skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A quick trip to Wikipedia's bitcoin page yields[1], which, among other comparisons, compares bitcoin's consumed energy to countries. At 145.9 TWh yearly, it's less than Egypt and Poland and greater than Ukraine and Norway. This is up from the 2021 estimates[2] of 121 TWh yearly, larger than the countries of Argentina and Netherlands.

Bitcoin is intentionally wasteful, and I say this as a technical admirer. Its genius is the extremely simple idea of making writes to a distributed database so unimaginably harder than reads, so that untrusted network peers behave themselves and don't invalidate the state of the shared ledger. The network literally just asks you to spend your time counting to N at the top of your lungs so you don't cheat, if that's not waste then I don't know what is waste.

This 'waste' is necessary when you don't trust your peers, you're buying trust with it, cold hard trust, as rock solid as P != NP. But look at the sheer hype crypto has amassed since 2017 and tell me with a straight face that all those "applications" need trustless distributed peers. NFTs literally store the actual data of the token on centralized servers that can go down or go wild with your data at any moment they goddamn please, the NFT on the blockchain is merely a thin reference.

The ideal path for distributed trustless blockchains would have been as a small niche, an "elite shock trooper" technique when distributed trust among trustless peers is absolutely necessary. Ideally, miners would understand the simple fact that it's of no use to keep bringing better and better silicon to the arena, as the network swallows all in its big mouth anyway, and the network would then grow naturally so that it's approximately the power of NETWORK_SIZE * CURRENT_PC_POWER at any current year, instead of a never ending race to the bottom of sacrificing more and more silicon to the God Of The Hash.

Alas, from the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

[1] https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/comparisons

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952
I have no stake in crypto besides a bit of eth. 2 coinbase examples. First: your deposits are covered only if they're denominated in USD. Second example was the fine print on Coinbase's crypto-loan thing where they said they're giving custody to a 3rd party and giving you all the risk. Good luck on that APY!

A free third example is all of these "APY" and yield-farming things in defi (usually) project figures based on a couple of early whales moving into a shitcoin, getting random people into it, then swapping liquidity to the next one. The initial move isn't exactly a lie, but assuming the next 6-18 months will sustain the advertised number is (imo) quite deceitful. Now you get to "stake" and lock yourself in for months! Yikes. That's on top of liquidity vanishing in a crisis.

tl;dr the nuance on this stuff is detailed, and the details are important in times of crisis
The science itself is good. It's scientism that's dangerous. Also malicious intents of some academia members to get grants or lifelong job based on the misleading research.
I’m not really following this. Let’s say I secretly tag my dollars with a red mark. Deposit $1000 cash, and then my account shows a $1000 balance. My red $1000 is probably going to wind up being withdrawn in an ATM by someone else, or used in a mortgage, or something else, but my red tagged $1000 bills don’t suddenly become a multiplied amount of money!
The Internet is by no means decentralized, and the most compelling argument for the inefficiencies of crypto, in my opinion, is that everything we've built on the Internet tends to centralization. "No one wants to run their own mail server". So eventually, we'll have spent all this energy and time in designing convoluted protocols that solve the exact same problem we had already solved, only less efficiently and with more hoops.

(edit: fix typo)
The Android 'equivalent' is just using the uBlock Origin add-on in Firefox as usual, not some new Apple-invented category of app and hamstrung browsers that are all basically Safari.
I’m inching closer and closer to just deleting every app on my phone and tablet except what allows me to take calls, answer emails, and read books. I read so much when I was a kid, with a great deal of focus, but now I feel like I need constant shifting multisensory stimulation. I can hardly get through ten minutes of a movie without pausing to look at my phone. I can’t listen to a podcast without playing a game or something at the same time.

I absolutely feel that I’ve gotten dumber in the last fifteen years.
Every other way is better.

1) Crypto is easily traceable. Far more than any other means of funds transfer if you exercise even modest efforts to hide the source of funds. And to the extent crypto provides a modicum of privacy it’s because it’s too small for governments to have put any restrictions on it.

2) There is absolutely no guarantee the money will reach Wikileaks. At best, the money will reach the holder of Wikileaks’s private key holder. As we found out with Coinbase, for the vast majority of crypto wallets, that’s not gonna be your intended recipient.

3) Even “The money” it’s a term
Is debatable. If you sent them that crypto 1 month ago and they tried to withdraw it today, at best they would have got half the value you sent them.

There is nothing unique about crypto in terms of privacy other than the fact that most governments haven’t bothered with it. In fact, crypto is so easily traceable I’ve always harbored half a theory that it was created by the CIA specifically to chart out and bust drug and terrorist rings.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the only reason the government isn’t taking down/regulating crypto is because the intelligence agencies are just so thrilled with the awesome network information they’re getting about criminals through their crypto transfers.
Show HN: Gstreamer-based stream supervisor using YAML
The Art of Decision-Making (2019)
yea, that's the second theory, but the timings don't really match, we started self-domesticating a long time before civilization
Archived: https://archive.ph/0voO2
the impossibility of privacy is also not theoretical.
The article includes an explainer: https://www.servethehome.com/what-is-a-dpu-a-data-processing...

Line-rate (10G, 25G, 100G, 400Gbps) packet processing enables software control ("virtualization") of networking and storage. Instead of needing a human to make a physical connection between server and storage or network device, it can be automated via software. This saves money for data centers and allows new products to be launched quickly. It allows customer self-service for purchase and management of storage/network capacity.

Line-rate packet processing also enables automated (authorized) intercept of storage and network traffic.
But a larger fraction of the users that seek a method of stopping ads.
Let's see for how long the FED will be able to keep interest raised before having to lower it again.

I say they'll lower it again by 2024.
I think the last couple of years is a wake-up call for the neo-liberal order.

Before, it was cool to talk about efficiency and how backward it was for countries to try to protect domestic industries instead of just allow “free trade”.

However, the last few years have illustrated that if you don’t have domestic production of essentials, then you are going to be hurting. Look at the early Covid pandemic and the shortage of face masks and other protective equipment. Look at vaccine production and how countries that could manufacture the vaccine prioritized domestic distribution first. Look now at global food supply and how countries as limiting exports of their grains.

The last decade or so is a story about countries and companies pursuing “efficiency” at the expense of increased fragility. Going forward, I think you will see more companies taking a larger role to make sure critical production capabilities stay domestic.
Can You Use Formal Verification on a Table Top Game?
> Bitcoin can provide uncensored access to financial services

Example needed here, how are people with less financial privilege censored by fiat? Loan conditions? Definitely not, that's just the financiers not wanting to issue risky loans.
> Umm... that's because "VC" as an asset class has only existed for a few decades, and didn't come out of the fringes until around the dot-com bubble

Rockefeller and Gates wouldn't have wanted VCs on the cap table anyways, even if they were around back then.

That's because they knew they had the means to repay the 27%something interest rate loan that a newborn Standard Oil or Microsoft commanded.

People resort to VCs because they don't have the entrepreneurial arrogance to believe that the thing that they'll build is gonna be a hit.

Actually given that any movement is a bottom-up movement...VCs exists solely because entrepreneurs have lost their entrepreneurial arrogance.
I don't see any cryptocoins that I regard as a success, but I am watching three that might be a success:

1. Filecoin: It was well-motivated from the start, to provide a cheap way to get counterparties (by default, a multiple of six) to pin content in IPFS. I don't regard it as a proven technology yet, but it's usable as it stands;

2. Brave's BATs: Brave annoys me with its cryptocoin boosterism, but in principle this provides an way for content providers to profit from gaining a readership that doesn't involve nasty ad-tech. I don't think the system provides good enough incentives for users to mint BATS as it stands, but I think that in principle the Brave team have a viable solution to this problem.

3. The Stellar payments infrastructure has a cryptocoin used to grease its wheels. I don't see Stellar's choice to mint their own cryptocoin as principled here (they could have allowed nodes to choose), but using some cryptocoin here is driven by use.

None of these coins use Bitcoin / present-day Ethereum style proof of work, so they do not appear to have the negative externalities you deplore.
People might think this is too bitter or dismissive but it's true.

I have seen many many people pointing out the shady dealings and the death spiral nature of Terra on social media like reddit. But they were shouted out with cries of "FUD!".

It's a ponzi scheme and if your caught holding the bag, it is always in your interest to continue the scam rather than call out the scammers. That is why crypto "communities" will never acknowledge negative facts.
A golang app exposes several metrics by default already. A common way is using Prometheus to collect the data and use Grafana to create a graphic dashboard. But it takes some configuration and needs those services running somewhere. Not something I want to spend much time on.
When I interview people, I wouldn't dock any points for saying what you just wrote. I care more about the way you think than if you perfectly know the language's syntax. If anything, that's a positive for me. The modulus operator can be tricky and do not behave the same in every language, the fact you're aware of that and you would have a quick sanity check is a great sign in my opinion. It can be the start of some further conversation.
They are not. Singapore’s business model is to be a hub for international business, and being low regulation is a important part of that strategy. Singapore regulates many things about it’s social structure, but international business is very free and open.
https://dokku.com/docs/processes/process-management/
As far as I know only Google Cloud does ‘hardware redundancy’[0]. I’ve had single-instance outages in AWS and they don’t seem to really care if something goes wrong with your instance, although maybe they have more maintenance events than they let on and they might happen transparently to the user thanks to some form of live migration.

0: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/live-migrati...
Has Microsoft changed its TPM requirements for Windows 11?

If not, then there is no override.
The test is graded to a curve with 100 as middle and usually 15 points SD. Size of the SD might vary.
Wilderness with randomness? Animals at each encounter flip a coin to decide who eats and who is eaten ?
You say “only 1300 wishlists” I know some people that would be doing backflips if they had that many people interested in their game :)
Didn’t makerbot have those hot ends that were rebranded as disposable because they would just fail so often? I wonder if the new CEO seeing over R&D/operations was there for that.
Lack of dopamine is just as problematic as too much dopamine.
(a) mobile -> VPN -> server with PiHole
Not that it's a great solution, but there's https://github.com/BurntSushi/go-sumtype for (2).
Doesn’t the MessageID work?
The smallest PaaS you have ever seen is one order of magnitude larger than mine: https://github.com/tinspin/rupy

And I bet you the same goes for performance, mine can share data between cores atomically.
The era between 1945 and 1971 was not based on gold standard, but it was Bretton Woods system, that worked in a significantly different way from both era before (traditional gold standard) and era after (floating currencies).
> I've had increasing trouble reading books for years.

I've experienced this as well, and the only solution I have found is to take periodic breaks from my phone and all social media. Within a day or two of minimizing phone use that natural curiosity and desire to learn and motivation to read reemerges.
Some great inspiration to dig back into fantasy consoles
I used this when it was announced but it's been a while since I even thought about it. I decided to dig up some old emails and see how it went for me.

Invited and signed up on 2015-04-28, service ended 2017-01-17. I had a $2 monthly reoccurring charge to fund the account, but I just accrued a balance, so I cancelled the charge in 2015-11-15 and that balance lasted until the service ended. In the final email they sent they included some stats:

> Thanks for being a Contributor! Your contribution of $14.01 helped to fund 351 sites! A refund for your remaining balance of -$0.02 is being processed and your account is now closed.

I don't remember it being particularly noticeable, and I think on some sites it would just replace the ads with a banner saying something like "Thanks for being a contributor". I also recall there being tiers / budgets you could set.
I lost faith in Makerbot when they started using proprietary parts that, as far as I could tell, weren’t actually superior to the open source equivalents. I ran a print farm for a while with 50 printers of various brands and the bottom line is that if you FDM print a lot, stuff is going to break or go wrong regardless of the printer price or brand. Being able to easily (and cheaply) source parts and replace things yourself is essential. I will always applaud them for Thingiverse, though.

I feel like the story is a bit different in the SLA world, but I got out of 3D printing before it got really popular.
Speaking of externalities - climate change is a very real consequence many people choose to go Lalala about. Ridiculously pricey GPU? Now we have something people might notice :D
So why isn't C the baseline (and zig and rust being pretty close to it quite expected), but both luajit and julia are significantly faster??
Oh suddenly middlemen are fine. I thought crypto was all about cutting out the middlemen?

Also, even if you follow that premise, that someone should at least be independent of Tether. With so much of the classification "at their sole discretion", this seems questionable.
I developed a terminal emulator, file manager and text editor Deodar 8 years ago in JavaScript/V8 with native C++ calls, it worked but I was extremely disappointed by speed, it felt so slow like you need to do a passport control each time you call a C++ function.
How come the authors did not want to add proper sum-types?
You think poor people don't already have a buffet of scams, MLMs and ponzis to chose from?
I’m not talking about live migration - the instance will go down and there will be a brief outage while the instance restarts on another hypervisor. The same is true of a single dyno Heroku app.
> The one tiny drawback is that the globals have to be variables instead of constants, but that’s one of those problems that really only exists in the theoretical realm. I’ve never seen a bug from someone overwriting a global variable like this, that is intended to be immutable.

Even if it’s a silly bug to make, it really annoys me a lot knowing you could change an enum value.
Is it so hard for Go to support consts of any-type?
Maybe set time limits then. Also have an alternative thing to do on your phone if you can't do anything else (like Duolingo or respond to important emails).
If I was "China" I would see this "warning" as a naked aggression, and as a Western man of western values (closely holding the original US constitution ideals) I am utterly disappointed by this "western" elite's behavior.

* There is no justification for RU to pull the "trigger". However, by the same token (in the plane of ethos and logos) there no justification for US(NATO) policies full knowing that it will lead RU to do this (Im referring to dozens upon dozens of documents, research and diplomatic confessions available to public that these policies will result in a military confrontation).

To summarize from China point of view (in my reading of the situation):

1) NATO/US does not acknowledge any role that lead to this situation (which just simply undeniably imbecilic when dealing with other foreign players, and diminishes perceived honesty and seriousness for equal treatment of future problems).

2) Instead NATO is pursuing ever more aggressive stance in this proxy war, going as far as openly (supporting) calling for assassinations, weaponizing finances and economics, and etc

3) There is no effort/will/plan by EU/US to resolve this conflict in a diplomatic space. [I can totally see an argument for doing this, but I can see why China would not look at it from that point of view]

These points, in my view, along with "issuing a warning" rather than debating on equal grounds I suppose will not yield the desired goal of G7. At the same time China will gauge its own interests in this situation, from their point of view (they may use the conflict also as a proxy war to weaken NATO).

*What a mess of a situation*
In the case of Brave, genuinely curious:

Is there any reason this needs to be on a public blockchain? What are the benefits? Why is this a better solution than Brave keeping points/payments data in their own database?
How much they produce and how much they export are not the same thing.
If I'm willing to pay to not see ads in search results it's more likely that I'm not really engaging much with ads.
Not to mention ridding Gotham city of crime.

Sorry, damn, that was Bruce Wayne.
You don't think that the 1MWh or so of electricity used (estimates vary from 2MWh down to 700kWh, depending on what you read, so I pick a value in the low end of the middle) is pushing up the price of energy?

Let's reframe those values slightly - every bitcoin transaction uses about as much electricity as it costs to run my house for nearly six months.

Are you sure that's not having an adverse effect on energy prices?
Not misleading at all. India is the world’s second largest wheat producer.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_wheat_producti...
Debatable. Seeds are very high in omega6 fatty acids which should be balanced with omega3. They also can go rancid more easily which is not healthy to eat.

I noticed this article also subscribes to the “saturated fat is bad” way of thinking which is also debatable.
Where are all these crypto bros that everyone seems so upset about?
Half the Nasdaq is down a whole lot more than BTC. I don’t think BTC is the most sensitive asset w/r/t interest rates and the market is proving that.
Your "data" is not worth anything. No-one is spying on you. You are not interesting.
2009:

"There is an accumulating body of evidence that a decline in immune function with age is common to most if not all vertebrates. For instance, age-associated thymic involution seems to occur in all species that possess a thymus, indicating that this process is evolutionary ancient and conserved. ... we show that life history trade-offs play a key role and we highlight the possible advantages of the age-related decline in thymic function."

https://www.cell.com/trends/immunology/fulltext/S1471-4906(0...

2021:

"The thymus begins to degenerate as early as the second year of life and continues through aging in human beings, leading to a decreased output of naïve T cells, the limited TCR diversity and an expansion of monoclonal memory T cells in the periphery organs. These alternations will reduce the adaptive immune response to tumors and emerging infectious diseases, such as COVID-19, also it is easier to suffer from autoimmune diseases in older people. "

https://clinicalepigeneticsjournal.biomedcentral.com/article...
> That’s not how we build cities; modern cities have urban planning departments, traffic engineers, zoning etc.

I don’t know. My father spent his career as an Urban Planner in a Planning Department (in Ontario, Canada), and he never had the power to remake cities that you’re alluding to.

Mostly his job was to do studies of proposed zoning changes of land use and the impact, and make a recommendation. The recommendations were presented to the Planning Board at public meetings.

The board meetings were, of course, part of the larger democratic process, and were just as subject to popular whims as any other parts of government. Landowners and developers had a huge amount of influence, and worked hard to get their projects approved.

I think the “Urban Planners did this” is mostly just a deflection (in Canada and the U.S. at least.) I point to the “smart neighborhood” that Google and the Province of Ontario (on behalf of developers) were pushing hard for in Toronto a few years ago [1] as a more visible example.

patio11 has even written about this process, more from the developers side. [2]

[1] “Sidewalk Toronto” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidewalk_Toronto

[2] “Dad’s war stories (commercial real estate). https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1389688784569073664
> Sure, except it strongly correlates with pretty much every single measure of fluid intelligence you can think of. And with a billion real life outcomes, besides

Sure, test scores correlate with other test scores (surprisingly badly) which correlate with other proxy measures of intelligence. Quelle surprise!

There's a massive difference between acknowledging a test is somewhat useful in ranking peers and agonising over whether one cohort getting scores in a particular test a couple of points lower than another cohort from a completely different background represents some real world shortcoming of the latter cohort in anything other than that particular set of puzzles. The research establishing a lack of support for supposed "dysgenic" trends (though absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence) because the drop happens within families might be superficially interesting, but we're looking at tiny points of difference in a noisy series. There's typically more variation between Weschler and Raven tests adminstered to the same individuals than the measured generational "IQ decline" the headline is encouraging us to agonise over. When all the points of data other than IQ tests suggest that subsequent generations haven't struggled intellectually compared with their forebears, there's not much reason to suspect the trends in paper puzzle scores are a signal and not just noise.
https://nullprogram.com/blog/2018/05/27/
This article would be much more convincing if I didn't have fresh experience recruiting to netlify. They didn't even bother to send the automated email with rejection, and my experience pretty much 100% matched the job description. Pretty good example of corporate "Lets write article to gain some PR points".
> But, for argument's sake let's say you can be put in jail or killed for your sexuality.

Maybe don't live in a shithole country then. Use some of your money to move somewhere sensible.