skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Crypto is a speculative investment. It may well work out for some, however, I wouldn't advise to put more money in than you can afford to lose.

I am interested in the technology behind crypto, however, I have only seen limited use cases for it so far. The major selling point for crypto seems to be deregulation, however, having worked in Finance for over two decades I have witnessed what (too much) deregulation can result in. If crypto is here to stay, it will be end up as much regulated as money.
The trick was to run many HTTP requests in parallel, using different subdomains so they wouldn't be subject to the browser limit on number of parallel connections to a domain, a dummy first request per subdomain so the interesting messages went over established persistent connections, and decoupling outbound from inbound messages to make a set of "short-long-polling" connections.

That resulted in real-time message throughput close to the game frame rate, bidirectional, and no connection setup latency per message, just the transmission latency even over TLS (SSL back then).
Define far. Gasoline engines eg are within 2x of Carnot limit. Not much room for improvement.
Seems like a pretty autistic way of thinking to me, as if the world exists of only mathematical proofs and religion.
Would forcing people to donate only some non-critical parts of their body to save somebody else be a fair compromise to you?
I first read about Bitcoin here on HN in about 2012. It's when I first started looking into it.
> It's ten years of hype, get-rich-quick schemes and other scams, hardly new.

Right, a portion of which happened right here on HN until it became too blindingly scammy to ignore. NFT's came out which are demonstrably a scam that don't actually do what they claim to. DAO's show up, claiming members will have cryptographic (?) guarantees about decision-making when in fact they are ultimately dependent on some level of human decision-making, so ripe for scams. This maybe climaxed with the push for "web 3.0" to be some sort of new crypto-based meta-internet. People are trying to cash out, I think.

I'll be honest, until then I wasn't even aware of things like the oracle problem, the "nothing at stake" issue inherent to proof-of-stake systems, and the horrible horrible idea that is programmable smart contracts. Cryptocurrency seems like a nice idea when you handwave the actual implementation details as "the tech people figured it out somehow!" Unfortunately, they never really did. This stuff only "works" in a frictionless vacuum.
On taking advantage of both extremes of risk and reward
Awesome! Who is doing this? And how does it compare to transferring money using an existing method?
It's not new.

It's almost as old as android and ios, but instead of changing the world like they did, it's perennially on the verge of something big, according to its proponents. The cryptocurrency revolution is just around the corner! And you should give us your money now!

Meanwhile the entire space is pretty much defined by scams, and economic projects built by people with a questionable grasp of economics and ethics.

And looking into the tech, well it's interesting(ish) in itself but it doesn't really solve any interesting real-world problems for me. PoW in particular seems like the most inelegant hack.
> I never said I "think [I am] entitled to returns just because

Exactly! Why did you think I said anything about not taking risks. I didn't say that either. I was misinterpreting on purpose to show yours.

> "if my goals change, I don't want to lose money"

I did not say that either. I vehemently agree with everything else that you said.
"Edit: I'm a bit tired of all these "this is not something that you would actually ever do" caveats, well, don't show it then?"

Because solving real world problems in a solid way is often too complicated for a presentation, but to show something special you sometimes have no other choice to come up with non real solution that show the principle. But I agree that you can do this in a bad or good way.
Yeah the comparison between the shell script and the Pascal/LP version is a little bit apples/oranges. Maybe a nice counter to that would have been to make an LP version of the script itself. Here's a quickly hacked together mashup of the Knuth/McIlroy solutions:

Given some text input via stdin, we want to find the word that appears most often. The main body of the shell script is as follows - each section uses plain shell utilities and has been developed and tested with (blah blah, maybe mention the version of the utils we used in case GNU versions work but BSD don't or something)

<<makeLines>> | <<convertToLowerCase>> | <<sortAndCountLines>> | <<sortLinesByFrequency>> | <<takeFirst>>

The first job is to isolate "words", defined here as groups of lower case latin alphabet characters (sorry to our international friends out there!) using `tr`. Importantly anything hyphenated will be treated as a separate words ("short-term" will be "short" and "term", for example), so modify the pattern if this isn't what you need.

<<makeLines>> = tr -cs A-Za-z '\n'

Next we'll make everything in the input lower-case:

<<convertToLowerCase>> = tr A-Z a-z

The next step is to sort the lines so exact words are next to each other, then pipe that into `uniq -c` to get counts for each adjacent line. This is a fairly common pattern so I've bunched these guys together.

<<sortAlphabeticallyAndCount>> = sort | uniq -c

Since we're interested in the most frequent we're sorting descending (-r aka --reverse. IMPORTANT: not -R aka --random-sort) and numerically (-n)

<<sortNumerically>> = sort -rn

And finally we can take the first line and print it. NOTE: I didn't use `head -n 1` here because blah stupid reason whatever

<<takeFirst>> = sed ${1}q

(fin)

This is the first time I'd ever written anything approaching LP (I just copied the style in the article) so I just quickly dashed it out with placeholder comments, though I'd maybe include a worked example of the program in action too showing the output at each step. Now obviously it's longer than the little shell snippet that was posted, but even though it is a relatively tiny problem to apply LP to, you can see that there is still some value to it - I've been able to make it clear that only the latin alphabet is considered, I've highlighted a potential oopsie in case someone inexperienced in tries to re-use it (-r/-R), I was able to state that there's an alternative approach to the final step and give a reason why I chose my way.
Perl was a great language while it lasted. I used it all the time in opsec.
I kinda have to agree, can anyone elaborate on the uses of crypto, what does it actually solve? I understand blockchains offer a decentralized system. but how about crypto?
Zsh isn't Bash. And Bash version compatibility is important when 75% of your team develop on Linux, but the other 25% on Mac.

I mean, I use Fish, but when I'm writing shell scripts for others, it's Bash, because it's a common default. But now I'm limited to Bash 3.

But I'm glad that they got rid of that stupid bar, and let you get a laptop with 32G of RAM now. So kind of Apple!
> Had the EU invested heavily in a proper Green New Deal (in ~2010-11 for example

Meantime in the real world in 2021 EU made strategic decisions that guaranteed high food and energy prices for next couple of years and made Putin think that he has a window of when Eu is completely at his mercy. (Putin made a mistake short term. Long term he surely forced EU's hand to go for alternative sources of energy).
Crypto is anti-social. I prefer a working to build a society with trust that isn't dependent upon cryptography that no one understands.
> And the majority of tech people have a hard time coping with the fact that there is something they can't grasp while some others do.

can you please tell us what's hard to grasp?

A block chain is an immutable data-structure due to the fact that there's more computing power out there that proves the data is integral.

you get "coin" for doing the work.
People then trade coin like they trade anything else.

What is there not to get? if bitcoin is an immutable data-structure, what is that data structure holding?
Thank you! This is not only helpful but sounds like my ideal program in terms of learning, flexibility, and chance to explore something new.

I’m curious to hear about the SEM (I assume Software Engineering Mathematics) method of qualifying perhaps as a post-graduate (non-matriculated) learner — this taken from the other commenter. This seems like an ideal way to test out the structure and style of a classroom and qualify by achieving high marks before committing and fully applying to the program. Is this a thing that you’ve heard about? There isn’t anything on the website about qualifying for the program through this.

Also, what was the application interview like?
It is different. Yes, there are some colleagues with whom I have regular online contact, some of them I really only got into contact with during the pandemic. We have regular calls and exchanges.
But I also have a lot of colleagues, which I don't have close contact with and contact to those has mostly evaporated during the pandemic. That are those people, I might talk to when meeting them in the coffee room, but really no reason to call outside of that or vice versa.

Speaking of coffee rooms, they have another important property: it is very nice, even healthy, to leave your desk from time to time and both take a break for your mind and your body from work. In the office you walk to the coffee room in that time and there you meet people in the same phase. They are taking a break and you don't interrupt each others work when having a chat. In a sense, online social contact can be very disruptive, as when you start an online interaction, you don't know whether your recipient is willing for an interrupition or not.
Of course, there are ways to arrange that too, but things aren't just black and white and interactions are complex.
> Coworking space, cafe, personal office etc.

or you can chose to work for a company whose offices are not two hours away.

coworking, cafes, etc are not really suited to actually work, especially of your work requires some kind of concentration or secrecy (an NDA for example)

Personal office in house is the worst combination of them all IMO.

Not that I do not work from home, I did it for good part of my life, it's just not for everybody.

You have also to consider that having their parents around all day could be the worst possible way to live for teenagers, it makes more sense only when they are small kids, but in my country we have parental leaves and specific holidays to take care of that.
I illustrated this epic story: https://comic.browserling.com/knuth-vs-mcilroy.png
Crypto is nothing but a speculative vehicle for making money. People of high intelligence (which represents most members of Hackernews) recognize this, although depending on what their vested interests are, they may or may not reveal that publicly.

In general, if you happen to have a large stake in crypto or are depending on crypto to make you significant returns, you are more likely to be pro-crypto.

If you have no stake, it’s likely because you never saw a point to cryptocurrency and never invested, so you will likely be anti-crypto or neutral at best.

The technobabble of blockchain tech does not work on highly tech-literate people of Hackernews, we know this is basically useless technology in its current form. At it’s peak it would essentially be nothing more than a globally distributed database anyone could read from or write to. But inherently this has nothing to do with cryptocurrency.

It would be a red flag IMO if hackernews was pro-crypto.
I had similar issue - I know the passwords, the recovery email but does not have a phone number associated with it. I can't login. Thankfully, that Google account has no important data.

Only thing you can try is to use the same device and browser and this time, use your mobile internet to access it (if not done already). This might have 1% extra chance of success but there's no guarantee.

Google's AI (or the engineer's brain) has decided that logging in with new routers is only the job of a scammer or a terrorist, hence you're logged out permanently.

I've moved 90% of my life away from Google. Perhaps you can try that as well.
Exactly. I don't know why anyone would hope to not be sceptical about anything. The opposite of sceptical is gullible. You should strive to be sceptical.
> There is no way that every transaction signer whose transaction is added to a block should be considered a client of the miner of that block.

This does not seem obvious to me; even if "client" is too strong a word, the transaction signer and miner have some social contract that's very similar to more traditional fiduciary duty, even if the technical details and enforcement mechanisms are totally different.
I'm asking about pdf-tools on Emacs, not Okular.
"Ponzi scheme" does not mean "thing that gets lots of money that might not deliver and I don't like"...
> It can only compete with cash, in a way that’s worse by every conceivable notion.

Except the part where a tiny fraction of a populace can print an infinite amount more of it, sure. But that's just a small thing, amirite?
Not a week goes by without seeing a post like yours. You may simply need to come to terms with the fact that you may not be able to gain access to your account. Lesson learnt: Google is evil, stay away from it.
Have a look back at ~2014 or so. HN was extremely bullish on Bitcoin. It sometimes took up about a quarter of the articles at any given time. It promised a bright new decentralized world and offered fertile ground for innovation. It promised to free up peer-to-peer transfers, allow some measure of anonymity in financial transactions, and perhaps even become the vehicle for microtransactions that the world so sorely needs.

Today, it is far less clear that there is something new at hand. To the extent that blockchains enable innovation, the early wins are complete and the strengths and weaknesses of the entire ecosystem largely have become clear.

In 2014, it was rather clear that blockchains had some sort of substantial potential value, something competitive with the total amount of money circulating in the world. In 2022, cryptocurrency is worth that much. Bitcoin alone is "worth" perhaps a trillion dollars, while M1 is around 20 trillion.

What we're seeing today is a lack of clarity and direction. HN was stoked on crypto when it offered something new. Today, crypto offers a lot of pump-and-dump schemes and financial curiosities, but nothing like the promise and obvious direction it held in 2014.

Something cool and new may yet emerge -- expect HN to get real excited when it does happen.
Well, "crypto" is just Ponzi scams. The more interesting question is why is HN so anti-bitcoin? Looks like they don't get how harmful fiat money is to society and the environment.

One reason might be that HN is just too woke. Probably you even get censored here for saying that men are not women.
Constipation believe it or not.
> “crypto twitter” (they mean blockchain twitter)

This says it all.
Do you expect fighting climate change to look like synchronized swimming?
Why is that valuable? And more importantly, how is the upside this brings bigger than the downside it brings compared to previous approaches to borrowing/lending?
Because ever since the Bitcoin whitepaper, the focus has completely shifted from building useful technology into speculation and grift, accompanied by scams and tribalism.

Solving the double spending problem in a completely decentralized manner is quite the achievement, but rather than embrace speculation, Bitcoin should have deterred it, keeping the price low and limiting environmental impact.
Yeah or is it like the infomercials where people show you these awesome gadgets that solve problems that you actually don't have, just to sell you a bunch of crap so that they can make money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWf98aCvkOQ&t=215s here he says so.
hahaha ... havent laughed this much in a long while ...

That would be the next evolution of workspaces after open plan. One giant cesspool err .. watercooler where everyone can sysnergize and regurgitate err... ideate.
There's knee-jerk generalization about cryptocurrency here. There are plenty of bad takes on Twitter and HN. That said, yes you can highlight things you do not value personally. That doesn't mean others are wrong to value them.

The above stands, even if you feel you have a superior understanding of technology. It doesn't mean you have license to generalize or an exclusive license to determine what is valuable. Others may value things differently, and that is fine.

Different strokes for different folks. Don't want to transact in cryptocurrency? You don't have to. Problem solved. Value it however you want to, but don't dismissively condemn it or generalize by calling it a scam. The claim is arrogant. Even more so when, "Because we understand tech better than..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value
Smart contracts are interesting, but they're like ray traced quake was in 2004, a curiosity, a toy, something interesting that doesn't have real utility yet.

These technologies are good to have in case someday they become actually useful, but the amount of energy and money spent on them today far exceeds their usefulness and is purely hype-driven.

For example, there may be actual utility in NFTs: EU law requires that if you buy a game on e.g., steam, you should be able to lend it out, get it back, and resell it. If the EU, in a few years, were to decide games had to be portable between stores, and started actually enforcing these, it would make sense to put the actual game license key up as NFT and allow transfers.

But that's a hypothetical. It's not what's happening today. Today's excitement is purely hype.

The total energy consumption of PoW blockchains has increased global CO2 output enough that it exceeds the amount of CO2 saved by switching to renewables in the past 20 years. That's not worth it if there's such little utility in there.
Taking care of your own trees also takes time. For one, you need to put them in good soil, water them perhaps, keep them clear from pests, trim them, etc.
Hand-wavy predictions like this scare me - it suggests people don't understand space travel or the distances involved at all.

Sure, if you think of the Earth as a game of SimCity plus Kerbal Space Program, these discussions about exponential growth are interesting. However, they miss the part where the intervening 30-100 years become literal hell on Earth while space travel ramps up.
I've been seeing a lot of kids on Twitter doing threads on things like, "What is a smart contract?", "How to transition from Web2 to Web3", and I can't help but feel like I am staring down inside a barrel that leads to a black hole.

People talk about these topics like they "truly" understand them, when there isn't much to understand in the first place. As I have said many times already on HN - it's unnecessarily complex at the very core of it, and is often spoken about through traditional marketing jargon.

"It's the future.", "But, it's decentralized!".

An example we can look at is Crypto.com - which has invested billions upon billions of dollars into the US market. Do you really think the average Joe gives a rats ass about blockchain or decentralization - the goal of these investments is to hook people on something they don't understand.

And then milk their stupidity with cheap tricks like NFTs, bullshit investments, and scam coins that come and go on an hourly basis.
Exactly. I even use the same monitor and everything, but when I'm done for the day, the laptop goes in the drawer and whoever wants something from me will have to wait for the next business day.

I find the same kind of creep can happen at the office, too. Many colleagues end up leaving at 8 PM or later [0] because they have to do this one more thing or someone shows up with just a quick question to ask.

However, I realize that for some people, who have a harder time saying no for whatever reason, it's easier to have a hard, external excuse. "Sorry, I need to catch my train, so I don't have to sleep here" works less well when you're already home. But I think that in both cases it's very important to set boundaries and stick to them.

---

[0] Our workdays are normally 9 AM to 6 PM.
like that time when there's a bug and something like 40 thousand dollars just goes to waste because ~~~ it's out of everyone's control ~~~

The issue with control is trust. The answer is to enable more trust, not to reduce the control.
note to self: don't ever talk about socialism in US centric forums.

they won't understand.
and bad for the environment.
crypto is just purely distilled capitalism. Of course it's not going to solve any problems - it's an ecosystem entirely dedicated to the pursuit of profit, without the inconvenient side effects of actually producing useful work.
Indeed there’s actually a 64gb variant
Thank you for making this app!

It might sound counterintuitive, but some HoH (hard of hearing) users might actually be listening to media in the foreground when a noise triggers a background alert. They might have headphones or might have audio piped to aids over BT. So, it might make sense to pause foreground media, if that's possible, in order to let the user shift focus to the alerting noise, ideally isolating and amplifying the noise a little and sending it to the phone's audio output. Aids do this to some extent but maybe not when media is playing.
For the first 20+ years internet was relegated to a niche technology that will fail as we have faxes. I think your take on crypto is absurd and nonsensical in light of internet success. Here is the relevant quote: "By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." Maybe you don't remember that quote, but it was said by Nobel winner, Krugman.
For a few real world examples that may be easier to grok:

- https://goldfinch.finance

- https://www.maple.finance

- https://truefi.io

- https://makerdao.com/en/ (there is a growing "real-world asset"-collateralized pool as well)

- https://centrifuge.io

These all offer rates competitive or superior to traditional methods thanks to being able to access a global pool of capital through a single programming interface that simplifies coordination and risk sharing between counter-parties.

And another early example Valora (on the Celo network) where you can make global transfers of money with a Venmo-like experience for fees <$0.01.
Could be fun to do a sentiment analysis of block chain posts/comments on HackerNews and see if it possible to see the break
Yeah. Furthermore, I don’t know how CMC calculates their total but if it uses fully diluted market cap, the crypto total would be even less by a large amount.
try to twitter google with your issue, they listen better through twitter.

please remember to not use google mail for the future, anything important should not be offloaded to yahoo google Microsoft.