skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The cryptocurrency has value! Maybe we agree that it's shitty, but its value is abundantly clear. It has a price and a nonzero trading volume. An economy that prioritized at human wellbeing or moral value (and had the might to impose it) might be nice, but it's a far cry from the current reality of market forces determining what gets produced.
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/plpgsql-implementati...

Seems like these will get cached at some point.
> We're still building net-new coal plants

I wonder about that. Will they be subsidized? At the same time are also closing down functional coal plants because their operational cost can't be recouped now that they compete with renewables.

(Yeah, in all likelihood, everybody involved is actively refusing to think and talk about that on the hopes that they will have left this job by then. And the people putting money there are probably trying to sell their shares away to another loser before it.)

Any way you cut it, those new coal plants will only get operational at all if people decide to constantly burn some money in them.

> However the lifetimes on gas cars, heavy equipment, and power plants being built today range from 20-50 years.

Yes, and that means we can replace up to 5% of our transportation emissions by year without increasing our capital depreciation. That is in stark contrast to the norm in that you are supposed to do some net investment to adapt to any random change.

If you decide (by regulation, morality, or whatever) to actually sink money on the change, you can get there much faster.
Crypto literally cannot be stopped, turned off, banned, or otherwise censored. That is its entire purpose and design.

Whether that is good or bad is a different question.

(Yes, crypto can be regulated. Of course it can. The point is that it will continue to exist irrespective of regulation.)
Don't be underwhelmed. It definitely makes your Netflix better: whatever you watch can be encoded better, which enhances quality and lowers the chance of a rebuffer interrupting your experience. And the improved encoding efficiency frees up money that can be spent on content production.

But you can also just enjoy the story of developer achievement!
Idk if this is serious or not, but no, I, nor anyone I have met, has had a need to send money that the court system couldn't reverse.
What AI do you use for that?
Source [1] says:

> China subjected Mr. Spavor to lengthy interrogation sessions, according to one of the sources. He was drugged, forced to sit in a chair for long hours and subjected to threats of execution, the source said. Mr. Spavor admitted to the Chinese interrogators, the source said, that he provided information to Mr. Kovrig.

I'd only be able to trust statements that were made freely. Have either of these two made any statements on the matter since returning to Canada? I also wouldn't trust most plea deals made with US federal prosecutors either -- it's easy for any government to get people to plead guilty to things they didn't do.
Meanwhile we have this.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/miltonezrati/2023/03/24/america...

....all for a casino ponzi scheme that is creating a very volatile "asset". I'm all for free market, but electricity production in the US is highly regulated and very far from being free market.

Also, I'm not an environmentalist, but one of the things that has hurt electric car adoption has been the cost of charging, especially at DC fast chargers. Getting rid of this waste would reduce strain on the grid and help to drive down electric costs which could alleviate that problem.

It's surprising that environmental protestors have not started to show up at mining faculties.
The omnirole nature of C# and why it's a top language
Well, I don't want to make us all poorer, so I better start running the air conditioner and the heater with the windows open.
> In particular a strong point of Rust is that C programmers feel comfortable switching to Rust in way that has not happened with other safe languages.

I don't see this at all. C++ programmers might be switching, but C programmers aren't reaching for Rust when they need something better than C.
You get a salary that can be paid from the grants, but if you get $1m or $20M in grants it's not going to be a change in your salary. At least until you negotiate a higher salary. And if you don't get the grants in the next cycle, the university will be paying your salary.
In the .NET world we're developing on Windows/x64 and deploying on Linux/ARM64 en masse at this point. I haven't personally seen an issue yet where I had to debug a Linux- or ARM64-specific issue. I think different language ecosystems have wildly differing levels of readiness for this.
So what? Surely they are paying for it.
When an unknown call happens, I pick up and wait 3 seconds before saying "Hello".
Most of the time, the robot detects no voice and hangs up.
> $7T sounds like a lot of money but

Sorry you can stop right there.
No. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

This is the argument from authority fallacy but in reverse. Just because a idiotic war criminal praises someone does not mean that person is bad. Neither is it an indication that person is good. You should not pay attention to idiots. If you always do the opposite of idiots, you're letting idiots control you, and what does that make you?
Which is why I was always baffled by the decorative lights in my old office.

It was a wall with small scattered lights in different colors, so they used recessed LEDs. Fine. But instead of color LEDs with a neutral diffuser, it had red+green+blue triple LEDs to make white light, with a red/green/blue plastic in front to recolor it!

I understand how this could be cheaper to assemble or maintain, but I'll never not balk at a system that has components undoing each other's work. Feels almost disrepectful to the technology.
I know they're kind of experimental still, but I have personally found Nix Flakes a lot more fun to work with, at least once I sat down and actually learned about them. I feel the interface is more consistent, and it gives me the "replacing docker" experience with the ability to make devshells and ephemeral builds.

Granted, I'm not running Nixos on my main laptop, because I have had a hell of a time getting me 2020 Macbook to get Linux running stably, but I do use Nix as my sole package manager within MacOS, and I do run NixOS on my server and use Flakes heavily there.
Yes, obviously you should "argue" and require an explanation of the doctor's reasoning. I just literally rejected doing an MRI this past weekend, in an emergency context, that would have been financially "free". The things it might have found were already disimplied by bloodwork, or were rare with no treatment options, and in my opinion the amount of iatrogenic harm from the procedure would have been unjustified.

A patient or trusted advocated needs to be involved in a patient's own care, and the current "insurance" system does a great job at destroying this as doctors focus on "insurance" companies and associated bureaucracy as decision makers rather than patients. IMO this is precisely where the request to do an MRI was coming from in the first place - bureaucratic ass-covering.
And every time your libc needs to be updated, almost every other package you have installed must be updated at the same time.
Amateur radio exists.
Never thought a site called "Hacker News" would be so anti-technology as I'm seeing in these comments. Use the energy. We'll start making more of it and cheaper. Everyone benefits.
Carbon tax

The energy source of my wall outlets shouldn't be my problem. Electricity is cheap because fossil fuels are cheap because they externalize the true carbon cost. I assume with a carbon tax that less BS would be profitable.
We're fortunate to be able to charge at home thanks to our condo parking getting chargers. There's been tax incentives for this.

And the municipality is installing street chargers. While not enough currently due to the high % of EVs, they're going to install a lot more they say.

> If you have enough range to meet your requirements, why spend so much more money just to get a bigger number?

This was exactly our approach. We wanted 400km which we felt was sufficient for us. So we just eliminated cars with less and looked at other aspects to decide which one to pick.
I coincidentally just came to HN looking for this exact answer following the headlines about BTC soaring. [1]

The use cases for it I see are:

1. Cheaply send large payments without having to pay a bank fee (instead you pay btc fees plus conversion to and from fiat fees).

2. Anonymously transfer money if using a washing service (illegal to offer one in the US) or if you spend rawly mined coins.

IMO, crypto is a US gov invention that was pushed to speculative theater to give threat actors huge incentive to break sha256/512 publically, as the best use of such tech atm is to steal massive amounts of money. It therefore acts as a canary for when someone finally does figure out how to crack it or easily solve prime factorization.

[1] https://www.zerohedge.com/crypto/bitcoin-soars-post-etf-laun...
If I happened to carry a French passport and was in China now, I'd get out immediately.
Except the US electricity market is not a free market. Most people only have one provider to choose from.
What a sweet idea! I don't have a Patreon at the moment but if I get around to making one I'll definitely post it on the website.

I appreciate the heads up about the typesetting --- it looks like it's due to some macros that the web-based TeX typesetter I'm using hasn't implemented. I usually go over the PDF versions more carefully than the automatically generated web versions, and I guess this is the price I pay.

EDIT: Should be fixed now!
I imagine it’s much more complicated than that because they themselves may have never owned the content. A lot of times, they’re leasing content. I think the content owner could choose not to renew a contract thus requiring the distributor to stop distributing. I imagine if the regulator were to go after this, thee’d really need to start at the content owner themselves as well as every middleman.
Still, generating energy even with solar has impact on natural resources and the environment.
Disingenuous article. Compared against Intel Skylake which was launched in 2015 and discontinued in 2019. Not a fair comparison.

There might be a desire to compare to an existing cluster machine. So, hardware might be dated. Fair.

But, it’s very disingenuous to write an article and title it this way.
Really? What about Francesca Gino who is at Harvard https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=271812 and has even fraud and retractions on her Wikipedia? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Gino
Still a teacher at Harvard and filed a frivolous suit of defamation to the detriment of data conda.

I see no evidence that data fraud is "career ending" and the snark about dunning Kruger is fitting for your comment.
Ask HN: Could peer pressure be enough get landlords to reduce their rent prices?
Food for thought: If all the landlords say their rent prices are based on markets, what if the market called/emailed/wrote the landlord to state otherwise and to state their disapproval of how their prices are now. Would this be enough to get landlords back to the table on fair pricing?
Unfortunately, you're both right.

Decarbonization is the best thing to do by a large margin, both in a cost-benefit sense and in a net impact sense. It's stupid to burn coal to produce $X worth of electricity and then spend many multiples of $X just to remove a tiny fraction of the carbon.

But you're also right that decarbonization won't occur in the amount required by 2060.

Which, quite frankly and plainly, just means we're fucked. Not even going into positive feedback loops of natural methane emissions due to warming arctic and tropics.
On the one hand, I am glad that there are now online communities for neurodivergent people to support one another. That is a great thing.

On the other hand, I can't help but notice how many people with ADHD, Autism, Anxiety, etc. are now forming a strong personal identity around these diagnoses. We shouldn't neglect or ignore that part of their person, but I am also not sure how healthy it is for them to think of that as a primary part of their identity.

To answer the question: I would not mention that right away. Yes, autism affects the contours of your personality, but I don't think it is helpful for you or other people to think of you in those terms (especially right away).

I am not a doctor/mental health expert/therapist (clearly). Just thinking out loud.
Ring video doorbell customers angry at 43% price hike
Great book. I've read it through twice already! I always recommend it when talking about Sci Fi
Many years into crypocurrency being a thing, we have a non-theoretical answer to this question: apparently not, no. Not for legal purposes at least (people do get value from it as a way to buy drugs or other illegal things/services)
This is not a particularly helpful comment. I work at a California-based company, though we have employees all over the world. In our layoffs, typically employees stick around for weeks, months, even 6 months sometimes.

How are we supposed to know? Sometimes people put cryptic slack status icons or messages. Sometimes they slack the team or close contacts or something. But in a company with thousands of people, unless an employee sends a email to the entire company, how are you supposed to know? The layoffs happened months ago, why would it occur to me that the person I am working with today will be gone tomorrow, unless they start every conversation with "hey, so I got laid off..."

Nobody really wants to relive that trauma over and over again. It's frankly MORE confusing the longer coworkers stick around after the 'event'.
Sometimes I exchange printed papers and documents with colleagues that have actual coffee stains. Would be interesting to have digital and physical stains at the same time. I will test that. Some will complain about the perfect shapes /s
Feel free to DM on twitter if you wanna swap notes. Been doing that for a few years in the commercial real estate space so there's some similarities.
The way I see is Netflix is mostly sprawling implementation of mediocre Java stack which is typical of large IT department in F500 companies. But their relentless tech marketing and extremely high pay for work which is a wrapper around enterprise IT has created an aura of sophistication and cutting edge in many people's mind.
Yes, it does have a garbage collection, I wasn't trying to imply it uses reference counting.

(Though to be fair reference counting can be considered a rather rudimentary way of doing garbage collection.)
I'm not a crypto proponent per se, but I do feel the need to be reasonable about it, and this reads like pure emotional anti-cryptocurrency sentiment.

(edit: while I still can, I'm going to jump in and repeat that I'm criticizing this as a bad article which isn't saying anything very meaningful on its own. Thanks everyone for doing the author's work for them and gathering more data. I won't be upset if it's proven that crypto is intrinsically bad for everything I love - except insofar as I believe it can't be stopped.)

1. There is no comparison made to the energy consumption of the traditional banking industry, which I am sure is not a particularly energy-efficient industry.

2. The title of the article is itself editorializing the content of the article and is speculative according to their own words. From TFA: "[The EIA] released a study suggesting that cryptocurrency mining represents up to 2.3% of U.S. power demand." It could be less, much less, or much less, although I haven't read the actual report yet (I'm criticizing this article only), because "suggesting" could be doing a lot of heavy lifting

3. "Just 137" isn't meaningful AFAIK. Who cares if it's 100 or 10 or 10,000 miners? The point is the amount of crypto being mined. (The number of miners will always be in flux by design anyway.) And the answer to that, from TFA: "The EIA found that the global share of Bitcoin mining that takes place in the U.S. grew from 3.4% in 2020 to a whopping 37.8% in 2022." So roughly ~2% of US power is generating over 1/3 of the world's Bitcoin. This is only obviously bad if you believe Bitcoin is a total waste of energy, which I don't, but I understand that some do.

4. Energy consumption is frankly not a phenomenon I give two shits about, as an environmentalist. Fossil fuel consumption is. From TFA: "We intend to ... quantify the sources of electricity used to meet cryptocurrency mining demand." Meaning this has not been done, and publishing scary warnings is premature. If Bitcoin mining ends up using a higher proportion of renewable energy than, say, traditional banking, it could be seen as a net good for crypto use to rise.
I think you're overthinking this. At the point that the scammer is getting the victim to change settings, overcoming UAC is not the problem.
Carbon capture may be useful, even necessary, but the amounts needed to make any difference means that massive industrial processes are needed.

As a species we emit 35 billion tons of CO2 per year. So I would think we're talking capture in at least the hundreds of millions tons a year range.
Fun fact: the US military is one of the largest consumers of oil. If you want to equate them to a company for conversational purposes, that's fine with me. This is one of those situations where the gap between 1 and 2 is really big.
I read somewhere that it’s unconstitutional for overly high punitive damages in libel/slander cases.

Anything above single digit ratio is ($10 punitive for $1 damages) questionable.

Not sure if that applies here.
And if there's the slightest issue with the update, you can just reboot into the previous generation and continue working until you have time to figure it out later, or just wait until it's fixed!
I'm surprised that these companies are not feeling the effects of the ill will that is caused by these kinds of decisions.
The tatung was designed in bradford, UK, then manufactured in Korea, 4MHz Z80, 64KB of RAM (upgraded to a 256k option by the EOL), AY-3910 sound, 2x 3" floppy drives built in, a built in 80 column monitor, and a video system comparable to the MSX, it ran CPM, which meant it had access to a plethora of good Z80 assemblers, Turbo Pascal, Wordstar, and other useful dev tools (including hisoft C). The 3" drives meant that it had a native advantage for the spectrum +3, CPC 6128, and amstrad PCW since it was trivial to write a disk writer to write native disks for those systems.

As a system of it's own standing, ignoring the MSX software catalog, which was largely unavailable in the UK, it was probably the best Z80 system by specs until the Elan/Flan/Enterprise 128* finally was released; which upped the high-tide mark for Z80 systems even further with again CPM compatibility (requiring a 3rd party copy of CPM though) and amazing hardware.

Both the Einstein and Enterprise were commercial failures for the most part, to the point that in early 1986 I was presented by Dixons offering either the Einstein or the Atari 130XE on a massive discount at £50. I chose poorly and picked the 130XE, which turned out to be the last one they had in stock, had 100% ram failure, and Dixons were unable to repair it under warranty. I still wish I'd gone with the more useful Einstein.

In the early 90s, you'd often find Einstein's knocking around in storage rooms of most UK development studios from when they got adopted as dev machines. Sometimes you'd find a PCW or 2 too, again CPM and the 3" disks rendering it useful.

There's lots of Einstein info here:

http://www.tatungeinstein.co.uk/

And info on the Enterprise should that tickle your curiosity here:

http://www.oldcomputermuseum.com/enterprise-128.html
I did this before. I ran a cron job once a day that counted the number of active entries in a particular file. It was neat to see the number bump up after an acquisition or drop after a layoff. It was neat to see the overall growth of the company I worked for.

I eventually decided that someone _might_ decide that, although freely available, in aggregate, this material could be _sensitive_. I stopped doing it. I deleted years of interesting data...
Isn't most reputational damage very hard to conclusively prove for normal people?

If someone posts all over Twitter that I'm a fraudster and an asshole, and I feel like I'm having fewer prospective customers choose me to tile their bathroom and I'm getting fewer dates on Grindr - am I supposed to be able to prove that, and the causality in court?

Even if I somehow have detailed records of exactly how all of my dates have gone and how many prospective clients I've given quotes to - maybe there's just another tile guy who started asking for less, and I'm getting fewer dates because I got this garish pink mohawk.
Local from _their_ perspective, deep inside the beast.
That's exactly what this post is about. It requires some background info to see the scale of their achievement, sure, but their choice is to put some of that burden on you, the reader.
Slightly less than related, but sovereign wealth funds can pay absolutely insane amounts of money for the talent that they want. FAANG is far from the end game for truly talented developers.
I wonder how much societal progress has been thwarted by external warring factions, i.e. actual wars
Nobody's talking about socialism.

But let's say it was a more socialist society. As a result, everyone would be earning more, including him. And maybe the CEO that tried to fuck his research would earn less.

IDK but for me that sounds like a very good trade-off, given the CEO did nothing, as always, and got billions.
I would be with you, if bitcoin was only allowed to use carbon-free electricity. The reality is that they sometimes buy coal mines ([1]) and burn coal onsite without paying for the externalities. And that's something to be worried about.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...
Oh wow. That's very important context. The current SCOTUS would love to get their hands on a case that lets them give their friends more protection.
It's really hard to gauge how much utility cryptos are providing. After all, people who need cryptos the most are those who can't use "proper" channels to transfer money.
> This is a classic case of just how factually, scientifically, and morally bankrupt the money-backed climate denialism movement is.
Here was a huge dustup, lots of sizzle, tons and tons of examination, and the end result: it all held up!

Flamewar comment. The verdict of one jury (who very likely already made up their mind about climate change before the trial started) finding a single publication liable for defamation of one author on the _preponderance of the evidence_ bears very little bearing on the overall "climate denialism" debate.
> Why do utilities encourage customers to become more efficient when they could sell more power and make more money instead?

Because that kind of marketing works on a lot of people.
AI chips will be ~5% of TSMC's revenue in 2024. A very bullish outcome would be ~8% in 2025. TSMC spends ~$50b on capex per year. This is a completely ridiculous proposal.
Yup, Still glad I canceled my prime membership. Next, the doorbell videos will have ads that you can pay more for to remove.
There's also "the query plan you want won't do what you expect, so I'm giving you the next best thing until you tell me the right way to store the data": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39311536
Lucky enough, we are not living in a free market.

Otherwise we would all be fucked.

Just in case you don't get it: have you ever seen a company making a high quality, sustainable and save product because of free market? Nope they do it because of laws we as a society make.

And in this particular case, i'm absolutly for banning it globally.