skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The blockchain prevents double spending without a trusted party--that's its only TECHNOLOGICAL solution.

Where you "are going wrong" (your words--not mine) is not appreciating the value of what SOCIAL solutions can from that, and refusing to accept that these subsequent solutions may be valuable to others for purely non-technical reasons.

---

SOCIAL USE CASE #1: Cryptocurrency

If you're privileged enough to live your whole life without ever being denied access to any degree of financial services, I'm happy for you. However, Satoshi created cryptocurrency at a time when SOCIAL trust in traditional money networks was at its absolute lowest--this context is so important. Cryptocurrency (built on blockchains) offer global financial networks which anybody to participate in, and you are free to form a opinion around how valuable that is to you personally.

SOCIAL USE CASE #2: Permission-less Smart Contracts

If you have a digital payment network wherein anyone can transact, why not create programmable flows around that economic activity? Decentralized financial applications--savings accounts, payment channels, compounding interest, asset swaps, escrow--were all the lowest hanging fruit and so they came first because the network protocol they've been built upon includes a monetary asset natively.

Back in the Web1 days, there was an application called GameSpy. The service provided a way to find a list of community-owned gaming servers that hosted multiplayer sessions for various PC games. Technically speaking, it was the epitome of what the Internet was capable of and it failed because there was no viable monetization strategy for either the middleware or the server hosts that didn't involve centralizing the platform. A web3 version would survive with decentralized coordination, could stream payments to gaming servers, reward players for playing on the platform, and would make a good case for a DAO to provide upkeep of the middleware layer.

SOCIAL USE CASE #3: NFTs

Our lives continue to move towards fully digital experiences, and NFTs are key to commemorating moments in the metaverse.

To be clear: a NFT is a single number (ID index) sitting in a 256-bit address space, which is recorded to belong to some cryptographic data that you keep secret. It MAY have a visual representation you can find with a URL, but that is not a requirement.

---

That's my 2 gwei.
Did you purposefully leave out Broadwell, or was it a mistake? (If it wasn’t a mistake, I’d be interested to hear you expand on why, I know it was a bit of a weird release.)
The unforgiving-ness and irreversibility of cryptocurrency are the reasons that it will never gain significant adoption by “normies”.

With fiat currency, we have many systems for dispute resolution and restitution. They are not all perfect but they work often enough that people still have faith in the system.

Most people do not have the risk tolerance to use a system where one typographical error can irreversibly lose your life savings (for example), the product of decades of work.
Cold email tools have been getting it wrong for years
Gravity is infinite at the singularity (the middle of the black hole). Everything gravitates towards that point. Our best understanding is that no information can exist here.

Black holes "evaporate" over time -- by emitting Hawking radiation. This is probably where the information goes, in my layman understanding.
Unrestricted Warfare -
http://www.cryptome.org/cuw.htm
Apparently doxxing means whatever the author wants it to mean, and she wants it to include tweeting a link to a social media post without any additional information. And tweeting that link makes broadcasting the name of the previously anonymous tweeter journalism rather than doxxing. It sure is convenient for a word to mean whatever you want it to.
General relativity predicts gravitational waves. For the theory to be correct, gravitational waves need to exist. You haven't fully confirmed the theory experimentally unless you confirm that consequence.
Gravitational waves are just a consequence of the Einstein field equations for which he had experimental evidence for (the light bending from the sun during the eclipse)
If you change assumptions to solve a big problem, you don’t necessarily need to measure the big problem to check the assumptions. General Relativity itself was first confirmed with a relatively simple measurement of star displacement during a solar eclipse.

The “real solution” to the black hole information paradox will be one that solves the paradox AND provides a “small” way to test the change in assumptions that creates the big solution. This is definitely worth looking for IMO.
I feel like you might like one of my previous posts too (https://tegowerk.eu/posts/serendipity/). The trajectory of my life has also been shaped and defined by a series of decisions and events which didn't seem at all momentous at the time :)
GR made predictions that were testable at the time and Einstein was keenly interested in testing them. See https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol5-doc/609
> Chips of rare-earth magnet epoxied to your fingernails let you sense the magnetic fields around you.

Your body already feels magnetic fields around you... you have iron in your blood.
The protocol can be perfect. But unless there are great clients for it on multiple different platforms, and those clients implement all the awesome optional protocol features, it just doesn’t matter.

* Screen sharing
* File sharing
* Sync across devices
* Group chat without fuckery
* Ability to delete and edit messages
* Notifications of new messages

I know XMPP supports all of this and more. But find a cross platform client/server that implements all of it?

Then look at the clients for matrix, telegram, signal, teams, whatsapp, and others.
> $1B/day from Germany alone

According to [1], all imports from Russia to Germany in March were 4B EUR, so rather $139M/day, not $1B/day. Maybe that is the amount for all of the EU (with Germany then contributing 13.9%)?

[1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2022/03...
Blockchain is all about eliminating trust in transactions.

For the most part, it doesn't work.

An extremely small number of crypto trades are done without trusting some 3rd party.

For example, what is your crypto
worth? Most people trust unregulated crypto exchanges to tell them. Exchanges that can and do engage in minting their own crypto and using it (and other means) to manipulate the "free" market.

Blockchain solves a problem that most people don't have --- it eliminates trust in banks and government --- and replaces it with trust in unregulated exchanges that are free to scam and collude at will.
I'm not affiliated with urbit, except that I want a product that does what it does

similar feeling here. except i am also concerned about the connection to blockchains.

my thoughts on that are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31130695
I'd actually like to see a service where you can hire a single person to answer all your questions. We have guitar and violin lessons where you go and practice then come back with questions - why not the same for programming languages? I'd gladly pay some one on a ad-hoc basis instead of filtering out all the noise on IRC/Discord.
None of your examples work as easily as you say.

Unconfiscatable: a judge may order you to hand over your bitcoin, or face jail time for contempt of court etc.

Regulation resistant: see above. Also, depends crucially on anonimity, which doesn't hold up either.

Crime resitance: much worse than digital money, which is insured and much better protected by the state.

Relative privacy: only works for btc-to-btc transactions, or if you spend significant effort. Otherwise, the moment you order somethibg at home using BTC, the entity that you ordered from knows exactly whose wallet this is, and everything else they do or have done with their money.

Corruption resistance: maybe, since privacy is really bad.

And the heyday of people using BTC for actual transactions I think has mostly gone. It used to be that you could buy games on Steam or a Tesla with BTC, but no more.

Note as well that Lightning Network is not BTC - it rarely touches the BTC block chain and offers much weaker guarantees than BTC (in particular, it's easy to double spend on LN if your node is unreliable). And lots of people in El Salvador (the only country that has been crazy enough to do this) are not even using the LN, they are using an app which does most transfers on their own servers, and only used LN for interoperation with other apps.
It's clear you prefer the final type as suffix. That just means you need another syntax or keyword (such as "let") to introduce a variable declaration.

However function calls, array subscripts, and field accesses are the same "kind" of operation as dereferencing a pointer. Put the type last if it makes you happy, but you'll have "horrible" syntax if you don't treat pointers the same as the others:

something.bar[10]() // access the field, subscript the array, call the function
something.foo@ // access the field, dereference the pointer
Which contains this bit: "I am not talking about this because I want to change the mind of my colleagues in physics."

That seems to be pretty clear to me.
If you simply read the SFP you'd know the answer to this. It isn't there forever, because the black hole is not there forever.
This stuff is all normal when you're dealing with international contracts - it's not like nobody thought of doing international deals before satoshi.

Some of the answers do depend on the specifics of course. If the asset being traded is US real estate for example I would expect the smart contract to be set up so it requires a US court decision to correct the register.
Could you link to an example HN thread of "meaningful political discourse" in your opinion.
Yes it is. I have a friend who thinks heating his apartment in winter is a waste. He puts on a lot of layers, drinks warm beverages, and exercises to keep warm.
History is important, and TCL is an interesting point in PL design space. If people didn’t know it, it would likely get reinvented.
Agreed, extreme concepts are not hard. But I think the fascinating part is the salesmanship involved. Something I've noticed, really high concept artists are fantastic salesmen... and really shitty artists (80% of the time). They can convince people that a duct taped banana on the wall or just splatter paint can emotionally transcend you. Dont get me wrong, I like some abstract art when there is an aesthetic quality to it. But the worship status given to something like this, one incredibly slow note every however months... come on. You could do the same with Vanilla Ice's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 song from the 90s. Doesnt mean anything... other than that song still slaps :)

I'll take listening to an amateur messing with guitar chords while drunk in a shitty bar over something like this. Because I can actually experience the shitty bar music. You literally cannot experience this "art project".
I think most of HN are atheists who don't buy in to the cryptocurrency religion.
You should convert them into ebook apps, something I have noticed is that nobody reads the reviews. Maybe give the first chapters for free and the rest paid. Just make sure the user knows that's the deal so they don't get frustrated.
Nope. 88-91 RUB/USD if you want to buy crypto (something like USDT), and 83 RUB/USD if you're buying something at Aliexpress (i.e., buying from China and paying in USD).
After going fully remote my fiancée and I recently moved back. The changes in Greenville over the past several years are staggering. Tons of growth!

I’d like to get plugged back into the tech community here. Could I grab an invite to the slack group? hahn.shot.first@gmail.com
One is a result of the past, the other is speaking to the future.

There's no conflict between the two notions.
Neat!

But this one is two hours older: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31119322
Sorry for that late reply. My Thermodynamics Prof, Max McGlashan (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-professor... this to me personally. It has been many decades since I used thermodynamics in any no-trivial way, so I am no expert: but in chemistry (not physics) you just learn the rules to get results. That is the pragmatism: I was never researching thermodynamics, but using the theories to advance Chemistry.
> The number of powerful people (including people who would normally give lip service to free markets) who, when confronted by this consensus among economists, basically don't give a shit is... disheartening.

Domain experts reach consensus and their recommendations aren’t followed in a lot of disciplines. I agree in this case it makes economic sense to stop farm subsidies — which could result in lower domestic food production and greater imports from abroad. And when the world economy is humming along smoothly that’s great. But if there’s a hiccup in the world economy —- e.g., in the case of war in a place where it makes economic sense to grow a lot of wheat or a problem in the logistics network shuttling things from where they’re produced to where they’re consumed then it’s not as clear-cut.

My naive view of politics, when they’re running well, is to navigate conflicting priorities from groups, including domain experts, the populace, etc.

And I think the farm subsidies could be interpreted to involve national security concerns on top of then economic concerns. If a world war breaks out and we’re on the opposite side from places we normally source our food then they have leverage over us.

TL/DR I think there’s more at play than just the economic concern.
You can think of a two-income family with union jobs and pensions as the bottom rung of the upper middle class. It's more clear than not "rich".
Eliza Scriptwriter's Manual (1968)
Referral link spam.
OK, that makes sense.

In reading TFA I was just kind of blown away that temp, mass, angular momentum, etc, are all so closely tied together.
Naive question, but why can't banks undo a fraudulent transaction? Is there no such framework in place?
You misunderstood everything Varoufakis said.
"In practice, most people dealing with Bitcoin are dealing with it through ~banks~ exchanges which gave them a Bitcoin denominated IOU; and which may or may not be engaging in fractional reserve banking."

You're not wrong. Most people do it with IOUs, ie exchanges. But most people, don't have most of the bitcoin.

"Crypto Exchanges Hold 6.6% of Bitcoin Supply – One of the Lowest in History"

https://bitcoinke.io/2021/09/percentage-of-bitcoins-on-excha...

I'd like this number to be even lower. And as more exchanges (and governments) default, I expect it will be.

"* hard to store securely - I'd class this as a point for Gold."

fair to debate, a lot does get lost because people lose paper backups. but is this really harder than gold? I think it's largely unfamiliarity that will improve with time.

"* expensive to transact with at a distance - As opposed to Bitcoin, which is just expensive to transact; and gets more expensive the more people use it, as there is a finite amount of transactions per unit time."

if you don't understand how lightning works, of course you will believe this. lots of fud right now. encourage you to kick the tires here, and actually install a lightning wallet and see. as a retail guy, you can start selling slurpees via lightning, today.

https://medium.com/coinmonks/strike-partners-with-shopify-bl...

no it's not perfect, but it is non custodial. now imagine you are in venezuela or weimar germany.
How junk science persists in academia, news media, and social media
At this point I just want to know why it's considered news. This site is called hacker news, after all. The sun rises in the east, another smart contract eats people's money, another shitcoin goes to zero. Here's your coffee, sir.
The man in question is Thomas Midgley Jr., the inventor of leaded gasoline, for those who don't want to watch a 24min video that buries the lead (pardon the pun).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
That doesn't mean that he didn't have ideas for testable predictions of the model. It implied all kinds of things, some of which he had not even thought of (like Black Holes). Its quite a lot different to propose a model with some novel predictions that you can validate, and to propose a model that can never be tested in any form at all.
This kind of code is usually contracted out to the lowest bidder because the people that want to pull the scam/MLM/NFT project/whatever you want to call it don't have the technical skill, but can do the marketing.

This leads to bugs or exploits often ending up in these "contracts". The concept is inherently flawed, as they can't be updated and can't be reevaluated or reinterpreted by e.g. a court. The money's just lost.
You can also use P2P networks to transact crypto
And maybe in Texas they will offer to loan books to Park Slope children the Park Slope progressives find objectionable.
| You may not be indifferent, but the vast majority of HN effectively is.

What I want to discuss and engage with on HN is usually very different (and way less political) compared to what I engage with in other social media. So you can't draw any conclusions about me based on my HN behavior alone.
I'm not sure dang scales

They should choose some other infrastructure than whatever the dang system is then. Or maybe open source it and hope AWS makes a dang multi-instance auto-scaling service.

I've seen it's bot moderation posts though and I have to say it's quality work, passes the Turing test for me. Which makes it all the more surprising that no one has spun it into a real product. I'm not a 10x programmer but if they let me have a go at it I could probably throw one together in a weekend in my garage.
I think it's fair to use personal data collected on the same site. Without it, most sites would be rendered useless.
Valid point. As cash and savings there's no reason to accept the IOU. At which point you need access to credit you can move to that world.
Would a blanket help? Covering it with blankets will be my first thought.
Doesn't excuse tricking people into it.
> I don't know how marxists square their conviction that no trade is ever beneficial to both sides with the reality that nobody is held at gunpoint to make those trades.

This isn’t a theoretical position even remotely attributable to Marxists.
Bitcoin L2 is centralized b/c Bitcoin doesn't have base layer smart contracts (and no, simple scripts are not smart contracts)
Not the author so I don't know for sure, but it does list Polyscope in the main link.

https://github.com/nmwsharp/polyscope
Automatic market makers, Argent, RAI, multi-sig wallets, Baseline Protocol, Helium, FOAM Space, lending, digital ownership (say of in-game items), anonymity (I donate to Russian opposition in crypto only), improved payment UX.
IMO the point is to question the limits of what can be considered music. There's precedent (way too much in fact) in visual arts. Is a signed toilet art? Mona Lisa with a mustache? Banana taped to a wall?

None of these things are meant to be enjoyed in the traditional sense. But they might make you think, or make you angry.

So what good do these things bring the world? I don't know, probably none.
Disclaimer: I'm not even a physicist.

As I understand it, the trouble is with "what happens to the information inside the black hole?", not with whether it's there at all or not (which isn't disputed - we see stuff fall in, so it's gotta go _somewhere_ and it isn't in our observable part anymore). In addition, because of the nature of a black hole, how would an experiment trying to test any theory about what happens in a black hole even work? As far as I'm aware, we don't know of any mechanism where stuff inside the black hole affects stuff outside the black hole (hawking radiation doesn't, as far as I'm aware, explain _how_ the spontaneous quantum fluctuations come to be - they're just theorized to happen to satisfy the equivalence principle near the event horizon), but that's exactly what we'd need to confirm or deny anything about whatever happens past the event horizon.

On top of this, just the existence of hawking radiation means black holes vanish over time - but without us being able to say that e.g. a book with mass 1kg or a bag of sugar with mass 1kg was once thrown in. We can't distinguish the two cases - the information (as far as we know today) is lost.
Delicious. Somebody with $34 million of loose cash just got shown reality.
> The concept is inherently flawed, as they can't be updated and can't be reevaluated or reinterpreted by e.g. a court. The money's just lost.

This is the way it seems to me too, but I just can't understand how a flaw this obvious could be overlooked by so many people? Surely we are both missing something?
True and it's very important to have that discussion.

However, whenever a law gets passed at least one side is less than enthusiastic and, at least for me, it's helpful to get a first impression from a (more) neutral source which didn't take part in the drafting process.

After that I take a look at what the involved parties are saying about the new legislation and how it came to be.
I just checked the last balsamic I used, it is 45 calories (10g of sugar, 5g of which is added) per 15mL. While there is more sugar than I expected, I used 1 table spoon or 15mL for a full baking sheet of vegetables. You are right about resetting sugar cravings and to watch out for sugar sneaking into your diet. I find lots of foods at Trader Joe's have more salt and sugar than I would expect.
Sorry, no complete source, I’ve calculated it myself.

The discrepancy arises from several issues:

1. The article you quote is from last year. Current estimates for BTC are around 200 TWh/a, not 140 as in the article.

2. The article looks at BTC only. My statement was BTC + ETH.

3. Energy vs electricity

4. There is also the issue of energy production vs consumption (differences arise from energy used for the production of energy, as well as transport losses).

5. It is plausible that electricity is “just” 10% to 35% of energy usage, would need to look that up.

With all that, I stand by my statement that crypto uses 1% or more of the world electricity consumption.
+1 for LOGO. It's a great pedagogical language, and many primary school children would benefit greatly from its return to wide usage.
The requirement of "subscribe is as easy as unsubscribe" is a metric which you could argue about in court, but would be very hard to game.

i.e. if signup is "email and credit card number" then you're going to be hard pressed to explain why a similar option to cancel does not exist and isn't accessible in as many clicks, with equivalent screen real-estate usage.
I got an HP 4951b serial protocol analyzer off eBay, and want to do something similar with it. It’s based on an NSC-800 CPU, which feels like a cross between a Z80 and an i8085. My explorations are at https://github.com/InPermutation/HP4951b
The Best Interface is No Interface
Automatic market makers, Argent, RAI, multi-sig wallets, Baseline Protocol, Helium, FOAM Space, lending, digital ownership (say of in-game items), anonymity (I donate to Russian opposition in crypto only), improved payment UX.

All things that work well and do it better than non-blockchain.
In that case, you go into academia.
Tools: PlayZX is awesome.
The UK needs to hurry up and decriminalise e-scooters, so they can start to regulate them and actually improve safety.
I have tested several of them (XPS, Lenovo, HP), none of them worked correctly. S3 laptops work way better.
I agree neither dubs nor subtitles are 100% faithful to the original. By necessity, they cannot be. There's no such thing as a perfect translation even with books, but with TV/cinema you also have to keep the pace, which makes things doubly difficult.

Even then, just hearing the original language, even if you don't understand the words, conveys essential emotion. I like to hear the original voice actors, which are essential for the cartoon/anime (even more with live action movies, of course).