skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Take it from someone who has worked in economics and finance. Cryptocurrencies and tokens are mostly considered speculative assets or derivatives with a nifty digital signature. It will not "disrupt" the industry, it will make it a bit more diversified -- possibly.

Talks of ideology aside, the conversation on fiat, central banking, etc. in the public consciousness predates the rise of crypto by a lot. If we can call it "public consciousness."

The idea of crypto as a game changer has long sinked in the harbor. What has sailed is that it is a new notch in the portfolio belt of institutional investors and banks. A cursory glance at who invests or has invested in cryto companies is telling.
I still trust in crypto coins. In those that I hold in a wallet only I have the private keys to. Don't really care about all that fancy defi/nft/whatever stuff. Let idiots burn their money. But I still have trust in the concept of crypto currency.
A dude I know has cheap electricity on his allotment garden where he built a wooden hut/cabin. He uses three PCs built from throwaway parts to heat the hut in the autumn and early spring (in winter there's nothing to do there).

On the PCs he runs an app that basically manages the mining for you, automatically switching between cryptos to get the most microcents per watt per second.

I have no idea why the allotment gardens got the cheap deal on electricity and I don't know if the mining gives him a significant "discount" on the heating.
That's what gives this scam substance. Easy to dismiss with "iT iS bAcKed bY eLeCtRiCiTy sPeNt".
>Among other useful properties, digital currency allows individuals to move their money across borders without anyone asking them where it came from, where it is going and taking a cut.

A.K.A. Money laundering.
Got it.
The Art of Listening
I have seen many of these type of people in a large organisation, they are not really Type B, more like a Generalist. They dont excel in any single one thing, but they are good to decent in nearly everything. They also act like oil in the whole gigantic machine, smoothing out everything so Type A ( or so in this context ) could concentrate on their work. The many small things that are hidden within an organisation, and in daily communications when they helped but could not be accurately measured.

They are, in effect, the 10x people. Because of their presence they made things around them far more productive, while they themselves might not be as productive. Most, if not all middle management aren't very good at understanding this.
Employability can take a hit if the company you work for gets hacked or rug pulls, which sucks, as employees are victims in that context also, but I know a dev who finds himself a tad radioactive due to this.

That said, we're in a far smaller market. I've suggested he look for full time remote work for overseas companies instead.
Imagine if their hardware had other use, what would happen?

The non-miners that need to use that hardware would suffer because of increased demand
> in every actually-existing large production C++ codebase in the world

C++98-style actually-existing large production C++ codebases, you mean.

I suppose there's use in mechanisms for improved safety for outdated code, sure.
One could argue that fiat is fluctuating by 75% constantly :)
I do not understand the hatred, reminds me of the last article of this kind. This language is in alpha. I've been in the Discord community since 2020 and no one would think of recommending the language for production use because it's WIP. Sure the goals are high and a lot of things don't work yet or are shaky but that's the way it is ATM. The wording of the article is simply not appropriate for the fact that the language is not even published. The community is small, active and also very friendly. I had a very good experience with Vlang in 2020 when I used it for Advent of Code and actually always got help when I got stuck with some bug.
I work for crypto industry too.

Welcome people's ideas, but pass them through your filter and do what you feel is right, not what people think.

If you believe crypto is good and love working for it, keep on.

If you don't believe so, and have a good alternative to switch, do it.

Just don't make a decision because the people around you tell you so.

Not only about crypto but pretty much applies everything in life.
The bitcoin market is big enough, and there are enough places where power is free and the hardware is already paid for, that I am quite certain there's at least a few people still mining bitcoin today on GPUs.

Then there's the educational market, where it's less important that people mine bitcoin to earn money, and more about learning how bitcoin works by actually running the code.

So, no -- I don't think that's actually an open question at all. I don't have any proof, but then neither do you.

And all I'd have to do to create my proof would be to spin up my own machine with a GPU and use it to mine bitcoin for a while. Maybe on a free AWS account or something. Not that I'd actually do that, but it would be possible.
Isn’t it a zero sum? If one wins money, one lose some.
> Do you think the world could benefit from money that can't be manipulated by governments?

Maybe, but that's not Bitcoin for sure.
He said on a board that's mostly about young people without track records coming up with new businesses and tech :)
No, it's not outdoor lighting @ 0.85%. It's only the waste from outdoor lighting. Outdoor lighting is far higher. [1]

But now we're playing a game where you tell me the thing you like and the things you don't like and I can either present a counterargument of things I like and don't like and we can both get mad that we have different preferences...

Or, we can design a system that allows people to have different preferences without trying to regulate our preferences on each other.

The math:
(residential power %)(lighting %)(lighting % wasted)
(21)(.13)(.35) = 0.9555% (oh, it was higher than I remembered)

1 - https://www.darksky.org/light-pollution/energy-waste/#:~:tex....
> using actual consumer GPUs, but they tend to be absolutely destroyed by the process and then sold to unwitting buyers

This is such an urban legend. There's been quite a few tech people testing this and there's countless articles on the topic. In short - I have not seen a single one which actually found real significant issues with the hardware, even if some are listed in theory. If this was common at least one of them would buy a severely degraded batch, or we'd see some proven report about this.
The title is actually very confusing and so is the article. After reading it a few times I finally understood that the author is actually pro Kubernetes.

He is just saying that if you are in the really early stages of your startup, don't use Kubernetes right away. You will probably want to use it eventually.
English is much more prone to it due to a weak grammar (both syntax and inflection.) It's easy to tell when a German sentence is ungrammatical because of the specificity of the syntax and inflection (which English barely even has.) Older languages like Latin (or even formal Portuguese) are even more intense with the inflection. Anyway, all of that stuff works like checksum, kind of like packets having CRC32 all over the place. English has veeeeery little checksumming in comparison.
not for bitcoin (in any relevant degree)

for some other crypto currencies small and mid-sized miners do use graphic cards but large sized ones still use custom chips

for some other all miners use graphic cards

and for some no one uses graphics cards
That makes zero sense. If someone wants to play around with the concept of mining with a GPU, then mine ETH. Not only is there recent software that supports ETH mining on GPUs, but also the fact that it would take a long time to mine a single share on a BTC pool at this point.

Software for mining BTC on GPUs hasn't been updated in many many years. It would be a struggle to even get something working.
Chicago expands and activates quantum network
I have a hard time believing that drilling holes every inch and jamming epoxy in there is going to thoroughly perfuse the surrounding wood.
One of the many nice things about decentralized system is that miners don't determine transaction costs, users do. You're free to attach however high of a transaction fee you want to your transaction, or even none at all. Transactions will tend to be prioritized (by miners) by fee, but they have no direct control beyond that. The market collectively decides what it's willing, or not, to pay.
Err, Scylla does... here's some link text from their docs.

> Provision and manage a Scylla cluster in your environment.
Built in navigation in cars is garbage. So is the built in music app. Letting me play what’s on my iPhone is leaps and bounds better than what a car manufacturer can give me.
There is a aws doc on their page somewhere where they explain how to setup eks on private vpc subnets and using the endpoints to to access the needed aws services.

Edit, link: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/private-clu...
Zoom and Netflix both lost 60-80% of their value in the last year and I don't see anyone declaring them dead. I don't work in crypto but I think there's a bit of a knee jerk reaction to seeing all the vaporware projects being wiped out (rightfully so). Consolidation and pruning of wasteful projects is good. If you feel like the work you're personally doing is positive, then don't worry about people dancing on the graves of LUNA and Celsius. ETH is still a legitimate technology with real use cases.
MPD is definitely much more sophisticated and bigger project.
MPD is primarily client-server music player with streaming support.
Audioserve is more about serving audio files over HTTP protocol with couple of utilities/enhancements like possible audio transcoding, support of playback position sharing, support for chapterized audio files (m4b) and couple more.
I was in your shoes (undergrad class of 2015). My PhD journey was way more isolating, cynicism-inducing, political, yet also more successful than I could have imagined. I now have a nice researcher job in industry that has lots of agency, is interesting, and I have no complaints on pay. Yet I also have come to understand that there's nothing special in the intellectual achievements one can have in science. The thought of challenging myself intellectually and striving to reach heights was appealing to me in undergrad. While it might be easier to think critically/scientifically in science vs other areas due to job descriptions, many people think scientifically in other areas with just as much intellectual rigor and insight and without any advanced degree.
Bitcoin is mined with ASICs, not GPUs
Name one piece of software that mines BTC on GPUs that has been updated in the last few years.
Even if we had a fully government ran, 100% flawless, zero-cost micropayment system, thee majority of people would still not host their own website for their content.
That’s a good point about build instructions, but hopefully they are encoded via a make file. In reality, I only had to make very minor changes to the experimental code to get it to compile, so I really appreciated maintainers keeping backwards compatibility for the most part. Some of this code was over 10 years old, and it still worked… that was pretty impressive since I mostly work with higher level languages where dependencies can change very significantly between versions, or even be abandoned within a decade.
As long as you aren't running a scam you have nothing to worry about. Most people don't care about crypto one way or the other, all the noise comes from a small group of boosters and haters.
Isn’t the money being manipulated by the governments an important positive feature for their economy?
> mining equipment as collateral

So the same hardware that becomes useless when the btc price falls?
Surprised the article doesn't mention Viral Eukaryogenesis, the hypothesis that the nucleus of Eukaryotes evolved from a virus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_eukaryogenesis

My understanding is that there is much less evidence for this, but it seems like the question of whether or not there were multiple gradual endosymbiotic events in eukaryotic evolution would definitely depend in some way on viruses.
Apart from the energy that has been wasted, it really pains me to think how much fab time, chemicals, wafers, etc. have gone into producing ASICS that just perform pointless busy-work… I wish at least mining rigs were useful for anything else…
It depends on the society. In my social circles, literally every single person around me praised crypto almost religiously, for years.
Maybe this will help change your mind or at least give you a better alternative within the field: http://nonstructured.com/in-defense-of-web3/

But if it doesn't change your mind and you don't believe in this industry you should find another job, somewhere which aligns with your values. I don't believe nutral is good enough.
In my limited experience the Patron only content that Patreon hosts is in the form of blog posts. The actual content is often an unlisted YouTube video or something.
There's a strangely large amount of people who just need spacex to fail for their own enjoyment.

Reminds me of "the mosted hated man in America" who got sentenced to 8 years in jail for a tweet.

Meanwhile faceless people do the exact same thing every week that made him so hated and no one bats an eyelid nor could they name a single person involved.

I'm sure this is entirely organic hatred and not manufactured at all.
I suppose it depends on what you consider "main street". I noticed the largest amount of people asking me about cryptocurrencies in 2017, during the last run-up.

> I bet a lot of Main Street investors will probably not come back to crypto after this is all over.

I had similar thoughts in 2018.
Won't just mining switch to another GPU proof of work currency?
Local Async Executors and Why They Should Be the Default
I had always wondered if mining had been profitable at all, ever, except for the very beginning. I feel like being a late entrant into this required huge fixed costs, and this was back in 2014 or so. Only through joining a huge mining pool or staking pool would the numbers make some sense.
My comment was just meant to show the absurd of "not making business if you don't trust the customer"
The Crungus
Or sometimes, your government just decides your money doesn't actually belong to you [1]. But sure, we can call it "money laundering", if it makes that boot taste better.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/russia-ukraine-latest-news-...
Was it not whether it would be based on silicon rather than carbon? I think that is usually where the similarity lies.
1. Pedantry but long term energy storage isn't really a thing. consumption is more or less supply

> Results from EIA’s 2015 Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) show that televisions and related peripheral devices—such as digital video recorders (DVRs), video game consoles, and streaming devices—consumed 7% of the electricity used in American homes in 2015 [1]

quick edit: I derped the math. I think American residential is 21% so that's ~1.48% of total supply. You'd need a 33% efficiency increase in residential TV efficiency to match the energy saved by abolition of crypto. That's without taking into account that crypto is on average produced from _more_ renewable energy than the average.

1 - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37032

2 - https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...
Which one do you think it is, considering both the functionality of the program and the high possibility of the author not being a native English speaker?
For millions of people 'dato' simply means 'date', as in day of the month.
Neither does any single bitcoin user?

Miners should be compared to data centers, like those massive ones powering cloud games?
Video games are entertainment. Are you suggesting we shut down tv, radio, theatre, movies, theme parks, tourism because they are all wasteful and useless?
Are your SSIDs named the same or differently?

If you name them the same, they should auto-switch more aggressively, but probably still not optimally.

For that communication between the routers is needed and each will kick you over to the other when they agree it’s necessary

Recommended reading: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202628
> You can also be mining at a loss and have it be completely rational, because it is less of a loss than turning it off and writing off the equipment.

It depends what you mean by mining at a loss.

It's never rational to mine when the cost of power is higher than the expected return. Turn off your equipment and go buy bitcoin directly.
That is kind of apples and oranges. In the case of Bitcoin, the algorithm is only trying to maintain a consistent block creation rate of 1 per 10 minutes, not attempt to compensate for the price. If the price drops faster than the hash rate because all the minors are playing chicken with each other, well that will be interesting to watch.
If Linux can be Unix then sure -why the hell not?

http://www.linuxfocus.org/English/July1999/article79.html
I wouldn't be surprised. In mold, if we have more than one choices to implement a feature, I always take the one that scales well for more cores even if it doesn't perform the best on low-core count machines.

My assumption is that future machines will have more cores than we have today on average, so I'm optimizing mold for such computers.
Maybe. Maybe not. Bitcoin is a better known name, and an easier algorithm to compare the differences between running on CPU versus GPU, and so that might be a very interesting thing to study.

I can definitely see a CS professor assigning that kind of work to their class for a while.

Then maybe a couple of weeks later, they do ETH instead. Or maybe Dogecoin, or whatever else the professor wants people to study.

For a hobbyist, maybe they really are married to Bitcoin on GPU, and damn the torpedoes.

The point is that there are billions of people in the world, and presumably at least millions of people who might be interested in mining Bitcoin. You can't account for every single person who might want to do that, nor can I.

My advantage is that only one such person needs to exist to support my thesis, whereas your position requires that there are no such people anywhere on the planet.

Like I said, these aren't going to be large bulk operations, I totally grant you that point. But I'm confident that there are at least a few examples out there.
That auto switching software is a joke. It doesn't actually get any more profit and likely costs money.
I'd wager that games have a higher cost to society than crypto coins.

First games waste a lot of electrical power. A modern GPU is what at its peak? 500 watts? A modern CPU isn't too far off. That's 1kwh that per gamer that gets turned into heat and lootboxes.

2nd technological game progress means that computers/gpus are considered obsolete too fast. Back in the day your home computer would last over a decade until you had to throw it away and buy new hardware.

3rd (young) people wasting a lot of time in computer games. Teenagers waste their youth infront of a screen over going out and enjoying the world in their prime. Leading to adults that lack life experience and get depressed/anxious easily. (Mental health crisis)

4th modern game design makes games pretty much a gateway drug to gambling addiction.

5th spending all that time sitting means it's an enormous health care crisis. Pair that with the deregulated dopamine cycle in game addicted people and you can easily see how this leads to over eating and obesity. Which is even more of a cost to society.
updated the post with the overall result for now
If you genuinely see potential in the technology and ideology, I say stick to your convictions and remember that many opinions that appear to be widespread are just loud minorities. A lot of HN's anti-crypto stance is just an emotional reaction to the "crypto bros" phenomenon[0]. I also don't think employability will be an issue in the future, especially if you were not part of a scammy project.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31356857
>we can call it "money laundering"

Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...
Fwiw a similar pattern is seen in cooking, where lots of chefs have reasoned ideas of how things work based on tradition and lived hands on experience, yet are scientifically disproven.

Lived experience works to some extent, eliminating failures and making progress, like with your steal example, but that doesn’t mean it can pick optimal options from a list of options that all work to some reasonable extent; aka dynamic typing does also build software.
Check out NKN coin and new kind of network inspired by Wolfram cellular automata. The protocol is truly P2P and could change things to a workable state. Kudos for your skepticism. The world really needs a crypto to work to achieve freedom but current incarnations are nothing but scams.
Descartes said a lot of things that were silly in retrospect :P Pineal glands, anyone?
GPU miners use software that mines the most profitable coin at a given moment.
Bitcoin was not the most profitable one to mine in almost a decade now.

Unless someone launched a miner ten years ago, before the advent of protocol switching software, they do not mine Bitcoin.

Here is a list of profitability of coin mining on GPU. Bitcoin is not even on a list.
https://whattomine.com/coins
Dang. I had hoped this was about the new borrow checker in Rust.
mold/macOS aims to be a drop-in replacement for the Apple's ld. I don't think it supports all the feature you mentioned already, as it is still pre-Alpha. But we are working on it to make it "just work".
That is not money laundering.
I do think so, but also believe bitcoin will not be that protocol.

It's the first, but not the best, and while it benefits from being the first, that will only take it so far.
> and more about learning how bitcoin works by actually running the code.

You can find an old CPU miner for that. There's a few that have been written clearly with demonstration/learning in mind. If you don't expect any gains, why even go with a GPU?
A cursory search might even give one the impression that Einstein had an opinion about bees. (Unkillable memes are pretty interesting.)
I would expect that, or at lean toward the idea that, any interstellar civilization is no longer ruthless for internal conflict with their own species, but I wouldn't rule out the idea of them being ruthless toward other species.
Delia Derbyshire and Doctor Who
I doubt it's even worth it for many companies to deal with returning monitors and other sundry office supplies. The company has to spend time and money dealing with the employee to package up the monitor, ship it across the country, have someone make sure it arrives in decent condition, and then sell it to a liquidator for a fraction of its value anyway. Costs less to just let the employee keep it.
Good for the miners, the equipment and the coins are worthless, worst case, and thr money is gone. The bank will hold the bag so.
I agree, it needs to work as a currency. This is why Bitcoin Cash is the real Bitcoin. BTC was co-opted at the repo level and the block size was stifled. This is how Bitcoin should work: https://www.reddit.com/user/chaintip/
Because large scale electricity transmission is very very expensive and depending on how remote, sometimes impossible. If you can burn the gas in a generator (which is a lot more efficient and less environmentally damaging than flare burning it) and convert that into value directly, that seems like a better outcome.
I guess it depends if they are custom ASICS or just GPUs. GPUs can be useful elsewhere, custom ASICS not so much.