skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Questions regarding the current monetary system
Sorry if the title isn't properly formulated. Due to the recent abuse of the current monetary policy from the governments, and especially from the US, this question came up to my head.

When I refer to "real money" I mean money, the asset, that can be redeemed by itself, without any trust. For example, gold is real money. Cash is real money; even if there's a trust from the government since they're printing it, there's no trust when I hand out a dollar bill. Bitcoin is real money et cetera.

With this definition credit isn't real money. You can create credit out of thin air. Credit requires trust to work; the existence of the previous assets.

My first question is: When a central bank wants to create money, does it have to print it? Since they are the only mint, what prevents them from pretending they have enough reserves (in cash) and increase their credit balance with zero risk? Why do they have to print notes and then burn them?

My second question is: Can a government create "real money" in an electronic form? I had watched once a Zeitgeist documentary regarding this matter, and said that the exchange of $10 billion in bonds between the US treasury and the FED happens electronically.

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Just a folk who tries to figure out what's happening in the world. Thanks!
By the way, on versions that don't support status=progress (like busybox and the BSD versions), you can periodically send a USR1 signal to get a progress update.
A word for “the number of things you need to know to understand the code”?
For example, to understand

if (obj.index == 0 && (f_mode > 3 || state[1] != null))

you need to know
* What does obj represent
* Under what circumstance does obj have an index of 0
* Why we are interested in that circumstance for what we are trying to achieve
* What does f_mode represent
* Under what circumstances is f_mode greater than 3
* etc etc etc

You need to know at least 10 things to understand it. However, if we break it up and replace it with

if (Membership.IsExpired)

then we need to know 0 things to understand it.

Is there some sort of principle that represents the number of things you need to know? A sort of Things You Need To Know To Understand This Index? Something that is a countable unit, so that you could say that one block of code has an index of 17 (i.e. you need to know 17 things to understand it) while another block of code has an index of 2?

We could start from a baseline assumption that the reader knows the coding principles themselves. The reader needs to know how an if-statement works, for example, but that would not be included in the index. One might argue about whether more obscure coding tricks should be included in the index or not.
...but you better don’t settle for a minimum RAM if you are buying it not just for web surfing.
Each to their own. I can parse a double negative but don't know what "NAKed" is.
Mdshow: Turn Markdown into beautiful presentations with reveal.js
> As a rule of thumb, if you never handle a transaction failure or deadlock with something that is not retrying or failing, you shouldn't be using an ACID-based system since you're not getting any benefit from it.

Could you expand? Does this mean you wouldn't use an ACID database for CRUD?
Bitcoin can have value even if it's not money. So, gp's point stands.
Tax everything the amount it costs to clean up the pollution it causes, and if a country isn't signed up to this, tax all their imports the same amount, overestimate.

Then use that tax money to clean up the pollution.

Side effects: people will invent cheaper ways to clean up pollution
Maybe not in major cities, however, definitely applicable to a medium sized town in Catalunya.
it's organic.
Ask HN: Tips for Reducing the Number of Inboxes
Does anyone have any tips for handling the fact that there is an ever growing number of apps to check messages on. I have to check linked in, email, texts, messenger, whatsapp, signal, telegram, slack etc
Everyone seems to have their preference I have loads of friends who only use messenger, some who only use signal.
As a dyslexic I find it super hard to keep up and end up missing and forgetting loads of things as a result.
Does everyone just deal with it? Or is there a way to centralise my communication without hiring a pa?
> Linux, in hardware virtualization on the M1, is fast. Like, vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly fast. Absolutely useful for anything that “needs Linux” on a M1, and very likely the fastest Linux machine you can get right now for single threaded work.

Author seems to be basing this from their results of https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/ :

* M1 - Chrome on macOS: 127

* M1 - Chrome on Linux via QEMU: 160

I just ran the benchmark on my framework laptop (2021 version - 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-1185G7)

* Framework - Chrome on Windows 11: 138

* Framework - Chrome on Linux (manjaro): 160
>These were all non realistic threat.

They still are. How many stories are there of people actually having their cars stolen via remote relay attacks? It gets demoed a lot in proof of concepts but I have never heard of it being actually executed. Why on earth would someone build fake fingerprints when they can just walk in to a designer handbag store with a knife, grab a few bags, and resell on facebook market place.

Credit cards don't _need_ bulletproof security, they just need to be secure enough. Fraud can often be reversed and fraudsters don't get away with it many times since there is CCTV in every location that takes card. The card companies would rather opt to eat the losses on any non reversible fraud because the profits of a friction less user experience is worth more.
I would pay a premium if I was confident that I'm speaking to an expert that will tell me when he's _not_ an expert in something I'm looking for.
Fun read, but these notes are exact opposite of "empirical". But considering the author was 14 when writing it, I think we can overlook that.
There have been breaking changes, I don't think anything too difficult to overcome, but it's easy to pin it intending to fix later, and fall behind. (e.g. 3.9-3.10 something to do with dataclasses iirc)
Unrelated to the content:

What is the reason to link to external websites like this: https://www.construct.net/out?u=https%3a%2f%2fen.wikipedia.o...

Why not set a link to wikipedia directly?
thats a massive strawnan. tfa is not saying accidents dont happen. theyre saing that their data show that wearing helmets has a net negative affect, all things considered. tfa is about statistics of large numbers of situations, and is not making any claims about individual bikes being magical.
If you consider organization in general to be abstraction, then I think that might cause some overselling of abstraction and miscommunication with others.

Unless I'm the one using words weirdly here.
On other hand bitcoin will always have non-zero cost to operate. Even if it goes back to CPU mining someone has to keep computer with the blockchain stored running somewhere for it to exist...
In a way I mean that these libraries are low level.
I personally use Matrix and bridge all my social accounts to there. It works super well, because my friends don't have to switch their app, but I see everyone in just one app. matrix.org/bridges
Perhaps if we are talking about the South Island of New Zealand and the southern tip of Canada (Toronto). Most of Canada would be closer to the pole.
I can sort of understand the Museum's position in that allowing everyone to make their own 3D scans all the time would end up taking a lot of time and resources.

But perhaps a compromise would be for the Museum to make its own scans using the best available technology, and make the data available to any institutions that want it? Or allowing the Archaeology Institute to do their scans on the condition that the data is made available to others.
I also got this heuristic from Martin Crawford.
However I believe it applies to snippets (<100 lines of code at the very most) only, for the reason you gave.
But even then, it sometimes happen that you find a bug in a 4 line snippet that you know was duplicated once, and have to hope you can find it through grep or commit history. So while being careful not to over-engineer and apply KISS/YAGNI ('you ain't gonna need it'), one-time duplication can be a pain.
It’s breaking up into whole books. Each has is stored, distributed, addressed and built separately. You have to become an expert at making the implied overhead efficient, because it will dominate everything you do.
Canada has email money transfers that is done via the big banks.
If you’re serious about the environment you’ll do things like:

Having fewer kids, having housemates, eating less food, buying fewer things, not driving a car, not inducing demand for services that require cars, etc
Yeah yeah. We've been hearing this over and over - especially in bear markets - yet crypto is not only still around but it is also getting relentlessly adopted.
Immich: Self-hosted photo, video backup solution directly from your mobile phone
Value (Economics) : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_(economics)
> Heck, the one that got acquired died even with me in an advisory position.

:) There is an interesting advice on this topic in a book "Make a million before lunch". It states that your job as a founder should be to make yourself redundant as soon as possible. It helps a lot strategically in the long-run.
To become a Unit of Account, you generally need to become a Means of Payment. To become a Means of Payment, you need to be a store of value.

Why would you price a product or service in something without value?
Why would you denote all prices in something that nobody is pricing in?

Your blanket argument that all successful currencies have been backed by a state is obviously wrong. Gold, Salt, Rai stones, sea shells all had value and were used as currency without governments taxing in them. Rai stones especially are a very interesting use case of money.
But writing it would be harder, no?

I mean if it's only like 50 short lines, that would be okay-ish, but in this case why do it in C and not use perl or awk?(i suppose you want fast text processing, so I won't suggest python). If the processing is hard, then you will need debugging (which is better in segregated functions) and to prototype a bit (unless I'm the only one who does that?).
I'd say that's mainstream though
Every action you take first creates emissions. Doing nothing often seems to be the safest way to reduce your own emissions. This gives you a good feeling that you are at least not part of the problem. An open source / open science strategy at least prevents greenwashing and allows to at least focus on measures that actually save emissions. However, as long as the systemic / economic problem behind climate change is not solved, someone else will simply create the emissions for you.

Find more about this under the term "Climate Shadow": https://www.mic.com/impact/forget-your-carbon-footprint-lets....
I think there's a lot of folks who want thiis! I have personally felt burnt-out when working long hours without my proper weekend - which has happened many times in my long tenure. However, I now feel - agreeing with you - that a shorter day with appropriate breaks leads to more productivity!

Would be curious to see if any HN companies have gone ahead and implemented this, and if so, why!

And I am also curious to know people's strategy when feeling burnt out and not getting ample time to rejuvenate/rechArge between bursts of being vErry productive!
Can you imagine a high rise where its all following a consistent design except one balcony which is painted red? It would look like crap. And for little gain since its only really something you can see properly from the street.

I know HN loves the muh freedoms angle but surely its easy to understand how forgoing the freedom to paint a very small portion of the property is largely beneficial.
Let's go look at the actual data. Here's the Florida measurement station that has the highest rate of sea level rise that I could find: https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station....

> The relative sea level trend is 5.95 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence
interval of +/- 0.89 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from
1990 to 2021 which is equivalent to a change of 1.95 feet in 100 years.

The press doesn't like to talk about actual measurements, because doing so destroys their scary stories.
You can run coherency protocols across dies. How many cores you decide to make coherent is largely unrelated to how your die yields work out, as far as I know.

Not that it matters either way for this discussion? Whether it's "one server" in that 2U box, or "twenty servers" in that box, you're still shoving in lots of cores and lots of watts to get that density up.
Not unique to Netflix, however, most other streaming platforms also broadcast their series on old fashioned television channels.

Netflix may solve this problem by introducing adverts on their cheaper plans.
She would know, she's after all in charge of the ECB, whose sole purpose is to promote and manage the use of another entirely worthless commodity.
And this blog actually loads fast and does not require me to trust random third-party scripts to be able to see text. Good job!
That was true but isn't anymore. MobilePay is now part of a Norwegian company, Vipps, which is owned by a consortium of Norwegian banks (65% ownership), Danske Bank (25%), and Finnish OP Financial Group (10%).
Don't forget zoning and environmentalism. If it weren't for those two tools NIMBY would be a lot less effective.
> It's amazing to hear the chief of ECB make a statement so obviously and fundamentally wrong.

It's not.

Centralized entities with a govt. enforced monopoly on what they manage simply abhor competition.
How do you get 210M USD from 10 USD? Not a rhetorical question, I'm interested in how the maths works. Are you using the dollar amount to guess how many miners would be active, and where exactly do all the numbers to do that come from?
My guess would be that they are working on it. At their scale, it is hard to imagine them having technical difficulties removing SEO garbage from results.

It also could be that search quality is no longer their sought after metric, but I find that hard to believe
Military looking for new ways to acquire and use commercial satellite data
Had to read the source to figure out what this does! It bolds the first few letters of each word to make it easier for the human eye to fixate on those points.

There are also variants where they will turn each line into a colorful gradient to make it easier to know which line you're on and thus move between lines more easily.

I have been thinking of making a "syntax highlighter" browser extension for English text, so words would be colored according to their grammatical function. I'm also wondering of ways to identify keywords (based on how rare the word is?) in text and make them stand out (color, size?), to facilitate finding information in large blocks of text.
If you’re serious about the environment you work to make sure we get lots of cheap clean energy and that’s it.
This would be a more useful comment if you actually engaged with the article to point out which parts you don't agree with and suggest alternatives. For example I'm very skeptical that reducing the power consumption of software is very effective; although the industry has made huge advances in low-power hardware, induced demand has meant that the overall electricity consumption of the sector has continued to increase. A lot of "sustainable" tech initatives seem to be based around that and demand shifting so you're running compute jobs at times when renewables are more widely available. The latter might be worth worthwhile as a short-term hack, but it's only a meaningful part of a solution insofar as it incentivises a faster transition to more clean/renewable energy.

When you just make a blanket statement that everything is "symbolic nonsense" it's easy to assume that you're not interested in helping, but just one of the many people who has pivoted directly from "climate change isn't real so we should ignore it" to "climate change is inevitable and so we should ignore it".
> Bitcoin only has value to transfer or store money as long as it has value. See problems with that circular logic

Same exact logic applies to the Euro, the thing she is in charge of shoving down everyone's throat and competes with BTC.
>(Love how the upper management men are circling numbers and a competent operator is running the equipment.)

That's just how things were. Until the 1980s and the rise of personal computers, it was considered unnecessary for executives to know how to type, for example. Instead they would either write things out longhand or dictate to a secretary or typist who would do the actual typing.
With a market cap of $700, you would find that it is very poor at both transferring and storing any value. First of all, you're limited to $700, second, a single computer could attack the network.
May 21st, interesting... the views appear to be quite outdated.

> A digital euro, however, would be an entirely different ball game

There exists quite a number of different EUR stable coin projects out there.

Most of the active Crypto community have already abandoned Bitcoin. Heck, for more than a year the the hype has been on dApps.
Awesome. I'll buy all the bitcoin you have at twenty grand a coin then.

It's not even good propaganda, they've been waffling for over a decade now. You're just full of shit and everyone knows it.
Venmo has continually failed at privacy: https://www.legalreader.com/venmos-at-it-again-privacy-issue...

Privacy is an area where Apple tries to differentiate. It’s not great that this is Apple only, but it’s also nice that it just works.
Do you mean Paris? I was in Paris and Bordeaux last week, Paris is for sure very expensive, sometime even close to what I’m used to pay in Switzerland. But in Bordeaux “plats/formules du jour” where below 12€ in restaurants, sometime below 10€.

Note that I meant for lunch, not dinner. I meant the equivalent of “Mittagsmenu” we have in Germany. The price is generally lower.

Edit: just to be sure my tone isn’t off here, I don’t expect to know what things cost in France and not trying to say that you’re incorrect. I’m just wondering if prices I’ve seen are more or less the norm or the exception.
The Game Boy Sewing Machine (2020)
I once inherited a codebase where everything was hidden behind two interfaces for no reason whatsoever.

A "Business Object interface" is implemented by a "Business Object implementation" which delegates its method calls to a "Data Access Object interface which defines exactly the same methods as the Business Object interface" which then is implemented by a "Data Access Object implementation" which then does a simple SQL query.

You can argue that the DAO has a right to exist. After all, you are separating concerns and organizing your codebase. The BO only exists to make me suffer through 4 layers of indirection. When I write code I just drop the DAO interface and call the original class DAO. If I ever need to migrate to something else, sure, I could just rename that damn thing to DAOImpl and create an interface with the same name as the original class and the same methods. I never had to.
DIY Server Rack Plans (2014)
I noticed recently how quoted queries seem to be a suggestion at best. Google search really has gone downhill, and quickly.
Can't resist note the comment was made by the head of Responsible Investing :-)
Elizabeth Warren basically sold her soul to the DNC to become senator. Don't be surprised when she parrots party platform BS even when she should know better. That's literally part of her job now. Thanks Obama (no really, he should have made her head of the CFPB, she'd have done far more good in that role than she will ever do being a mediocre senator).
every website should load fast. If they should be clean is something that's too subjective IMO.
Also side effects: people will invent less polluting ways to produce goods and services.

It's shocking how environmental impact and taxation are completely disconnected at the moment.
I absolutely love this app concept! It's probably not the most efficient in terms of computation overhead but it is definitely practical and absolutely wonderful in terms of compatibility! Web browsers are the operating system of the 21st centry after all!
Why not tho? Decorators are very explicit markers of higher functions. When I see one, I know what's for.
Bank transfers are not instant in Norway at least. There is a popular peer to peer app called Vipps that handles all of the complexity for you. If somebody's at your door picking up the couch you sold online you can't wait for the bank transfer to go through.
It seems that the major constructed languages are heavily influenced by Indo-European languages, but not other language families.

I find they lack creativity, and stick to all sorts of complicated grammatical structures that the creators took for granted. If you're trying to create a simple language, you don't need verb tense, you don't need the plural form, you don't need articles, definiteness, ...

You'd be surprised how much grammatical complexity you can strip out of a language without losing the ability to express the same meanings.
>>> I can't think of a single institution that hasn't self-corrupted.

This is a very cheap take, and undermines the unbelievable amount of function that institutions play, despite corruption. The self-corrupting institutions that you speak of are what drive modern society. To reject them altogether, that is naive.

Institutions are also destined to corrupt, see Quigley's work. This is why they die, to give room for new.

>>> ...a single entity manned and driven by men that hasn't turned itself into shit...

Again, another general take that is not flexible enough to consider the context of Bostrom here. What Bostrom is suggesting is an extremely severe scenario in which there is no other choice other than to place our bets on a centralized authority. I think general distrust of authority and institutions can make one read this article in a bent way, but let's pose it this way; what is an alternative solution to the easy-nukes scenario? If one writes an article on the same topic, how would you frame the solution?

>>> ...the view that either a holistic surveillance apparatus or global government would be any better.

Centralized systems have done a lot better than decentralized systems in many cases. See many attempts being made in crypto space. They run case by case. It takes tremendous amount of smart design to make decentralized systems work. Sometimes centralized systems are more flexible than decentralized systems.

Laissez-faire, power to the people, and all that is great and people (of the world) should tend towards that. This is what I appreciate about America, and their steadfast approach to these values. But that is a general take. Religiosity towards these values can be a great detriment to epistemic flexibility.

If this reads as if I am arguing for centralized systems over decentralized systems, I am not. Note I put in a lot of conditionals, like "sometimes" and "case by case". There are situations where centralized systems are better, and where decentralized systems are better. As humanity improves, we will replace centralized portions of the world with decentralized counterparts. But as it stands, centralization is really useful under certain conditions. Could you really decentralize the army? (Maybe in a few hundred years)

All this is to say, we need centralization sometimes, and the situation that Bostrom is suggesting here is that sometimes.
One core is probably not pushing more than 100mbit on average. Scaling that much networking up a hundredfold is child's play.
Dupe? of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31476985
In Australia we can use a phone number or email address to transfer money. It’s near instant transfer and even comes up with the full name of the person you’re sending money to.

Little cumbersome since I never bothered to get peoples phone numbers till recently.