There are also downsides. This makes it pretty much the same as any other technology, e.g. the combustion engine.