skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People can want something without wanting it as "currency". GP is indeed correct that nobody wants a currency whose value fluctuates by 50% over a few days; what the people who want bitcoin want is a high-risk speculative investment that has so far dodged the gatekeeping and restrictions that the developed world tends to place on other high-risk speculative investments.
Keep in mind that size tends to lower intelligence! ;)
I'm an electrician, definitely not a plumber. But when I needed to redo my parent's irrigation system, the reverse analogy served well enough.
Glad to hear it. And no need to read what I wrote as criticism. It's just me deciding I'm not in the audience for it. It sounds like you're clear on who your audience is, and generally that's the only criticism you should care much about.
If the price of bitcoin rose to $1 million, but the price to mine one and associated transaction fees stayed at, say, just $20k in electricity costs, don't you think lots of other miners would beef up their rigs to mine bitcoin now? After all, that's like $980k in free money!

Of course, they would beef up their rigs (spending commensurately more in electricity), and the required hash difficulty would go up to keep the mining speed at a block per 10 minutes.

Another way to think of it, is why do you think the electricity requirements of Bitcoin are now the output of Argentina? Years ago they were a teeny fraction of that. As Bitcoin became more valuable, the competition for mining increased, so the hash difficulty adjusted to ensure the new block rate matched the higher wattage miners were willing to put in to increase their hash rates.
"I never understand why do people think the government is going to do such a great job at running things." Because if designed competently, with audits/transparency baked in, it can.

Plenty of agencies in numerous nations have proved this out, but folks continue to have onanistic John Galt fantasies instead.
I think the SQL DML is far from optimal but it mostly works, even though it is quite difficult to use for some cases. It will be with us for a long time.

SQL DDL, on the other hand, is broken as a standard because it assumes implementation details of the database engine that were widely true when it SQL was designed but are nonsensical or increasingly divergent in modern database engine architectures e.g. the many tacit assumptions about index properties.
After having spent weeks learning nix, I'm convinced that docker is simply a better tool for most use-cases of nix.
It's funny how Bitcoin advocates say "widen the chart" to point to the rise since 2012, like that's the slope it will keep rising at. Sure, if my great-grandfather bought General Motors in 1908 I might be filthy rich now, but does that make GM a good investment today?
>There are clearly _some_ novel ideas in the crypto space

Depending on what you mean here, I don't agree. Every novel idea I've seen coming out of cryptocurrency/defi can be generally applied to distributed computing and is useful in other fields or with other forms of finance. The ideas that are explicitly dependent on cryptocurrency appear almost exclusively to be the really terrible ideas. (NFTs, smart contracts, DAOs, etc)
that is a really good point. What coding language/library is best at representing fractions as opposed to floating points. Even though there might be overhead storing the numerator and denominator, it would prove useful with this problem.
Don't forget to compare how much gold you could buy with each 1 week ago.
We can't completely discount a price rise due to inflationary policy, but we most certainly can discount the portion that's over the 5-7% that most goods have seen — so, like, something like 5% of the increase due to monetary policy, and 270% due to other causes.

Is that ridiculous? Hmm. Maybe try again. We can afford to be generous, after all! Let's say that it's 10% due to monetary policy, and 265% due to other factors.

... Nope, we're still not really there.
Don't be so negative to other people's hard work.

I mean, a big team of PR specialists probably worked day and night to bring you this ;)
"The Cloud is bad, instead rely on this service that happens to have a pretty good value free tier called.... uh... Baremetalflare?"
For many companies, 3 hours of downtime per month are no problem at all. So they can pocket the cost savings because they don't need the reliability that you pay for with a cloud.
I am all-in on nixos. I've also experienced those problems, but I for one am glad that those don't work. Let me explain.

My use-case for Nix is to make my build system so reproducible that, if I get back to the project in five years, it should still compile, and if I give it to someone else, they should be able to make it work without any issue. Like the install steps for them should be as simple as "Install nix, then run `nix build .`". If that doesn't work, then I've failed.

About your issue. It's unclear what it is given you give so little information, but I often run into similar problem of native bindings in NodeJS and Python not working failing at runtime. I've found that very often, those native bindings are distributed as prebuilt blobs. This obviously doesn't work on NixOS, because those prebuilt blobs will depend on paths that aren't present in NixOS. Here's the thing: That's not a NixOS bug. It's a bug with that package, which should check whether the prebuilt blob will work on your distro. Most don't though, and just assume the user runs Ubuntu or something.

Here's the thing: That's not a NixOS exclusive issue - NixOS just makes it much, much more visible. I sometimes (though more rarely) had similar problems on old Debians or very new ArchLinux, where I'd have, say, a different openssl version and everything would break. Anyone that has a distro that deviates slightly from how the blob was generated will run into the same issues.

At least with nix, once I have a recipe that works, I can be more or less guaranteed that the resulting flake will work reliably for everyone, everywhere. The only thing that could break it is if the source of the packages goes down. And that is great. That's my number one use-case. And for this, Nix is absolutely prime-time ready, and in fact it's the only package manager that has such high guarantees around.
Edit: My original response totally misunderstood your post, below is an updated response:

When Bitcoin's fiat-denominated value drops, the claim that the price of everything actually increased while Bitcoin remains stable — becomes a clearly silly argument when you realize we can make the exact same argument for literally any other asset of your choice (which will in some cases yield completely contradictory conclusions about whether the price of everything else is going up, or down).

To make this argument, you are essentially axiomatically proclaiming that the value of X is fixed, and so when its value appears to drop relative to other things, this therefore is actually just a case of everything else getting more expensive.

The problem is you actually have to justify why you believe the value of X is fixed; otherwise, the conclusion is tautological. Without justification, you will find endless logical contradictions by applying the same logic simultaneously to multiple assets, yielding stark disagreement/contradiction on whether "everything else" went up or down in value, depending on which asset you chose as your denomination reference point :)
The chart shown at time code 7:55 https://youtu.be/FYIeL8XxluQ?t=476 is the best representation I've seen of this.

One of the hard things to talk about is the difference between: exposure, infection, disease, and infectivity. Headlines and news coverage of these has been almost universally terrible. There are rules of thumb thrown around like they are proven truth. The experiments to actually show at what time and how much infectious agent is produced are very difficult and as far as I know, none have been done. There are some studies on household spread, but to really know what's going on you need to do challenge trials - which means exposing people to the disease - which is highly unethical to do in humans - and challenge trials in animal models can be highly deceptive.

But generally speaking, yes, I expect to be exposed to Sars-Cov-2 many times in my life, and will probably be infected and may develop disease and infectivity. But as a vaccinated person, the period of disease and infectivity will be reduced.
A clock could not exist at all, and not having a 1 hour commute would still be favorable.

Resisting the waste of valuable time? Sure. Resisting the clock? I'd say it's the exact opposite. We are eyeing the clock every moment and realizing how much time we're wasting on idiotic things.
Not every open source project is run by the little guy. I want to see a a security vulnerability in something like AES. Then the complaint emails demanding answers in 24 hours would be going to nsa.gov addresses.

Anyone leading a shareholder action would love to see these emails. They are basic admissions that the company doesn't know how or from where it gets essential software.
This is accurate. Patent litigation is at the top and pulls the most fees by far.

Of course, it can also be very challenging. Setting aside troll/NPE cases, you're sometimes competing against the best attorneys at the best firms in the country, in cases where the amounts of revenue at stake vastly exceed any amount that the attorneys could reasonably bill (even at the typical rates of $500-$1500/hr).
I see that a lot, and as a former biomedical engineer I would like to reframe this a bit.

Regardless of field of study in college, be it engineering, humanities, science, etc, you learn valuable skills that are almost certainly applicable to beyond your field of study. I for one saw many of my peers enter software engineering roles, project manager roles, or even consulting roles that all pay well, likely 80-100k+ right out of college. Speaking to my siblings who graduated a year ago, they appear to concur, and many are being paid more. Could this be a factor of where you go to college? Perhaps, but I'd argue it's also a bit about selling yourself to wherever you are trying to go.

Additionally, there are many folks that obtain further specialization in a different area of study via a graduate degree, such as a PhD like you mentioned, but also Master's level degrees. They can do biomedical engineering in undergrad, pursue other engineering master's, and succeed in their desired career. I found many peers that pursued this route especially for computer science.

To further push against the thought that biomedical engineers are without opportunity: The US Bureau of Labor Statistics states the mean annual wage of biomedical engineers is around $98,000, and the growth projections are around 6% over the next ten years, while lower than the average of 8%, is not "bad".

Would certainly like to see any other anecdotes from other biomedical engineers to refute or support my statements above; I'm no longer an engineer and thus my insight is likely limited compared to currently employed engineers.
ZFS performance on raids of NVMe is quite bad. If you need performance, use xfs over mdadm.
I've read speculation that this is to cover their own asses with various regulations. Not sure if there's any weight behind this.
I'm not associated with the Bot Sentinel project, but I think one of their major strengths is how they communicate their results. See the description for "disruptive" accounts, the class before "problematic":

> Accounts that are classified as disruptive, often engage in malicious tweet activity. Some disruptive accounts harass other accounts and use offensive language. Disruptive accounts periodically share misinformation and can frequently spam hashtags. Inauthentic accounts and toxic trolls regularly receive a disruptive rating, so we recommend you exhibit caution when interacting with disruptive accounts.

And from their FAQ

> I am a human being, so why am I rated disruptive or problematic?

> Bot Sentinel doesn’t just classify bots, we developed Bot Sentinel to classify several types of accounts including accounts operated by human beings.

All this to say, a great effort is made to ensure people understand that what is being classified is behaviour, not human-ness.

To your point re: "...social bot claims are insidious because they're invariably assertions of political or geopolitical conspiracy.

Surely, many humans behind accounts classified as "disruptive" or "problematic" are statistically not going to be physically in some warehouse or being paid as part of some state-sponsored psy-op.

But it's hard to extricate the political and propagandist nature of groups of, often loosely coordinated, individuals who consistently and totally disrupt non-political discussion with literal thousands of messages. It wouldn't be accepted in any physical public space at the scale and frequency it is done online.

> "A spammer already knows they're breaking the rules of the platform..."

I would contest this point, and further would say that ignorance of the rules is not much of an excuse. Bans are often preceded by a suspension, which provide users with an explanation of the offending behaviour.

I'm not sure how things like Bot Sentinel do anything but educate users on whether their behaviours are disruptive or not. Good faith actors will take that as constructive advice to change, bad faith actors will wear it as a badge of honour.

> Binary judgments of who’s a bot or not have real potential to poison our public discourse

Bot Sentinel does not claim to identify bots full-stop. I think this is a bit of willful ignorance on Twitter's part. The bit about "the narrative on what’s actually going on is increasingly behind the curve" is something I feel is particularly rich, because Twitter is financially incentivised to be themselves "behind the curve" when it comes to moderating behaviour on their platform, as disruptive accounts often drive engagement.
My sister spent $350K USD on a kitchen remodel that included a crazy expensive La Cornue Château stove, yet she doesn't know how to cook. When I visited her many months after the work was done she showed me the stove but wasn't sure how to turn it on. Her goal was to get her kitchen into an interior design magazine, which she accomplished.

She's a constant source of embarrassment, but also entertainment, for the rest of the family.
Heck, the west isn't even doing very much to help curb infections in the west.
All this FUD is some ludite commie nonsense.. its one thing to see articles and stuff like this written by the bbc or something but tech people? Really?

You guys don't see how solving byzantines general problem is ground breaking?
You guys don't see any potential in decentralised networks resistant to sybil attacks?
No value in being able to "own" things in the digital world?
You guys couldn't imagine any uses for something like Zero Knowledge Proofs?

Its just stupid. Most of you guys are over payed dorks who lack any sort of vision or imagination..

You don't need to be genius to see that we are in a euphoric bubble when jpegs of apes as selling for millions and its pretty cool to point out/warn people of the scammers and charlatans in this space.. but to dismiss the cambrian explosion of innovation happening here..

I mean.. I'm baffled.. tech people? I know this sounds harsh but the sheer stupidity in a phrase like "blockhains are a solution in search of a problem"...
Stop. This article is click bait satire.
It's less ignoring clues than maximising the delivery of clues.

Hard mode is hard because repeating a known value reduces the values which can be tested.

If that's how you choose to play, then yes, go ahead.

But after applying the wordlist(s) I use above, what you have are clues to the hidden word, and that must still be guessed. It simply turns out that the letter space itself can be extensively tested.
I downvoted your comment because it doesn't engage with the author's argument. Instead you simply write dismissively "a VPS is fine for a low risk pet project like your portfolio, a blog, some marketing websites, the project I built over the weekend and a few other things. For anything else, there's literally not a single reason for not wanting to use a cloud service / a managed provider."

Everything you wrote in your first paragraph is obviously something that factors into the decision, but nothing more. You're just a random person on the internet, so your appeal to yourself as an authority does not lead to a useful conversation.
https://archive.is/WMRDD
Still waiting for one that blocks FB ads. I gather Meta spends a lot of effort to make it hard though, contrary to most sites I've come across. Makes sense given their business model, I don't doubt that.
No doubt. Its just basic financial reporting, when XYZ is going up the headlines are about how great it is, when its going down publicity is given to the bears.
I Built my MVP as a (relatively) bad programmer
Hell, write everything in assembly, you'll never get optimal performance using higher level languages. Plus, have you actually read all of the code in the python standard library?
are you seriously arguing that clickbait is a good thing?
> I would like to opt-in to something like this on a case-by-case basis.

Which XSuspender provides via its configuration file.
I always see this argument peddled, but I can't recall the notion in the earlier crypto days of it being a "stable store of value". We saw it as a means to bypass payment middlemen, such as PayPal.
> Is downtime an actual, business-killing problem in practice?

Yes, if the business is an enterprise, unscheduled downtime can result in significant losses. It's why disaster recovery is a serious business.
It reminds me of solar panels on cars. It sounds great if you don't think too hard about it, but a highschool physics course can easily prove how completely useless it would be in practice.

Ideas like these end up being nothing but virtue signaling, whether people know it or not.
The funny thing is that if there really is anything revolutionary to be done with crypto currency it will happen when they are cheap.

Ethereum's "world computer" vision for example, might actually lead to some neat stuff if it was dramatically cheaper to run smart contracts.

Cheap, less volatile BTC makes it much more useful as an actual underground currency.

I sort of want crypto to crash, not because of some schadenfreude, but because so much more technical experimentation with ideas can happen if it's dramatically cheaper to play with.
All I can see is maybe the AX101? It matches all the specs they put down, although the SSD is RAID 1 @ 4TB total.

https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax101
I suspect something similar. They have a good partnership. While we're dreaming, I'd love to see a version of Windows with a Linux kernel. They could do what they did with Edge, replace the core with something better.
Is the US’s position as a global leader for data centres unassailable?
"InfoWorld: You answered critics who said that Python is too slow. You said every time you try to write something in Python, it is fast enough. Why is there criticism that it is too slow?"

"At some point, you end up with one little piece of your system, as a whole, where you end up spending all your time. If you write that just as a sort of simple-minded Python loop, at some point you will see that that is the bottleneck in your system. It is usually much more effective to take that one piece and replace that one function or module with a little bit of code you wrote in C or C++ rather than rewriting your entire system in a faster language, because for most of what you're doing, the speed of the language is irrelevant."
Well to clarify, I'm not necessarily saying that the ethics reason clearly outweighs all other tradeoffs. I was responding to the very specific assertion that "no reason exists". My greater point would be that the comment I'm responding to was being a little hyperbolic. There are definitely reasons not to use cloud. Your ultimate decision, especially in the context of project-specific requirements, is a different, bigger discussion.
> If you’re a startup you want to focus on your product

Sounds about right but that contradicts the premise of the article.
I can imagine that someone is going to come up with a way to encrypt the stuff, such that only the holder of the private key "owning" the NFT can decrypt it, or something along those lines.
I remember at least two flu seasons where flu variants named after certain animals caused people to not simply go on with their lives. Do you remember those?
Give it another 10 years, and we may get a stable alternative to ZFS that will live in the kernel tree.
I used to think the ideas of NixOS were great, but then I learned about `ostree`, and in my opinion things like Project Atomic (in Fedora), are probably more pragmatic or straightforward idiomatic implementation of those ideas. In essence the software packages resemble how git works behind the curtain.

Git has a bunch of objects with cryptic names resembling hashsum's, and those are the files in your git working tree, they are sorta symbolically linked into the working-tree of the git repo. In the case of ostree, the working tree is a filesystem path such as the root of your filesystem. You can checkout a branch of the root filesystem on bootup, etc... and it's great for A/B testing because if there are any problems one simply boot into the previously known-good branch, etc.

The problem there is people sorta hate having to reboot after modifying the HEAD of the ostree repo, which might conceptually resemble a git commit into the main branch. Flatpak to the rescue, which is itself another implementation of `ostree` but not for entire root fielsystems, but for the package's filesystem layout, what you might think of as the contents of any given nixos package path. The same kind of things happen, bundle libraries can be different in different runtimes, and multiple runtimes can co-exist, and their file objects are deduplicated, and shared or isolated. The configuration language is JSON, so it's easy to manage as a packager.
The case for and against analogies
A common defense of using the cloud is that it saves you the cost of employing a dedicated sysadmin team and is hence cheaper in total, even once you factor in the higher runtime costs.

However, in my experience, as soon as you scale beyond anything from a "hand deployed" MVP, you will need to build tooling around deployment management. And guess what? This tooling is most often developed by a dedicated infrastructure team. So, all-in-all, you don't really save on labor but still pay for the more expensive runtime costs. Oh, and you have vendor lock-in.

EDIT (addendum): I'm not advocating to run your own datacenter as soon as your organization grows, because that requires yet another team and has immense initial overhead. The most portable and cost-effective method is to rent servers as you scale or use VPS providers. If you are already using a cloud, stick to the products that have equivalents in non-cloud situations. E.g. managed postgres / your own postgres, virtual machines, kubernetes, kafka. Stay away from special-purpose proprietary systems such as pub/sub systems, "lambdas", cloud configuration, etc.
"a VPS is fine for a low risk pet project like your portfolio, a blog, some marketing websites, the project I built over the weekend"

You are making the same mistake the article did. VPS is a great option for lot of production applications and not just low risk or pet projects. Not every production application needs Elastic Beanstalk or Lambda.

The answer is always "It depends but all options are on the table"
If you have a long time customer (especially one who brings in as much good publicity as Troy Hunt) and you look at their billing history this spike would be a clear anomaly. Writing off an $8k bill to keep a customer around and happy for years to come is worth more than that bill.