skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> bitcoin was an attempt to replace gold mining and gold transfers

Imagine replacing a valuable material asset with nothing. I get that bitcoin was designed as a hedge against market volatility. But instead of soaring when the traditional market sours it has become a leading indicator of volatility. If you look at the crash of 2020 and the one happening now buttcoin variants preformed poorly almost a month before the market did meanwhile gold is doing what its supposed to.

> however in places where bitcoin is mined efficiently, one could theoretically use those same bitcoins to purchase either cheap (or even green) electricity, efficient (cool) compute, or whatever else goes along with running massive mining facilities

This is stupid, who would burn energy to buy energy? Bitcoin proponents who believe these lies probably also believe in overunity, free energy and perpetual motion.
I sold my $0 revenue SaaS side project for $4.5k
"with no fast charging" --- this assumes you can charge 150mi overnight, which I cannot in the townhome I'm now renting.
Besides drug (a trillion dollar market) and money laundering, is there a serious legal use of cryptocurrency?
But that's because tulips and beanie babies have inherent value.

Tulips are pretty flowers.

Beanie babies are cute toys that you can play with.

Bitcoin is a purely virtual financial instrument. It has no purpose other than to be worth money.
The fact that hospitals are privatized and not owned by the community is IMO the root of the problem.
Money is fungible. There is no rational difference between "continue to hold X BTC that I already own" and "buy X BTC today when I currently own 0 BTC."
A digital wallet that can trade isn’t banking though. Can you direct deposit, pay rent, be fdic insured, etc with that solution?
POSIX shells don't allow arrays, but they can be mimiced with eval. This function will construct a set of related variables that simulate an array:

parr_add () { # $1:array $2:value
eval parr_c=${1}_c
parr_c=$((0+$parr_c))

eval ${1}_${parr_c}=\"$2\"

parr_c=$((1+$parr_c))
eval ${1}_c=$parr_c
unset parr_c
}

I could call this function from a loop that reads the password file:

IFS=:
while read user pw uid gid comm home shell <&9
do parr_add acc "$user"
done 9< /etc/passwd

Then, I could access these "array elements" in a loop:

count=0

while [ $acc_c -gt $count ]
do eval user=\$acc_$count
printf %s\\n "$user"
count=$((1+count))
done

Example run:

$ ./parr.sh | head -5
root
bin
daemon
adm
lp

It isn't that hard to survive without arrays.
I think it's functionally impossible for Bitcoin to hit literal zero. It could someday run on a network of ten hipster tech-history enthusiasts, worth micro-pennies like DOGE in the early days, but it still wouldn't hit zero.

I agree that Proof of Work has a severe scaling problem; which is why I expect Proof of Stake to outcompete PoW (a token with lower transaction costs being inherently more desirable as a store of value). AFAICT PoS scales linearly: as the market cap goes up, the opportunity cost of locking tokens, and the mining rewards, both go up proportionally. It'll be interesting to see if BTC maxi culture sees the writing on the wall, or sticks to their guns to the bitter end; even if they're right that it's a better security model (I'm doubtful), it wouldn't be the first time that "good enough" won the market.

I suppose the biggest reason that we'll never see PoW vanish completely, even if carbon-taxed or outlawed by most states, is the massive capital outlay in ASIC mining hardware, which literally has no other use. There'll always be a desire to recoup that investment, and an incentive to foster "true believers" to maintain demand.
The amount of unnecessary battery that you are hauling around for 400+ range is crazy. If anybody is going to go long range they need to do it via a removable boost battery that you can leave at home for the 99% of your driving where you don't need it. I have a plugin that only gets 29 miles of battery and I go for months of time occasionally sipping at the tank before I need to fill up.
Rational numbers are algebraic so how are algebraic numbers reasonably far from each other? Algebraic numbers are dense in the real number line.
Actually, rapidly developing a startup (as is the context of this website) is one of the best use cases of cloud services.

It’s true: You can set up and maintain all of your own services, create a backup system for them, test it all, and handle your own redundancy. If you have an engineering background, this probably feels natural and will feel like a lot of progress and accomplishment. But in the time it takes to do all of that (usually distributed and interwoven into other activities) you could have been prototyping out your startup. That’s the value of cloud.

You can always invest the effort into setting up your own services later as a cost reduction move. Doing the cost-reduction activities before you’ve even prototyped a business isn’t a great use of precious time in a startup’s early days.
The magic sauce for desktop users is home-manager, which allows declarative setup of your user environment. And rollbacks to previous generations with one command , in the OS or the boot screen.

I use it to set up my window manager, fonts, Vim/VS Code/Firefox plugins, configure all my tools, set up user-specific systemd jobs, ...

I recently got a new laptop and I had my perfect setup in 20 minutes (install NixOS, git clone config repo, add new machine specific config (disks), apply NixOS config).

I appreciate that it's not for everyone , but it is brilliant.
Truth. Parent comment is deeply misinformed. BTC already has more than enough hash rate, and it is entirely independent of price.
>>And if you need that, my -98 Volvo got a little pin on the dash you can press to zero a sub-odometer. It also reset the fuel consumption average. So, ye, no need for spyware.

Not sure how this would work in a PHEV where the car is seamlessly switching between EV and ICE running, or in fact compliments ICE with the EV motor. You need the internal reads from the ECU to know exactly how much electricity/petrol was consumed.

You could - of course - provide that without syncing it externally to any servers and then avoid the whole privacy issue.
I think the author is quite wrong that the nix language is not very good and hard to learn. In fact it's not only the best external DSL I've seen, but also one of the few cases where inventing a new language rather than just repurposing a subset of something already established looks like a good decision to me. In fact, I consider it a marvel of language design. The mix of properties that nix has (laziness, purity, relative simplicity and good syntax for things like path-names, records or interpolation) absolutely makes sense for the problem domain and would be difficult to achieve with something more off-the-shelf.

That is not to say there are no significant problems with it: the lack of static typing coupled with low runtime performance and bad error messages and debugging support means tracking down more complicated errors can be a pain and the laziness can further compound this.

The main big design flaw in nix (as an ecosystem), from my perspective, is that there isn't enough separation between the parts of the build specification that a purely data driven (git hashes, version numbers, license info etc) and the parts that actually need computation (specifying a complex build recipe conditioned on various things). This lack of separation makes it harder than it should be to have tooling to programmatically transform the pure data bit (e.g. to bump the version) and also really raises the barrier of entry. Stuff that should just require a newbie to tweak some toml file often requires messing around with nix instead. There is tooling that has this separation (niv, for example) but there are a bunch of different solutions following different conventions and nixpkgs itself happily jumbles metadata with actual code. I think this has significantly held back the ecosystem. Specifically 99% of users ought to be able to just tweak some toml files to satisfy their needs rather than learning nix. This is starting to improve a bit with stuff like toml files for flake, but it's still not great. I also think the ergonomics of many of the nix command line tools are rather poor.

But none of these issues seems to require significant changes to the core nix language (probably even the lack of static typing). So whilst I think there are significant practical warts, the core design is IMO extremely good.
Preface: EV leasee, believe the future is electric.

>The EV transition will last about 10 years...

>I test drove a Model S in 2013...

And the Model S started selling in 2012 - nine years ago. Would you care to more specifically explain what such a 10-year timeline looks like to you? When does such a timeline even start? Should we include in the "transition" the period where hybrid vehicles were all the rage?

>This is easy, as prices will drop below ICEVs within a few years...

I'd be very curious to see how long "a few years" is to you, and what data you have that bolsters this point.
>If the university is any good at teaching, it will pace the course in a way that at least ⅔ of the students will be able to follow the course.

This is generally true, but sometimes universities assign lecturers who are poor at teaching (e.g. just reading from the slides, or alternatively not putting effort into making the material more understandable). In these circumstances, a more independent approach to learning the subject can be quite helpful (e.g. focusing more on the textbook, and designing a specific learning strategy that's independent of lecture quality).
Unreal Engine 5 Stack O Bot
Windows seems to rely on disk accesses in a lot of critical processes which is why it tends to have GUI lockups and slowdowns under I/O load. Even opening task manager, or just switching tabs in it, while the system is loaded can take a few seconds (~dozens to hundreds of billions of cycles).
Epic Games starter kit featuring a small robot that shows features of the Unreal Engine 5
Sadly currencies rely on network effects even more than instant messengers to be really useful. The fact that most people look at cryptocurrencies just like they were stocks and comparing against a buying/selling price in USD should be pretty clear. I know that people also invest in currencies and gain money on exchange fluctuations but it's more a "side effect" than the main purpose. With cryptocurrencies is the other way round instead.
Unpopular Opinion: Agile is the only way to run Data Science projects
Show HN: Shabdle Is Wordle in Hindi
One should not buy things that one does not need

I love to travel and I have taken many a fun and interesting course to further educate myself post university. And while I certainly don't regret any of it for second, I needed none of them and from a purely utilitarian point of view they where pretty terrible investments.
Facebook Promised Free Internet Access, but Users Got Charged Anyway
You forget to mention the cost of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The cost of electricity, the environment. The cost of securing your assets. I can guarantee you, if a clever goon comes across you in the middle of the night in Amsterdam, and they know you got cryptocurrency assets with you, they'll get them off you (que XKCD ref. of what happens when you get coerced to give away your private key). And I bet they'll be able to smell the hipsters from miles away. Oh wait, these don't frolic around in those neighborhoods in Amsterdam. Cause stuff there goes via (small amounts of) cash, mainly.

Independence, you are very much dependent on the internet, miners, etc. Yes, you can use the tool to avoid detection of a nefarious state actor. But you'd be breaking the local law, willingly and knowingly. That's a risk. At one point, police are going to recognize these sweet 'lil Ledger and Trezor hardware wallets. Furthermore, if a large local economy would collapse, like say in my case EUR, it'd take Bitcoin with it. I admit, it makes sense to avoid currency in small economies in crook countries, but you're choosing for your own benefit instead of the state you live in.

Accessibility, since a lot of people use mobile smartphones, they cannot sync the blockchain to it. Many are dependent on third party like exchanges. Hardly independent of corporations.

Immutability, you can lose your private key and be done with it. If I lose my bank card, I can disable it and just get a new one. With NFTs, these depend on a third party resource. Which depends on USD or EUR or whatever in order to be paid. These also depend on authority of whoever made the blockchain or smart contract.

You didn't mention anonymity, because Bitcoin isn't. Yes, it takes effort, but it can be anonymized. The reason it supposedly doesn't happen is 1) if you are investigator and know a vulnerability to do so, you're best to keep it private for reuse 2) you apply parallel construction instead. But specialists who can do this exist. Its just that they're expensive, so they only go after big fish not Pablo who sends some Bitcoin from El Salvador to USA.

> You can also pay your taxes in crypto in many countries.

(It is called cryptocurrency, not crypto, but yes you can recognize cryptocurrency proponents by the way they call their asset.)

No, I cannot, as Bitcoin is not a currency. I have to pay my tax in EUR.

> It’s 2022 and people still don’t get that.

This kind of straw man is useless.
Funny enough, I decided to play with FreeBSD for personal projects in 2020. I gave up and I am reverting all my servers to Linux in 2022, for the opposite of the reasons mentioned in this article.

* Lack of systemd. Managing services through shell scripts is outdated to me. It feels very hacky, there is no way to specify dependencies, and auto-restarts in case of crashes. Many FreeBSD devs praise launchd, well... systemd is a clone of launchd.

* FreeBSD jail are sub-optimal compared to systemd-nspawn. There are tons of tools to create freebsd jails (manually, ezjail, bastillebsd, etc…) half of them are deprecated. At the end all of your jails end up on the same loopback interface, making it hard to firewall. I couldn't find a way to have one network interface per jail. With Linux, debootstrap + machinectl and you're good to go.

* Lack of security modules (such as SELinux) -- Edit: I should have written "Lack of good security module"

* nftables is way easier to grasp than pf, and as fast as pf, and has atomic reloads.
Light games can often easily be "solved" and quickly lose replayability.
You're often not expected to complete these. It's just comparing to see how far you get, what engineering tradeoffs you pick, how you do vs that other guy.

That's the difference between startup culture and big company culture. Big companies get away with accurate estimates, story points, burndown charts. Work is rounded down to what's accomplishable in a week. Startups just have an infinite blob of things to do and need those who can deal with that.
We purchased a quartz (manufactured) countertop about fifteen years ago. It is robust to the point that you can cut on it and put hot pans directly on it. It looks almost as good as (or maybe the same as if you're not too fussy) a granite counter. At the time, it was significantly cheaper than the "natural" granite counters. But I looked recently and the quartz is now more expensive than granite. So I guess folks are starting to feel the same way you do.
Super interesting, thanks a lot fot the resources!
I think of it as more 'late stage early adopter' compared to a decade ago with the Leaf. When talking to in-laws about our car we need to bring up "long trips are fine, we just need to stop at a Walmart in New London for 45 minutes on our way back" and that does not make an EV sound appealing to them. This is something that will be eventually solved with more and faster chargers, but we're not there quite yet.
Aspirationally, you should be getting to the point where you care less about the underlying technology (you're smart, you can pick up whatever tech they want to use this week), you're paid more because you have the scars and experience that can be better applied to the tech du jour.
Agree. I personally don’t consider cryptocurrencies as currencies and the comment has few points where I disagree:

- Consider them currencies

- Describing the fact of holding positions on currencies for operational purposes as an investment

- Thinking that cryptocurrencies accomplish the second point
By the same logic though, many internet drug dealers only accept BTC.

"Inherent" implies independent of any individual buyer demanding it. Even if the buyer is federal govt.
A Ponzi scheme is a specific type of scam where new investors are lure in with the promise of great returns and portions of their deposits are used by the scammer to pay off early investors who ask to realize some of their returns. The central scammer pockets the difference and eventually runs off with all of the deposits.

Crypto currencies if anything are a bit like distributed pump and dumps, but at that point you're just talking about asset speculation.
A fair criticism, but one that should work itself out as EVs gain more marketshare among new vehicles. Used car prices in general are a little crazy right now due to shortages of new cars, but it won't be that long before used EVs start flooding the market, making them more accessible at tons of price points. Right now most used EVs for sale are very early designs and/or compliance cars which were never that good to begin with, but it won't be long before lessons learned cars are available used. I suspect early VW ID.4 coming off lease in 1-2 years will be excellent bargains, for example. It's a shame VW isn't bringing ID.3 to north america since they'd be even better.

Batteries are also continuing to come down in price and economies of scale are starting to kick in for EV manufacturing, so new EVs are becoming available at more accessible price points.

I think we have crossed the threshold where spending money on a new ICE passenger car doesn't make sense, but I think there is tons of value to be had in fuel efficient used cars, particularly Toyota's hybrids that have bulletproof drivetrains. Chevy Volt gen2 is also an excellent gateway (PH)EV.
I’m no crypto fan but this is just incorrect. Stablecoins exist solely to be stable, look at tether.
This isn't an unheard-of practice in the software world. BSD has often touted itself as the most secure *NIX-like system on the market today. When someone files a CVE, the developers use it as an excuse to powwow, crush the bug or vuln, and then continue claiming to be best-in-breed.

And yes, that's not necessarily the de-facto behavior of a lot of developers, unfortunately. Projects like Flatpak have hundreds of open issues and vulns, with only a handful of developers actually dedicated to working on it. These people often prioritize features over fixes, and they reap what they sow for it.
It's not backed by mathematics any more than gold is backed by chemistry.
Speculating on Forex is gambling, just like speculating on crypto.
With all these stories coming out of Britain of people finding ancient gold coins, I’m surprised everyone isn’t out there searching in their own neighborhoods with metal detectors. Decent detectors are not that expensive.
Because Hetzner and Linode VPSs have fixed disk sizes, while Azure and AWS have basically infinite storage. You use your cheap commodity VPS as a cache, not a source-of-truth.
I don't get it, who is going to pay for the time and energy required to audit everything? I presume the big package maintainers already have eyes on their stuff - symfony etc.

In theory we should always diff upstream package changes - in practice hardly anybody does. There's a trade-off between using OSS code and the cost of maintaining it yourself.

That said I guess this adds an option to the ecosystem that wasn't there, or possible before.
What’s confusing is hospitals aren’t all that profitable.

So where does the money go? Is it going to treat people who end up not paying? Is it going to buy expensive diagnostic equipment?

Where does it go? No one seems to know.
Wow, what a nostalgia! I wish somebody did this for Rainmeter of the early 2000s
Everyone has an opinion on the root of the problem but I’d like to see an actual analysis with the costs and revenues in our medical system to better understand what’s happening.

Does anyone have a good one?
The financials around US hospitals are something most don't understand. I didn't for a long time.

For example, many procedures at a hospital lose the hospital money. They don't cover the cost. Other things cost more and make up the difference.

Another element is that most US hospitals are very inefficient in what they do. In the book The innovator's prescription you can read the technical details on how those inefficiencies happen.
Yep same. For libraries unit tests are great. For applications though I feel the most value writing integration tests and e2e tests. That's what helps capture the biggest user-facing bugs.
I don't want to see anyone around here criticizing how much "work" it is to run Linux after this comment.
Difference is that gold is useful/desirable in of itself. That's why it gained value in the first place.
Alas, this is a transcript only. I wish the voice version was available, too. Well, one can only expect that much from a 2,000 year old interviewee.
On Race, Genetics, and Pseudoscience (2019)
Is there oil in Ukraine we do not know about?
Agreed! I have lots of them in my list, using https://letsblock.it/filters/search-results as a template.
I'm investigating adding presets to this filter (check a box to block the SO / github clones, they'll be added to the filter input alongside your blocked sites).
No.

I'm implying that a currency should make an effort to maintain its value to be considered a currency. The fundamentals of USD are not backed by a trade surplus or by a demand for foreign reserves, as has been the case for the majority of time since the end of the gold standard. In this context, indefinite QE unsupported by economic growth puts USD in an unprecedented position, and is exposed to runaway inflation.
I'm not evading anything, your question doesn't make sense.
How are drone attacks an invasion? So from your own argument, do you consider Israel an occupied country because rockets are constantly launched at it? How about London during the Blitz? I don't think either group would ever consider themselves having been 'invaded'.
AFAIK the elliptical orbit shown is not (easily) possible (source: Kerbal Space Center)
I think they want to show a "vertical" orbit around L2 (where "horizontal" would be earth's orbit around the sun). It's slightly better visible in the youtube movie.
If you are fine with sidestepping the system as intended then nothing prevents you from forcefully replacing the dynamically-linked, shared libc in the nix store.
Actually Crimea is probably the hottest spot for any action, as Ukraine has been cutting the supply of fresh water to the peninsula. They have running water for 3-5h a day.

If war starts, securing water supply to Crimea is one of the first steps they would do.
Normally the customer doesn't care. They will care, however, if something goes wrong during the migration or some unforeseen issue comes up later that degrades their experience.
1. Buy expensive health insurance to cover medical bills

2. Never use it because even though you have no idea what you're going to be charged, you know it is going to be outrageous, even though you have insurance to cover medical bills

What a racket...
At least in my household (and some groupchats) its become like a fun daily ritual, it takes just 5-10 minutes to play and post it, and you can only play once a day.