skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The internet has facilitated a staggering amount of crime as well as the fiat currencies of the globe.

Sure, but both the internet and fiat currencies have facilitated a huge amount of legitimate activities, far, far more than crime. I would assert that the vast majority of users of Bitcoin (>90%) are either speculators or criminals (the vast majority of that majority being speculators, with some small but significant minority being criminals).

> Let’s suppose this 14billion dollar number of Bitcoin crime is right [...] Global credit card fraud hit 32billion in 2021

Those numbers are meaningless without comparing them to the total monetary value of transactions pushed through them yearly. I suspect you'll find that, when talking about percent of total, Bitcoin fraud is higher than credit card fraud (and I would suspect that's still true if you consider other kinds of fraud in addition to CC fraud).

> surely you aren’t suggesting Bitcoin is worthless and only provides a mechanism for crime.

I'm not the person you're replying to, but I would suggest exactly that. The vast majority of Bitcoin use is either speculation or crime. And speculation basically destroys it as a stable store of value, which is something that's essential for a currency. Sure, there are people using it for legitimate purposes, or to get around unjust currency controls perpetrated by their governments. But I'd wager that's a tiny percentage of users, and they do so at great risk, both legally and financially.

> As for investment risk. Check Netflix stock ytd or for that matter Enron. Or the entire bank crisis of 2008. Is Bitcoin really deserving of this much attention?

Yes, absolutely. Your average person should not be investing in individual stocks. They should have the bulk of their investment assets in index funds, or at most, actively-managed funds.

Regarding specific company stocks, sure, you can always cherry-pick examples that did worse than Bitcoin. That doesn't prove anything, though. Regardless, looking at the all-time history of BTC does not inspire confidence in it as an investment, especially were I to consider opening a position today.
> although if you learn a hosted language, you're going to have to learn stuff about the ecosystem on which it is hosted

I thought this at first, but then I thought if you take Python, which is hosted on the OS directly through CPython, so we can say Python is hosted on Windows or Linux.

Well it turns out, most people never need to interop directly with Windows or Linux APIs or any other C interop.

Python seems to have a different mindset here, where most of its value proposition are providing wrappers over C/Windows/Linux/Mac APIs.

Why does so much effort get put in maintaining all these wrappers in Python? Is it just attitude? Is it that those APIs are much worse then Java's enough that even C programmers using Python want to wrap them over using them directly?
Are you stating that you actually have, or speculating that bitcoin must help such people?
First of all plea bargains as currently practiced have been ruled unconstitutional. For example Bram v. United States, 168 U.S. 532, 542-43 (1897)

Second, successfully defending a federal case takes an average of over a million dollars. And publicly talking about the case, for example to solicit donations from those you know to help you pay for it, is strongly frowned on my judges and you WILL be likely to lose because of it.

Third, if you choose to fight, you will face a sentence that is usually many multiples of the plea bargain. Considering the difference in resources available to you and the state, you are likely to lose. Even if you are innocent of the crime.

Fourth, it is true that the point of public defenders is supposed to be to protect people. But they are part of the system. Public defenders typically have dozens of clients at a time, and the more efficiently they can process them, the better they do. The vast majority of the time this means efficiently negotiating a good plea bargain for you, and convincing you to take it. A public defender who lightly lets you exercise your right to trial will quickly fall behind on your other clients, so they try to avoid that.

Fifth, people who are out on bail are very much not free. They typically must suffer arbitrary inspections, follow curfew, avoid being in a variety of places where other criminals might be, and so on. You aren't behind jail bars, but you're still made to feel a prisoner.

I used to think as you do. But after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz committed suicide, I became curious and learned a lot about the system. And the more I learned the worse it looked.
My hope is that a lot of the difficulty in getting reproducible builds is caused by outdated libraries and techniques. For example, assuming that your code is in /usr/bin or /usr/lib, so any package manager has to emulate that.

My hope is that eventually, you can just run `cargo build --reproducible` or `meson build --reproducible` or `make --reproducible`, and if your architecture is the same, the dependencies will be the same and the output will run exactly the same. Even going as far as to install an older cargo or meson or CMake if that's what's needed for backwards compatibility. And if you want to be safe, you can create a sandbox or "jail" and libraries will know how to deal with it instead of just crashing when they try to access something outside.
“Docker but it’s just a chroot”?
Yes, so convenient that over a decade after its inception, still well over 95% of the black market operates in fiat instead.
Like we would trust any of them... come on...
Nietzsche Before the Breakdown
That is the whole point of bitcoin. There is no entity that can prevent you from using it.

Anyone can say you are not allowed, but enforcing it is impossible in practice.
The best kind of correct!
The gold standard is Mitsubishi’s Hyper Heat, which operates efficiently down to -17F, and below that the BTUs are reduced.

However to think about it in the simplest way.. a cheapo space heater in every room is a crude way to do electric heat, that anyone “can” do.
Again, you’re gonna need some data. I would consider 1 in every thousand people being a homicidal maniac held in check by the the threat of force to be an extraordinary high incidence rate. Such a rate doesn’t even vaguely match up with my experiences of people.

One in a million I could believe, but numbers lower than I have difficulty believing.

Even if the state doesn’t punish anyone, and even if there was no physical retaliation. I imagine that murdering people would quickly result in your social ostracisation. Who the hell wants to spent time with a nutter who’s gonna kill you for rubbing them up the wrong way? I think most people would find better friends and colleagues.
Why would they use a public, transparent ledger to launder money?
for example lofty.ai (tokenized real-estate investing)

Agree, IIRC this is a YC baby as well and will easily be a $1-10B startup over the next 5-10 years. They have unfortunately become less generous with fees since launch but the core product is still extremely solid. Probably should just keep my mouth shut because homes move so quickly now, but that wouldn't be in the spirit of SV.
There are many ways to launder money.
> The odds on this draw were much better

The odds were the same, but the EV was certainly higher than most draws. Still, the EV was likely negative. $2 ticket x 303 million-to-1 odds would require a post-tax cash-in-hand value exceeding $600 million, which the winner is unlikely to see after tax, despite avoiding a split with a second winner.
> Without dividends, the stock market is a zero-sum game.

If a company is able to make profit from their business, then ownership of that company is valuable, regardless of whether they return that profit to you in the form of dividends or not.
https://archive.ph/eDhcu
You are 100% right. At some point I measured smart_ptr to be 25x slower than raw pointers. The compiler I am maintaining is not using C++ style smart pointers. It is using a global whole program optimisation pass to reduce reference manipulation to a minimum. Basically what a world class C++ programmer with years of experience optimising performance would do. It is just done automatically.
Why do two institutions need a blockchain for transacting only between themselves?

They’re banks. They have lots of agreements and lawyers. They already trust eachother. And there’s no 3rd party involved.

I’d be surprised if there was an actual blockchain involved instead of spinning a simple log as a blockchain for hype.
Recording audio/video without all-party consent is legally perilous in the US. I recommend not doing that subtly.

It's at the very least illegal if any of the parties are in California or several other states.
That's unfortunate to hear, I haven't followed these projects in a while. Looks like their competitor PolyMarket is now the most popular prediction market: https://polymarket.com/
Humans are pretty efficient at screwing each other over, particularly when money is involved. And any technology that allows humans to screw each other over more efficiently should have the deepest skepticism possible.

https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ has tracked $10B in losses due to grift. And that doesn't include the losses used to pay off ransomware.

Money laundering for good is still money laundering.
What is an AMM?
I'm very skeptical of Bitcoin, but right now it's the only way I can get the medications I need, and I'm very grateful for that.
Exactly, so then lightning is the better comparison, since it just a few years old and built on bitcoin, like the web was bult on tcp/ip.
Nuclear is uneconomical because safe, economical nuclear is illegal. That's it. If everyone were pro-nuclear, those laws wouldn't exist (or would exist in a sane form), and nuclear would be cheap.
The web was the killer app built on the infrastructure of the internet. The blockchain ecosystem is still building it's infrastructure.
How much of that money was based on capitalizing on an unregulated speculative investment market? Just because a lot of resources flow in the general direction of a technology doesn’t mean it wasn’t put to misguided use.
Fukishima was still probably cleaner per kWh than most coal plants.
The irony is even those deal in bitcoin, they have to quickly convert to USD now for fear of further drop. Their entire operation involve in converting their cheap electricity (vastly subsidized by their government) to USD with bitcoin as intermediary. And when ask, they only tell the story of their intermediary bitcoin as though as they really by potato eoth bitcoin at their local wet market.
I am a bit out of depth here for obvious reasons (I work above SQLite, not under SQLite). But from my understanding, `journal_mode=memory` simply means it is in rollback mode, but rollback pages are not maintained on disk. Therefore, the modifications from a transaction will be applied in place in these pages. If the process that runs SQLite crashes in the middle of a transaction, these details will be leaked unless you know how to rollback these pages (through rollback journal, you can alternatively found these from FDB, but you should have no idea which one corresponding to which transaction?).

More over, without WAL, SQLite to the best of my knowledge would require read-lock on every read as well, practically becomes not only single-writer, but also single-reader (you probably can break the global lock (that through VFS layer)? But it doesn't make this thing safe (i.e. you will have things in a transaction leaked?)).
Actually no, I'm highly skeptical that happens outside of sitcoms
That is completely useless in the context of this feature. National security letters go direct to Samsung who already have full access. This feature is relating to creeps at 3rd party repair stores stealing your nudes.
The compiler uses arrays not linked lists. One of the big mistakes that other functional compilers make (IMHO) is that they use linked lists. It is a huge performance problem. There is a reason why high-performance software written in C++ and C always use arrays and not linked lists. Memory access patterns is the #1 thing to optimise for on modern CPUs.
I've been on the Sydney SCG waitlist since 2009, few more years to go.
I think this is the OP: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.05267

Note the headline may confuse: the reference to 1 Km relates to the fiber run between the eavesdropping equipment and the target. It's only picking up sound in the same room, not 1 Km away.
What is this crap lol. TA on the first 16 Google results for a series of buzzwords. Good luck finding a thing good there for any industry. Someone should parody this with "real world users e commerce"
>How does it get to this point?

I would imagine because, going back to even before Soviet times, all the people who do care are either disappeared or flee, leaving behind only the people who are too jaded to effectively resist.

Russian absolutism is generally more, well, absolute than other places. Though it's imperfect, a video[1] by Kraut gets the gist across.

[1]https://youtu.be/f8ZqBLcIvw0
Blockchain project helping de-anonymize users
You need access to the historical account statements. What was it invested in? Were any changes made to the account over the years (rebalancing, selling a fund, buying something new, etc), or was it "set it and forget it"? Was there an "advisor" involved? If so, how often were meetings with the advisor?

Odds are it was invested in something very conservative, like a few "bond funds", returning 3 to 4% before fees, giving you mediocre returns.

But don't get excited, even with all this information, there is nothing you can do. "Past performance is no guarantee of future results", as they say.

Also, being angry with the customer service person isn't going to do anything. Those folks do things like tell you how to transfer your money out, initiate password resets, mail out forms, etc. They're not the ones "managing" your funds, and they likely have very little financial knowledge.
> Corporal punishment in particular socializes children to let themselves be attacked and not defend themselves.

I was spanked as a kid. As an adult I've violently defended myself without hesitation from an unprovoked attack by a criminal stranger in the parking lot of a big box store. So that part doesn't seem to me to be true.
Assuming everyone here is familiar with the movie "The Conversation".
The author appeared to be explicitly looking for non-cryptocurrency related Blockchain used cases.
The "not openly" is key, though. The OP's point was that suppressing the funding of organized crime was the "net benefit to society". The activities you mention, because they are done in secret, do not provide an outlet to reduce organized crime by establishing legal marketplaces. In fact, you could argue that by engaging in smuggling, arms trading, etc, that the government is increasing organized crime... every time the US sells, some criminal is buying.
Data Management for the Metaverse
Disgusting project.
Those had immediate, obvious value which were held back by the technology: every military in the world wanted flight (remember those Civil War hot air balloons?), as well as things like postal services, etc. There was zero question that as soon as the technology was functionally available, people would buy it. Similarly, the earliest photographs had unquestionable demand but were held back by the technology — again, zero question that people would buy it as soon as that matured.

Finally, the Internet was useful by 1982 — there's a reason why universities, governments, etc. all jumped online and agencies like NSF were funding this to support other research, not just development of TCP/IP, by then. The other big trend to keep in mind are the BBS scene and especially online services like CompuServe (which was already 13 years old by 1982) which had profitable businesses selling access to people who found it was useful to have in their lives for many reasons not related to developing or selling computer networking. Again, there was zero question of demand: computer hardware was expensive and networking was positively usurious but it was clear that growth would accelerate as soon as that changed because normal people found it useful for various parts of their lives.

Cryptocurrencies are different: since these systems rely on the now-pervasive web, most people on the planet have had access immediately. What hasn't happened yet is most of them having a reason to bother with it. Speculation has been the biggest driver but buy-and-hold is toxic to developing a useful currency and few people have built a business or life which depends on it except for gambling like that.
I tried that too but it’s still truncated.
The Auto-da-fé of Mexico City
Anyone have experience using "The world’s most comprehensive cryptocurrency investigation and transaction monitoring solution."?
Why hasn’t anyone built a clone of npm/npx UX that uses Nix under the hood? I hear so much about how ideal the Nix model is, and how bad NPM is. It seems like this should be “easy”. What gives?
Please illuminate.
I mean honestly.... I know it's not bbc, but still:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2022/may/17/evacua...

Look at the headline image, the title ("evacuated"), and the "feels" that they're trying to produce. And the reality? They surrendered and were taken as prisoners of war to siberia.

If someone has surrendered, i want our media to report "surrendered" and if they were taken as prisoners, I want to see "prisoners" mentioned somewhere... I have no idea what they were trying to achieve with an article like this, but it sure as hell wasn't truthful reporting.
What are you expecting to do with 4 billion empty tuples?
Like a sibling poster, I hear this a lot too, but I don't see it as all that significant. Or, rather, these are excellent uses, but Bitcoin is a terrible way to accomplish this -- it's just a huge shame that there may not be better options.

An actual currency should have a stable value. Bitcoin will never have a stable value (at least not while it is popular) due to speculation. People who believe Bitcoin is a safer store of value than their country's fiat currency are in dire, dire straits indeed.

I do absolutely agree that people should be free from fear that their currency of choice/necessity should be safe from the possibility of 100-1000% inflation per year, but I wish we could do better than Bitcoin, of all things, as a "solution".
I would naively expect that if you run garbage collection on a regular basis that it should take no more space. Is that not true, or is running it on a regular basis the sticking bit?
I think anyone with even a passing understanding of the data can summarily dismiss your "argument", which is full of logical fallacies.

Atmospheric CO2 has gone from about 280 ppm pre-Industrial Revolution to 415 today. Yes, figuring out all the impacts and feedback loops is incredibly difficult, but it requires only a passing understanding of physics to understand how being on track to doubling the primary greenhouse gas in the atmosphere will result in a massively warmer planet.
I said "relative progressive" because, relative to Republicans and the general public, she was.

And she later did a lot to try to claim a progressive mantle. Particularly when she ran for President.

But yes, Bill Clinton got elected in part by "moving to the center". Which was moving to the right relative to the Democratic base. Given that the Democratic base as moved sharply left since, comparing past and present positions can be quite jarring.
Did a vigilante ROM leaker go too far to “preserve” a lost Atari ROM? (2019)
There are decades of research that show that it is entirely possible to live a healthy and extended life on a plant based diet. It then comes down to personal choice and is not an evolutionary argument.

If this is the case, then it makes sense to choose a diet with less embedded violence and which is more globally sustainable.
It's not enforced. It is legal tender, but the US dollar is still their currency, last I heard.
Yeah, you kid, but you know, it would solve a lot of the most common problems. Like a parent mentioned, most of the time you're just not linking to the right libraries. That’s it. Do we need to ship a whole kernel, have terrible IO and jump through a lot of hoops just for that?
I don’t advertise that I don’t care about cheating to the students and I don’t make them sit through a presentation either. The problem is that we need tuition dollars so admin isn’t going to expel someone except in an extreme situation. I need a job which means I need students to want to enroll in my classes so I don’t want a reputation of being a hard ass. Everyone just pretends. Students pretend to not cheat, admin pretends to care about standards, and I pretend to care about cheating.

I don’t give quizzes or graded assignments anymore. I just give a few tests because, well, as you said, Kabuki theater college is ridiculous.
This is a scary proposition though, at least in the US, because you cannot always trust good judgement from the investigators. The answer seems to be either: “there is no problem” or “you lose your kids entirely”. The likelihood of an investigator taking a nuanced response doesn’t seem very good. And the options of foster care in the US are not great, and there are child-abusers within that system too.

People have gotten their kids taken away for silly things. It’s a very real fear, even for genuinely good people. Unless it’s truly horrible abuse, I’d postulate that it’s better for a kid to stay with their parents. If you call Child Services on that parent, there is a real chance that you make the kids life significantly worse than the abuse they’re receiving at home.
I in general am in favor of scale to make the grid CO2 free. However, doing it with PWRs is just very sub-optimal. A 1.5GW plant is basically a gigantic civil engineering project and those are always late.

However, if you move to a molten salt reactor (cooled or fueled) you can significantly reduce the scale while still doing a 0.5-1.5GW plant. And you can use CCGT as well. This totally transforms the economics and while it would still a large plant it would be much more comparable to a gas plant in terms of capx. And in terms of opex the fuel should be significantly cheaper, while the labor required should be less in a modern plant.

The PWR real cost are the gigantic heat pumps and the huge required containment system. A molten salt reactor can be air cooled even in the desert of Arizona.

Hopefully in the future we can replace the CCGT with even smaller turbines like Super-critical CO2 turbines.

So I prefer large plants 500MW+ but they need to be molten salt cooled at least. My favorite design (for what is achievable in a reasonable time) is by Moltex Energy, the Static Molten Salt Reactor. Its basically the idea of filling the fuel assemblies with molten salt fuel rather then pellets and to cool you use another molten salt. And with some small amount of repossessing you can use current 'waste' as fuel. I think that design is of a scale and complexity that if some real capital got behind and government were willing to invest in their 'waste' rather then to drop it into a cave it could solve both the 'waste' problem and the grid problem.
Who's using it? How many people did more than get that free starter wallet and cash out? How many transactions happen daily? How many businesses would notice if Bitcoin dropped off the planet tomorrow?

(Hint: the fact that people were rioting in the streets to _avoid_ it suggests the answer is not many)
Wait so does it mean that technically right the internet of China is more open than Russia?
My dad recently learned he had a heart valve defect that many first learn about when it kills them; surgery fixed it. Doctor suggested his children should be checked for the same. The check involved doing an ultrasound of the heart. One ultrasound per person could save lives. I'm not sure why every baby (fetus) gets an ultra sound but once born they usually get none.