skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So one of YC's finest and most valuable startup, Stripe that needs no introduction here, also thinks there is 'no value' in using it for payments then? Right then why did they announce this then? [0]

Also just yesterday, a very low turn out in discussion about it [1], even less when they announced their Stripe Crypto post [2]. Why? Where is the scam? How exactly is Stripe scamming? Or is it because Stripe is spared somehow?

Or most likely, they waited for regulations to be clearer first and then re-entered back in with their crypto payouts products. Perhaps they still see some value in it.

So when it is Stripe that actually releases something, there is zero instant extreme outrage of predictable 'crypto is scam', 'snake oil' comments to be found like the ones I see here.

[0] https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31121177

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30628677
Good point - blockchain also prevents transaction censorship (your proposal prevents double spend but allows the central authority to block transactions)

Central authorities might do wild stuff like block Folks They Don’t Like (certain truck drivers, etc). Some people think that’s really good, others feel the opposite

(edited for clarity)
Perhaps you could explain why?
I wonder whether one can postulate an impossibility theorem (call it SEV, similar to CAP) for public blockchains (at least using PoW, and whether one can overcome it with PoS or similar is an open question):

You can't have a (PoW) public blockchain that is Secure, Efficient (=not planet destroyingly wasteful), and Valuable. Pick any two.
> That allowance was taken up by documents for various clients. This was usually quicker than any courier services at the time.

They were still a courier service. I once sat next to a guy (in first class!) who was accompanying checks to Hawaii. Yes, not so long ago they had to physically travel to the issuing bank. He was basically retired so he did this to travel, around and earn some money.

At the end of the flight they let him leave first. He told me they would let him off and he would go down to the tarmac to watch the cargo hold be unlocked and make sure the cargo wasn’t tampered with.

I’ve also had someone hand carry electronics to / from a customer. Sometimes it’s just easier.
There might be something in it with regards to reshaping the debt (fixed income) markets.

Starting with issuance process then secondary trading.

On secondary trading side the economic value comes from participants being able to transact with each other, with instant settlement and no delivery risk.

Still exploring this concept with a few others but. Email me if interested in this use case.
> Without a single trusted party. You're trading trust for one entity for trust for many entities.

The notion of “single” entities in society is, I think, flawed. A bank is not a single entity, for instance—they are not just a single actor—they are governed by a board and bylaws and shareholders and government regulations and judges, etc. If something goes wrong, which is expected and built into the system process,there is due process. And the strength of that due process is governed by the self interest of all the parties at play.

The main purpose of blockchain is to attempt to replace the messiness of human governance with the certainty of algorithmic governance. But it is an illusion in many ways and dangerous, in a sense, to put so much trust in an algorithm. I think that much of the philosophy around blockchain comes from the lack of faith in human governance—which is to say, a certain kind of misanthropy.
The thing that I most appreciate about Tcl is that it feels like Unix shell "done right". It is still a bit weird because everything is a string, but it doesn't have all those footguns around variable expansion, such as word splitting. It also has decent support for subroutines and local variables, no weirdness with subshells and so on.
It is. Except if you used SHA libraries for mission critical logging, it would be insecure by default, since it's demonstrably possible to force SHA-1 collisions. git is moving (slowly) to SHA-256, which is also the hashing function of Bitcoin.
As a Russian, I confirm racism is rampant in the country. I don't know if it is even waning anymore, considering the increasingly strong orthodox church and bigotry as indicated by the ongoing war and popularity of the regime that started it.

Anyone who thinks otherwise: go out and talk to ethnically Asian people more. (For an outsider, keep in mind that anywhere in Russian Siberia there are very large indigenous Asian populations in proportion to total.)

My Asian friends are routinely discriminated against purely based on their appearance: subject to searches at subway entrances, subject to disdainful attitude by government officials, salespeople and other citizens. They will have trouble renting flats, etc.

This is significantly worse in western parts of Russia (where you can be targeted by gangs and skinheads), but is still present in their part of the country.

And it is those who were lucky to have gone to good schools and speak perfect Russian. Things are dimmer for someone who has a stronger accent.

Most of my Asian friends never talk about it, but one did, after which I started making observations and reevaluating past ones and recognized that it is very much true.

Those of middle eastern ethnicities (often immigrants and their descendants) have likely even harder time.
There is genuinely no value in blockchain tech. However, I regret that I am not qualified to help you with the other part of your question.
Planet destroying is a bit extreme. The traditional finance system is no more energy efficient overall. It’s certainly not environmentally friendly, but that’s more a function of the dirty power we use for anything and everything. We just need to fix our methods of generating energy, not criticize everything that uses a lot of it.
The Economist has an interesting take on this

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/03/31/why-is-t...

Behind a paywall but if you turn JavaScript off you can read it for free
Currency exchange settlement/escrow is a possible use-case for a private chain, currently handled by a specialized bank.
I grew up with the Speccy and it's what kick-started my interest in computers and ultimately led to my career. I still have a +3, which is connected to the internet [1].

It's amazing to see that there's still a sizeable scene devoted to this humble little box, and there's new hardware and impressive hacks being built to this day. In the words of one of the messages from a user of my site: "It’s mad being online with a 40yr old computer designed around a tape recorder."

Part of it's longevity and appeal is how simple the system was - even 11 Year-old me could grasp the memory layout and experiment with writing assembler. I expect I'll still be hacking away on it in another 40 years!

[1] - I wrote a series of blog posts on how I mashed up a modern GitOps/k8s dev environment with 1980s Sinclair BASIC to build a community site: http://www.markround.com/blog/2021/12/21/devops-for-the-sinc...
Your post reminded me, I had a meeting with Amazon when they first started offering a Blockchain technology.

The rep said they had implemented it, but didn't have a clear use case and were interested in seeing what customers might use it for.

I've heard that Audi have a Blockchain to record car service history, so I believe we'll see more niche applications like that in future.
One thing I don't get: he is measuring gamma rays, which will go through the wall of the Geiger tube as easily as they'll go through the front window. Why does it matter how the tube is oriented with respect to the source? Seems like the only factor that should affect the count rate is distance.
Don't worry, governments and centrals banks won't let go of one of the fundamental powers of a sovereign. The anarcho-capitalist dream of being your own bank isn't sustainable in real life anyway.
I'm not sure if you're pushing back on cryptocurrency in general and using blockchain as proxy or if you're actually pushing back against blockchain as a technology buzzword that is being used by businesses.

In the case it's digital currency: Saying blockchain technology is nothing more a distributed database is like saying TCP/IP is nothing more than flipping voltages on a wire. It misses the point of what the technology can be used for.

Blockchain technology is the underylying mechanism for digital currency. Digital currency in the short term will allow less friction for online payments and has the potential to allow for easier banking options and a unifying global currency in the long term.

For places that have a strong banking system, the need for digital currency isn't so apparent. For places that have failing banking infrastructure or are building new banking infrastructure, digital currency is an attractive option as we're steadily becoming more connected and "wired".

There's a lot of hype, much of which is unwarranted, but behind that hype is the realization that digital currency and the implications of implementing it worldwide and having it widely available will have far reaching consequences for many aspects of our digital lives.

In the case you're talking about blockchain without the digital currency aspect then I agree with you to a certain extent. My generous read on the situation is that businesses want to modernize their supply chain infrastructure and are looking for some standard to adopt that will provide them with guidance and "best practices". This could allow them to use something that can be implemented and maintained with lower costs and potentially even be used for outside audits and federation/communication with other entities.

Personally, I think this is more akin to the Java/XML "craze". XML was adopted as a sort of standard but the underlying reason wasn't that XML was any panacea, it just happened to be the technology that was in vogue for businesses and was an excuse to modernize/digitize their infrastructure. The move to digitize data instead of either having a hap-hazard scheme or using paper was the motivation, not that XML was any great technology. Using XML also created it's own hap-hazard data schema realizations and, in the end, JSON provides more of the spirit of what XML promised but the move from pre-digitization to post-digitization provided such a strong incentive that it didn't really matter.

In other words, we're seeing businesses try to modernize different aspects of logistics. The current trend is blockchain because it provides enough key words that they can rally around it. The motivation, in my opinion, is more that they want to modernize/digitize their supply chain so they're looking for something/anything that provides guidance, standards or other infrastructure to that effect.
This can be a good thing. Just because a government prohibits something doesn't mean it is bad.

(Yes, now we can devolve into a discussion about what "bad" means.)
Low-Tech Coconut Shell Activated Charcoal Production (2012) [pdf]
This works too https://archive.ph/OB3hK
> The entire gambit was to take UA quickly and then use it as a pawn to get concessions from the West.

Nope, it was to take Ukraine quickly and parade it as an internal trophy, while also taking out a possible big competitor for the oil and gas market.

Putin didn't want any concessions from the West, just business as usual. He wanted to be left alone to "digest Ukraine" and ponder next steps.

Edit: I'd want to hear proof for contrary opinions.
How is it a different experience? How is it actually amazing? I don't want you to enumerate the ways crypto is useful, I want you to give me one or two concrete use cases that aren't money laundering or buying illegal things.
History of roff
Postcards from the Southern End of the World
Not under SHA-1 it isn't.
Noob question: Can anyone explain storage concerns of the blockchain? Right now the BTC blockchain is 320GB in size. Won’t this get too big at some point for speedy lookups of ledgers and all that?
Ever noticed that "change a diaper" is one of the easiest parts about raising children?

Lazarus Long raised many children - odd that he would single out that one.

Heinlein, on the other hand, did not.
> That is most accurate description of blockchain I have read.

It might interest you to know then that the short, digestible 8 page whitepaper on Bitcoin, which originally described the blockchain, specifically used this definition. It's the most accurate because it is what a blockchain was designed for. I recommend giving it a read and ignoring any project which doesn't follow its core tenants.

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
BTC is nice tech on the paper (solving the consensus problem in a decentralised way) but it's kinda slow and unpractical for real world usage. If it's meant to be used only by some banks while you do other transactions off chains - then you reintroduce trust and lose the benefits.

The value is all baseless speculation and hoping a central government won't class it as illegal once they get to do their own "crypto" to control their citizens better.

The main value in BTC is that it's at the moment less regulated than the financial mess we have in the standard market.

I think a better model would be to have tons of small private banks without a central banks and use a currency 100% backed by a basket of goods of prime necessity (wood, wheat, iron, gold).

That said, I hope will somehow they will succeed in replacing central banks and I hope some of the revolutionaries who got rich with crypto will topple governments and create a decentralised society without (or better - with less) central points of failures.
There's a lot of Web-accesible SDR's out there for 0-30 MHz. Here are some based on the KiwiSDR hardware:

List: http://kiwisdr.com/public/

Map: http://rx.linkfanel.net/
It's not GNOME, but there is Zeal.

I suspect GNOME would rather expect everyone else to adopt devhelp formats[1].

[1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/devhelp/-/issues/1
Doesn't make sense does it? Lies usually don't. The truth does make sense, but they don't want you to hear it.

https://tomluongo.me/2022/03/28/got-gold-rubles-russia-just-...
Russian exports have been badly dented, but some oil and gas remains. Russian imports have been completely wrecked. Effectively the sanctions have _improved_ their balance of payments.

They have some money, but nobody will sell to them. Slightly different situation from their money being worthless because they're outspending their ability to earn hard currency.
> It's too bad you can't take cadavers with you on flights, the cost of that is murderous.

Doesn’t that just create TWO cadavers?

Fortunately looks like the growth curve is less than linear.
Your site deserves a front page listing of its own - great content.
Tulips. Speculative value and nothing more.
Oh wow, that linked comment is gold.

I usually cringe when people show me mainstream news titles (I attributed it to a good literature teacher who taught me to read someone's agenda and bias), but it might also be getting used to that calmed "bookish as PG said' tone here.
For now.

And it's stuff like this that will probably lead to most cryptocurrencies being banned in developed countries. At this point they turn into national security risks and nothing survives a head on collision with the military-industrial complex.
> Colorado/Montanta/etc are just too damn cold in the winter for homeless to survive, so they migrate to other warmer places

It's this level of ignorance that is part of the problem.

Just because someone is rendered homeless doesn't mean that they uproot and move away from their friends and family and job and life. If you're conjuring up images of vagabonds and junkies at the end of their tether, you really need to learn more.

Chicago alone has almost 60,000 homeless, and it's a huge problem that so many die in the winter. https://s6624.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Homeless-Es...
> Not making a decision is, in itself, a decision with consequences.

And this is why so much energy is spent convincing you that your vote doesn't matter or that both sides are the same, etc.
Yes. We did this in the 70s with the war on drugs and successfully eradicated all drug use in the United States. No one does drugs in the US any longer, not at all. And certainly no one is dying from drug use. How could either of these things happen when we banned them so long ago?
There is a blockchain based system for doing podcast updates called PodPing.

It reduces the overhead of checking hundreds of thousands of RSS feeds, and cuts down the time it takes for notification of new episode of a show. It can currently update everyone in the system in under 40 seconds from hitting publish.

You can watch new podcasts get published live at podping.watch.
Yes those services exist though usually you want to send your own employee, typically a junior one.
Let's assume this is true. There are many simpler and smaller-scale coordination games out there. Why hasn't any of these adapted blockchain?

It is quite a stretch to think that you can go from 0 adaptability to 100% adaptability in one of the largest scale coordination games imaginable (tracking carbon consumption).

For example if you told me in 2002 that one day most of the world would be on Facebook I would have been very skeptical, if then you showed me all of Harvard using it like crazy, my scepticism would have decreased significantly.

It is the lack of successful use cases even at smaller scale that I think preventing many people believing in the grand vision.
preposterous. financial transaction processing is and always has been vastly more efficient and quick.
I get the value of having a chain of "blocks" of data, but that could also describe git. I don't see the added value of proof of work or proof of stake here.

Why isn't putting that data (or a hash of it) in a publicly available git repository just as good? You can even publish the newest branch hash in the newspaper everyday if you want.
Every day, I'm ashamed of the Modi government that has been elected twice.

Very recently, his party also won a key constituency, headed by a monk that has failed to condemn the astonishingly high number of females rapes.

If Modi were to stand for election today, he would probably win again. The majority of the people in India seem to be very fond of nationalism and its seemingly quiet transition to fascism. It's very disturbing to say the least.
It's supposed to be slow. That's what secures it. The production speed comes from layer 2 solutions built on top of it (analogous to how a secure VM can go faster with a JIT while still maintaining security).

It's not expensive. Transaction fees are just fine and getting cheaper over time.

It doesn't destroy the planet. You're thinking of the fossil-fuel industry.
I tried to read that but couldn't get over the conspiracy-theory-sounding language.
> What a manipulative comment. First of all, you didn’t quote the key points of the study:

Please point out exactly where my direct citation from the article is manipulated in any way.

> Meaning The risk of myocarditis in this large cohort study was highest in young males after the second SARS-CoV-2 vaccine dose, and this risk should be balanced against the benefits of protecting against severe COVID-19 disease. —-

Please read my comment. I quoted exactly the highest risk scenarios. The study determined that at worse it's less than 5 per 100 000 cases on young males.

> Second of all, the word benign does not appear in the study.

The study tracked primary and secondary myocarditis and pericarditis diagnosis at the moment of hospital discharge. The study mentions zero complications, let alone fatalities. A myocarditis diagnosis could mean something as little as claiming you feel fatigued and experience a weird feeling in your chest, no matter how brief you experience it.

Please read the study before going on personal attacks.

> The critical question in regards to heart inflammation was always about young males, this is very well known!

You need to decide if you want to accuse my quotation as manipulative or stressing nothing new. You can't have it both ways.

Also, you might find it interesting that the study points quite unequivocally that:

* "Myocarditis after mRNA vaccination was rare in this study cohort and even among young males."

* "The risk of myocarditis following the mRNA vaccines has been evaluated by the US Food and Drug Administration, which concluded that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks and fully authorized the use of mRNA-1273 in persons 18 years or older and BNT162b2 in persons 16 years or older."
Well it very well could have if things went a little different. Bittorrent was revolutionary, but slow to adapt. Maybe if it was more user friendly, or had more browser integration earlier on, and the protocol had more development, you'd see it more widely used. Imagine if "the cloud" was just bittorrent swarms. It could have happened. As for blockchain...decentralized databases have their place, the problem is that centralized organizations are trying to make a use for them when a centralized db already did what they wanted just fine.
I'm not sure anyone knows the "real" reason for all this, although we've heard a lot of stated ones.
One of the most hyped use cases of blockchains is event ticketing.

We had a close look. It cannot solve most problems it claims to solve. The only thing it might be useful for is digital collectible tickets. This may be interesting for a tiny fraction of events and attendees.

Full detailed analysis here:

https://medium.com/@ticketpark/nft-tickets-a-realistic-look-...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=abstract+art&atb=v279-1__&iax=imag...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=generative+art&atb=v279-1__&iar=im...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=spirograph+art&atb=v279-1__&iax=im...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=kaleidoscope+art&atb=v279-1__&iar=...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=macro+art&atb=v279-1__&iax=images&...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fractal+art&atb=v279-1__&iax=image...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=polyhedron+art&atb=v279-1__&iar=im...

Any significant sentence GPT-3 spits out will have more meaning, structure of meanings, and concretion of structure of meanings than most of the images on those pages. Those images all show up when searching for "art", even though your narrow definition discounts most of them as such, which means your definition is faulty. I don't think you can claim all those thousands/millions of people are wrong about what constitutes "art". I also don't think you can sensibly proclaim a faulty definition of something as general (and text-inclusive) as "an artistic object" to be "the important point" and then get annoyed when someone points out problems with it.

Maybe you're thinking of replying claiming all the images I linked above have meaning in them, but that could only be the case if you used a definition of "meaning" so broad as to be meaningless (e.g. "a person selecting it provides meaning", which to me translates to "it elicits emotion" since that's why it was chosen, and you already argued against that). Yes, an art critic might claim to find meaning in totally abstract artwork, but they'd find more meaning in most artistic images generated with machine learning, especially if you don't tell them the source.
Can you expand on this a bit? Which element regarding censorship does Blockchain help prevent?

I ask earnestly as it feels like a forgone conclusion but depending on what you refer to I'm not sure it is.

My initial thought is about freedom of spending and transactions as a concept of the chain but I guess it's not exactly censorship in the most common sense.
I’m not sure any efficient use for cheap energy is going to be less destructive than blockchain
This thread has mostly focused on the US. In the UK, rural life is quite different and it frustrates me no end that there is no equivalent to the local pub even in small towns in the US (sports bars don’t count)…

In terms of specifics in the UK, look west and southwest. Full of fantastic little villages which have communities.
Origami Masters