skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The switch to PoS is a non-issue from my perspective: a centralized system changed from using method A to method B, I don't understand why I should care.

Because every bitcoin transaction costs $60 in electricity. That is a monumentally stupid amount to pay. It's $125 per kB.

Proof of stake incentivizes capital directly. Proof of work incentivizes capital via the ability to find prime numbers, which limits you to people who are willing to spend $1000s to millions of dollars to do it efficiently. Limiting the validators like that drives up costs massively.

> Bitcoin mining is increasingly being used to prevent methane emissions in stranded gas reserves. Having an economic incentive to not flare or emit methane but instead using it for generating bitcoin allows Bitcoin mining to become net carbon negative.

No, it is not. Projects like that may be branded with bitcoin, but bitcoin miners are buying the same electricity as everyone else. The rising cost of electricity is causing new sources of power to be exploited.

Instead of being used for something useful, that electricity is being turned into waste heat.
I guess it's a bit of both - I'm sure car manufacturers have realised that they they can lower the sticker price by bumping up the margins on aftermarket
"For example, we often say that dogs are intelligent. But what do we mean by that? Some dogs, like sheep dogs, are very good at performing certain tasks. Most dogs can be trained to sit, fetch, and do other things. And they can disobey. The same is true of children, though we’d never compare a child’s intelligence to a dog’s. And cats won’t do any of those things, though we never refer to cats as unintelligent."

I, for one, definitely think of cats as unintelligent. A cat is like a potted plant compared to the companionship and relationship a dog offers.
Can you use a virtual machine?
When it happens to you and this is the only way you can get access to some urgently-needed account, you'll be thankful HN didn't create a special category to push these down and make them less visible.
Congrats Dylan. I remember riding caltrain with you from south bay to SF, watching you sit on the floor of the train coding a "photoshop alternative" thinking your idea was crazy!
Yeah, I feel Apple should acquire Sketch
I am still excited about new technology (45+)

Douglas Adams inflection point is not real. It's the result of an author having fun with his audience very much in the same way horologists make fun of their followers.
Cloud features are critical in an enterprise setting

The UX in my org share all the figma designs through figma cloud, I can quickly provide feedback and this is important! All designs are stored in the cloud, I can quickly go back and refer them when necessary.

I am not sure if the open source solution provides all these features yet, but a new startup can provide these.
> fired 2 weeks before my first vesting period because I took 2 weeks off after my father's death

That seems quite implausible. Not that the managers there weren’t jerks, or that this didn’t contribute to the conflict, but there seems to be a lack of reflection on this story because there is almost certainly more to it than that.
What's the point of VC investment if the innovative products that are funded are snuffed out by large companies? Might as well not bother and save everyone some time.
so, who has actually tried this and has anything to say about it? (besides the fact that is very funny to see it #2 with the sale of figma being #1)
they weigh the same..
Great reply, the rule for thumb of 'anything that can be done manually can be automated' applies here.

Needs backtrack, code it in, then everyone knows how the rules work and there isn't any side deals or exceptions.

Cheers!
The easiest (and very crude) solution is probably to find the amount of gas you use per year in m3, then calculate the amount of kWh heat that yields. 1m3 of gas produces approximately 10.55 kWh of heat, depending on the type/age of your furnace.

That is the amount of heat you require over a year.

Through the magic of heat pumps, you can find the COP value of any model you plan on purchasing, but in essence the COP value tells you how much heat the pump will produce when using 1 kWh of electricity, for instance a COP value of 3.62 means the heat pump will produce 3.62 kWh of heat for 1 kWh of electricity.

So say you have a yearly gas usage of 1600m3, that equals 16880 kWh of heat. Assuming a heat pump with a COP value of 3.62, you can then divide the 16800 by 3.62 to find the amount of electricity you will need with that particular heat pump to produce the same amount of heat, in this case 4663 kWh.

As i said, this is a very crude calculation, and it doesn't take into account that the heat pump efficiency drops as temperature drops to around it's lowest efficiency temperature (for mine it's -25C). When that happens, it has a built in backup heating device that will do regular electric heating, meaning 1 kWh per 1 kWh.

It also doesn't take into account climate control built into many european heat pumps (and maybe american as well ?). Mine has an outdoor sensor that simply shuts off the heatpump whenever outside temperature goes above a certain point.

And then there are all sorts of after market upgrades you can buy, like Tado, who produces a "sensor" for certain heat pump models, which will further reduce consumption based on local weather forecasts, AI and other readings.
I don't think HN can be considered indie these days. It was 10+ years ago. Now it's as mainstream as it gets. You rarely see something here that's not an echo chamber or the same as mainstream tech media. Just a result a of tech/startups being a lot more mainstream now than they were 15 years ago when HN launched.

I think many of the more "indie communities" are now assembling in Discord, subreddits, etc.

I'm also somewhat surprised at the extreme crypto hate on HN, but I'd attribute that to demographics. I do think that quite a large number of HN users are middle-aged Americans significantly above middle class. They probably started using it when they were early 20s interested in tech/startups and YC, which means they're now ~35-40 and have probably made a decent amount of money in tech. And that demographic doesn't really benefit from crypto for the reasons above...
I've considered it. But they have a right to refuse service for any reason. Only damages I could claim is 10 dollars from my last month of Nitro. Not sure what they're doing counts as disability discrimination either. Probably don't have a case.
Ah, too bad he could not use the Slick Willie defense and make the claim that it depends on what the definition of "touch" is.
I just did, since I have WINE installed to run music software. It runs _perfectly_, although with early 2000s era UX conventions (i.e., very small fonts, some pixelated). Edits seem very fast, although it is hard to say on my hardware (Ryzen 7). As a curio, it's a fun experiment, but being a bit less nostalgic and more realistic now, I'd quicker reach for GIMP or Krita on Linux (on the Mac, I use Pixelmator Pro and Affinity Designer for the semi-advanced editing I need)... Although I do love this thing.

FYI, the download of version 8 was available to use as a 30-day trial, which seems legal enough today, if only for experimentation, and I actually have a license of MX someplace from my G4 Mac days.
Correct - I used $5 because I KNEW it would cost less even in countries with very high electric costs, and for power hungry phones.

The last good data I can find (2019) puts the average right around $0.90/year for US based phone users.
Fun fact: since a relatively recent reform the position of the diaeresis (in french: "tréma") kinda changed (at least for quite a few words). For example in the word "aigue", the diacritic sign can be put either on the 'e' (as used to be the case previously) or the 'u' (which is now recommended but not mandatory: you can still put it on the 'e' instead). So both "aigüe" and "aiguë" are correct AFAICT.

Although I'm a native french speaker TIL, thanks to you, that it's role was to inform that the letters are to be pronounced separately.
This is the beauty of FOSS. It might be rough at the edges but you can always have access to it and not have to worry about losing your daily driver (talking to you Figma). Every organization needs to start thinking about this and invest in good FOSS tools for any recent technology to avoid business continuity risk.
> Only do that if you are in control of SSO

In reality: you do this if TCO of doing it internally < TCO of doing it externally + risk. There's quite a few people who estimate the risk is worth it.
Sometimes the muscles are compensating for a new instability in the spine from the trauma, which can be seen, but only with a motion x-ray.

I had a motion x-ray done of my neck that finally demonstrated that my skull slips slightly side-to-side relative to my atlas (C1 vertebra). So what seemed like my muscles overreacting or just me complaining about psychogenic neck pain (or trying to scam the insurance company) was actually my muscular system making sure I don't suffer an internal decapitation.

If anyone's having trouble with the insurance company insisting nothing is wrong because the static x-rays look fine, I cannot recommend highly enough that you look into a motion x-ray. It's very possible that your spine is only fine when it isn't moving, and that's no way to live your life.
How i see it, when a group of powerful people wanted to control ETH to some direction or block a party, they needed to do some physical work , which acted as a time-delay lock. Now all they need to do is think about it. I m not sure why the second case has the same level of trust as the first.

I think this begins the search for another trustless transaction system that is neither PoW nor PoS.
Yep. More precisely, construction worker pay has reached software developer pay, outside of the SV world.
In that case, maybe they should only ask for donations from people in the bay area.
I still use Fireworks CS6 for one-off mockups. I don't specialize in design myself, but I think that's exactly why I like using it - its UI is intuitive and simple. I've tried newer/maintained vector editors like Inkscape and Krita, and still feel like there's a void left by Fireworks for casual users like myself.
As a pure test case-

Let's say there was an individual who founded a company, owned 100% of the equity, and designed a brand new product. The product solved an unmet need for consumers, sold at high profit margins, and was massively successful. Our inventor was well ahead of his time, and the next-fastest similar invention would've been invented 30 years later, during which time $500 billion of consumer value had been created. Would you admit in this case that the founder earned a substantial fraction of the $500 billion?

To what degree is Bill Gates' wealth similar to this test case versus network-effect-capture, first-mover-advantage wealth? How do you quantify the value of Microsoft's software quality earning it's substantial market share, versus Microsoft getting there first and squatting on the network effect?
Hi! Yes, couple of primary things that would drive that answer:

1/ Right now, if you select "No A/C", we still include the cost+emissions of cooling from the heat pump. It's on the backlog to add a "heat vs. heat only" comparison. In part, we're assuming that if you have cooling capability, you'll probably use it (and therefore wanted to include that in the emissions impact), but also that homes without A/C today will have small cooling loads to begin with, so it wouldn't change the answer too dramatically. For now, I'd suggest looking at the monthly costs in the summer on the bar chart and mentally adjusting the headline number for those. Sorry that's not smoother!

2/ Natural gas is indeed way cheaper here -- dramatically so this year, but previously as well. The backtest shown on the site is Feb '21 to Feb '22 -- natural gas prices this coming winter are bound to be much higher than they were last year, so savings numbers will definitely change going forward. It's on our list to (a) make that dynamic clearer on the site, and (b) explore a more forward-looking savings number. Right now, the annual energy costs are "what you would have saved _last year_ vs. your existing equipment", instead of what you might expect, thinking that would be more convincing / less controversial, albeit potentially conservative.

Thrilled to hear you're 6mo into life with a heat pump! Is it air-to-water and still using water/steam radiators, or forced air now?
ah yes i agree
Because it gives people options and increases competition in the financial system.

It is much easier to create a VISA alternative when the ledger and transaction processing are taken care of.
I'm just going to assume he'll leave Adobe in one year to move on to his next adventure.
Taking loan? That's how people with $50K income by $500K homes
I'm betting they will leave it alone, at least for a while. I'm sure the C suite at adobe is not blind to their reputation and they know that if they start tacking on "Adobe" features to Figma, user growth will stall out.

Everyone is referencing the Macromedia purchase but I would argue that it was a very different kind of purchase. With that Adobe spent $3.4B acquiring them, in Figma's case they paid $20B. I could see how Adobe is willing to throw away $3.4B to kill their competition but I'm not sure they would be willing to do that to a $20B purchase.

If anything they keep is exactly the same, kill Adobe XD, and rename Figma to Adobe XD.
"Backblaze uses SSDs as boot drives for its servers rather than data storage, and its data compares these drives to HDDs that were also being used as boot drives."
GPUs are ridiculously cheap now, compared to how they used to be. You can buy a 3070 from newegg for $599 and they’ll throw in a free monitor to sweeten the deal for you
> Tech salaries are going to be on a decline for a while with the Fed rate hike

Isn't that true for the whole economy?
I also lost my Instagram to a weird bug/ban thing. If I try to access my account on desktop it says "confirm your information using the Instagram app to try to get back to your account". Opening the app on my phone results in a black screen. This happens on both Android and iOS. Android has some buttons that appear, but they're really buggy (appearing and disappearing) and none of them do anything except give me an error. It kind of seems like there's some sort of verification process I'm supposed to go through, but the app won't let me access it.

I just want to delete my account at this point, but I can't since I can't log in.
Good for you. I am not in a field where being a "specialist" is being a generalist who sort of kind of gets to choose what he works on. Just to be employable I have to have strong, deep expertise in Terraform, about 30 AWS services, Ansible, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and at least 5 different CI/CD systems. That's at all taken into account the sheer amount of architectural guidance, performance and fault debugging I Have to do. Now I also have to learn Pulumi and CDK just to have any prayer of a job if I'm forced to go back to the USA to make $$.

I'm glad that you're proud of learning new things. I doubt you were born when I first learned to solve a Rubik's cube.

Hats off to you for working in Security. I've worked for a couple of security startups, and the cynical nature of the industry combined with the pure bitterness of the security-focused people on our teams makes me uncomfortable to just think about.
"No means no" is political? Is there an anti-consent constituency?
> And it may be an incremental improvement over traditional global finance because there is a much greater ability to publicly scrutinize what goes on.

The flip side is that it’s creating new opportunities for massive privacy problems which would be irrecoverable. People who are trying to hide their activity will take precautions like using shell companies but normal people won’t think to do that or realize that they’re making that level of trust by using a wallet, exchange, etc.

There are some obvious big problems (“do voters know you paid for this porn site 15 years ago?”) but also more personal ones: imagine if employers, insurers, dating apps, etc. started data mining? Again, there are possible ways to mitigate that risk but I’d hesitate to make a lifetime commitment on those being effective and perfectly operated.
Ok thanks, I uninstalled it already
London I think the glory days were late 90s and maybe 03-08. Esp when contractors were paying no tax. I think rates have gone up a little since then but cost of living has doubled or tripled.
It's another case of survivorship bias - we only remember the ones that are still around 50 years later.
TIL that "coöperation" is an actual word.

The diaeresis is very important in French (we call it tréma). Without this the word naïve instead of "na-iv" would sound "nev". The first name Loïc instead of "lo-ik" would be "looak" (it is even hard to say it loud for me). And many others.

Fortunately we still have the word for waters which is eaux and that we pronounce "o"
The methane gas has already been burned for decades, adding bitcoin to the equation just made you look

No other use case has been profitable for the gas by products so the sites pump it directly into the atmosphere

Bitcoin mining is profitable and so the methane is not burned into the atmosphere, the molecules are stripped for electricity in simple catalytic converters and energy used on the spot (some sites are completely disconnected from the grid, these are the best use cases of this. others are connected to the grid which gets the most debate. in both cases no other solution exists in bitcoin mining’s absence and there was no political will to meet climate goals ever)

So the solution solves itself simply because it is an environmental solution that is profitable
Odd then that the insurance companies haven't been on the front lines against sugar, air and water pollution, climate change, meat consumption, etc etc. But good to know their greed-driven self-interests are closely aligned with individuals.
I'd like to request a change to that mnemonic: your principal is not your pal!
> Hold him, breastfeed him and co-sleep with him and he'll be fine. Otherwise you're doing something wrong.

Some humility would serve you well.

Some babies, even toddlers, scream loudly for extended periods with no way to console them. Our neighbor a decade ago had one such child. They were great, loving parents. The kid was obviously happy and content. Yet, every night, for several hours, she was a siren. They saw lots of doctors. They started with co-sleeping, for what it's worth. In the end, a separate bed and a parent reading a book with ear plugs [for several hours] seemed to cause the child the least distress.

When the child was 2, and still screaming, a new neighbor moved in. They spread neighborhood gossip of child abuse. They called the police and child protective services. Luckily, their case was so well documented, it was not an issue. The issue was "resolved" with better soundproofing.

The kid is a teen now. Extremely kind, well adjusted, helpful, smart, and, a sound sleeper. She's obviously loved very much her entire life. I think the parents did a great job.
> I don't think anyone with any real stake in the game is rallying against that fact.

Minor and probably distant concern. All forms of energy usage have losses, mostly heat. If consumption keeps going up forever, then at some point the accumulated generated heat will become a problem on itself. But let’s solve the more present matters first.
"some research shows that elephants communicate with each other using low frequency rumbles that can be heard for miles (if you’re an elephant)."

Apparently whales can hear each other over distances of several thousand miles -- entirely across oceans.
Figma turned ~$330M in investments into a $20B outcome and gave countless companies a better way to do their work. How is this a bad path for society?
No. Another hard truth is that some jobs are more essential than others.
Human nature, usually.
M2 is flat this year while prices are up. It isn't a good measure of inflation. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
> Then why haven’t you?

I found another product opportunity that will be faster and cheaper to build. That I believe I could out-compete Figma were I rich does not mean I _am_ rich.

Thanks for the down vote.
Yes you're quite right.

I don't think it takes away from my point, that some people have far outsized rewards for the risks they take.
Very interesting but since (my) iPhones can't use / read them, out of the box, there is very little change I will be using them anytime soon.
Wasn't a public blockchain supposed to solve this? I always see this speculation and I thought the blockchain was supposed to show the public who was doing what... instead I always see these comments about big holders and speculation who it is. Shouldn't exchange addresses be known?
The socio-legal conditions that permit the building of wealth, like strong property rights and free markets, are necessary but not sufficient; so you wouldn't expect to see a correlation between them.

There are only a few countries that have a low Gini coefficient (more income equality) along with a high per capita GDP (more overall wealth) in north or western Europe such as Finland, Norway, or Belgium, which are very much the exceptions; for the most part, they all have a strong cultural background of being industrious, and in the case of Norway have a lot of oil.

According to the Wikipedia page on the Gini coefficient, the top 20 lowest Gini (highest income equality) countries are: Slovenia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Iceland, Norway, Belgium, Finland, Kazakhstan, Algeria, Kyrgyzstan, the Netherlands, Denmark, East Timor, Sweden, Kosova, Malta, and Iraq. You'll notice that besides the northwestern European exceptions, they largely fall more on the "everyone is equally poor" side of the spectrum.

The US is in the bottom half of income equality, yet has one of the highest GDP per capita and the highest median household disposable income, which many agree is a very good way of measuring how wealthy ordinary people are.

To summarize, obviously having high income inequality does not cause a wealthy nation; but instead (going back to my original thesis) the factors that permit the building of a wealthy nation can cause high income inequality, which isn't a problem as long as the rising tide is lifting all boats. The few countries that are both wealthy and have low income inequality are virtually exclusively monoethnic societies that have a strong cultural emphasis on both the factors that are conducive to wealth-creation (like education and delayed gratification) as well as factors that forbid egregious displays of income inequality (like the Scandinavian Law of Jante).

I may go one step further and theorize that the same global factors that led to the rapid increase in wealth around the world in the past half-century or so did much to hide the failings of more egalitarian, "socialist" economic policies, much like the period of very low real interest rates of the last twenty years hid the failings of unprofitable VC-backed startups; and now that it looks like we are entering a more turbulent period with geopolitical instability and energy shortages, we may very well end up seeing a sharp reduction in the standard of living in countries like France or Spain as the ever-increasing redistribution of wealth in response to one crisis after another make it harder and harder to actually produce wealth.
California's antitrust case against Amazon feels anachronistic
What cracks me up, is how little a sub-200k salary is in SF.

100k less, in most other places on the planet, affords a much richer lifestyle.

When I work in SV, I expect 2x the salary minimum, just due to the cost of living, and housing cost differences.

Anything less than 300k? I'll make more working in Canada, at 150k.