skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
BTC was designed as a drop-in replacement for both the USD and SWIFT for processing transactions. If it were successful, it would be a grave threat to the US financial position. Trump recently issued threats to BRICS nations for contemplating issuing a common currency with precisely those same aims.[1]

If BTC was on the verge of realizing its purpose, Trump would work equally hard to burn it down. So, who knows if BTC price goes up or down, but categorical statements about a fundamentally transactional politician sending this permanently to the moon bake in a significant degree of risk of later being contradicted.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/30/politics/trump-brics-currency...
"I grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan,… …outside shooting pellet guns, catching snakes, feeding kittens, riding dirt bikes my whole childhood. "

I had a similar outdoors childhood in a town of about 10k people in a mountainous area about 70 miles from the State's capital city. You can never explain to those who've not experienced growing up that way about how wonderful it is.

One exception however, catching snakes was a no-no for this reason: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_brown_snake (read the fine print about how venomous it is).

I accidentally stepped on one when I was about 14 and luckily I'm still here. I was running along a bush track and turned into a right-angle bend and the snake—which was out of sight round the bend—was sunning itself in the middle of the track and I couldn't pull up in time—and squish!

The snake shot off in one direction and I did the fastest back-flip in my life in the other direction. I was trembling with fright for about ten minutes after that.

"… No rats."

Perhaps you shouldn't advertise the fact that Saskatchewan is ratless as you might have an influx of migrants (of the human kind that is).

On second thoughts, the last time I was in Saskatchewan (over two decades ago) it was so cold I may as well have been in Antarctica.

Perhaps rats are smarter than we think. Being in 'Antarctica' is just a bit out of their comfort zone.

BTW, I used to keep white rats and mice as pets when I was a kid (they were fun, I used to leave their cage doors open so they could roam and they'd return after exploring).
> If BTC becomes too competitive, it will be fairly easy to regulate it into being too unattractive

Will it though? There are millions of US voters who hold crypto and both sides attempted to appeal to this voting block in the last election (obviously one with more success than the other). Heavily regulating crypto seems to offer massive political downsides with very little potential gain.

And we haven't even seen the crypto version of the NRA yet.
Fair enough, the correct wording should be something like "revolutions are not worth their cost" as some good does come from revolutions. I'm sure many will argue that the its worth the cost but thats much more subjective.
I think it'd be better just to use Firefox, because it's still a better platform for uBlock origin.
Sorry, could you be a bit more specific? As a user, not a developer, I'm curious if there's any flaws in the source code (potential security vulnerabilities, inefficient code that might cause slow / slower execution, dodgy third party data extraction, stuff like that.) that might affect day-to-day user experience. Personally, when I switched from Chrome to Firefox, I found I had much more control over each aspect of the browser experience and that's been the main reason I've stayed. I especially like the "about:config" page, chrome is sorely missing something similar.
Don’t forget money laundering.
There’s still a clear opposite for many predictions. If someone says he’s betting on stock X, the opposite would be to go short. And if someone says the stock is overpriced, you buy it.
Not a problem with the source code, but did you see that Mozilla has literally become an advertising company?

• https://archive.md/6Un3E (using archive.md to avoid a disappointing problem with the source website)

Mozilla seems to still claim they're "stewards of the open web", yet they're so far off topic it's just impossible they can believe that with a straight face. :(
> This increases the market for bitcoin mining and subsequently energy waste.

News technologies will require more and more energy.

> For me personally this enough reason to ban bitcoin

It's possible to ban bitcoin?
Both vercel and next keep breaking APIs. I just blank out stopped touching anything coming from there.
I still have a client on next + vercel/ai and it's a constant shitshow of broken updates.

It's not an environment you can be productive with.

I moved to solid from now on: they don't have as much money but applications built years ago still work today
An undemocratic despot nation? Keep up the great ideas.
There’s huge fears around AGI, but that’s not what people are building.

Everyone is trying to build this.
As person with both a finance and economics degrees, bitcoin is a successful fraud. I can list out how they use bitcoin private definitions for standard financial terms, how they do not disclose those differences in conversations with financial professionals using the standard terms and their definitions, and the bitcoin community itself is composed of people that expect someone else did the homework to validate this, but no one did. I did, it's not there. Bitcoin is a fraud designed to trap smart people that trust other smart people, who do not do their homework.
But do you actually disagree? Has the Crypto Revolution to date produced anything other than financial speculation and a slight warming of the Earth's surface?
> It's hopelessly behind on many modern Web standards, too.

Chrome-only APIs are not "modern web standards".
Or Edge, which just works.
Well, USD is used too. For decades. Even with too many regulations and security controls implemented by financial institutions around the world.
There might be smarter elected officials in the future that facing two choices:

USD losing the world's reserve currency status and:

1. Yuan becomes the reserve currency

2. BTC becomes the reserve currency

they would understand that choice 2 is preferrable for the West
LLM hallucinations in fact has a positive side effect too, if you are using them for learning some subject; makes you verify their claims, and finding errors in them is very rewarding.
> He on the other hand would take a route that only involved stepping places where he had stepped the first time through. That way he never sprung any new traps on the way back, unlike people who stepped in new places.

Maybe that gives you a slight edge, but it involves having near perfect recollection where you've stepped. That's not a small feat.
GPS-alternative tech swaps satellites for Earth fingerprints
I was just humorously insinuating that HN generally isn’t particularly good at financial advice. Take this top comment from 2022, simultaneously bearish on both crypto and AI... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34196161
Is there a plan to support collaboration? Like two or more users work in the same workspace so that querying and getting the result would happen in real time together.

I've had difficulties finding such application. The closest I've been to achieving something like this is vscode + liveshare + some sql management extension.
No, that is literally the fallacy.

If someone says he's betting on stock X, the opposite is not to go short. That's one way of doing "not what he did". Another way of doing "not what he did" is to for example sell a PUT, because maybe you think it's just going to stay flat. Another way is to not do anything, and instead wait, because going short costs money (you're borrowing a stock and borrowing fees on it), and so the act of shorting itself can lose you money if he isn't "wrong fast enough". So is the opposite to short it on the day he says he's buying, or is the opposite to short it the next week? Even "pure opposite" situations would require exact entrypoints and exit points which you wouldn't have.

You literally fell for the exact thing I was describing.
One can make money predicting volatility.
First HN submission: Feb 3 2009 (0 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=463793
An Interview with Tae Kim about Jensen Huang and the Nvidia Way
Because 10+ years ago it was being used as a cool currency you could generate with your desktop GPU and buy steam games with.

Now there doesn’t seem to be any use case other than hoping it goes up higher, and enabling crime.
It’s very new to the standard library (latest version of GCC this year was the first version to support it). Additionally, I’ve found that println adds 30+ seconds to my compile time even for hello world so I’ll be avoiding it unless I need it
> Cross-platform is a must for a modern browser platform.

I don’t understand why. I’m very happy with Safari, it works great. Yes, it’s not the fastest to implement web standards. But it just works very well in Apple ecosystem, and for common usage, it’s way more important and useful than to be the best to support web standards, users don’t care about this.

(And to be clear, the situation is really different than the IE6 era, WebKit respects standards, doesn’t invent its own standard and it doesn’t have a monopoly on web browser market)
This is an incredible suggestion!
Friendly and Hostile Analogies for Taste
The last table is an awful lot of chrome only bits, many of which are a pretty bad idea on the web.
> Because it's something everyone can understand

But they will understand the wrong thing. Someone unfamiliar with LLMs but familiar with humans will assume, when told that LLMs 'hallucinate', that it's analogous to a human hallucinating, which is dangerously incorrect.
Web browsers could have 1/10th of the features, basically enough for markdown, forms, forums, displaying media, and minimal styling.
Create your own blog and have full control.
> Money going to underdeveloped parts of the EU is by design. Helping them helps everyone.

That is your take on it. But is it true? How does a French/German person benefit from the money from their taxes being sent to another country when their own economies are in the dumpster?

> It creates a huge internal market and companies and people benefit, even from net contributing countries.

Maybe for big companies. I don't think a plumber in Spain cares that they can sell their services to someone in Latvia.

> There sure are issues to solve, but in pure monetary terms, the EU is a no brainer.

Then why is it that we are having this conversation?

If the EU is a no brainer, we should be swimming in cash, shouldn't we?

Even the most ardent supporters of the EU have finally admitted the truth (such as Mario Draghi), the EU is falling behind on many fronts including but not limited to AI, EVs, economic output, industrial output, defense spending and so on...

> Just look at the UK

That's a bit disingenuous. There are many countries in Asia or elsewhere that are doing just fine without being part of a union such as the EU.

What about Germany currently? What about Greece after 2008? What about France which had a 10%++ unemployment rate for the majority of the 2010s?

The UK is not doing well at the moment, that is a given, but let's not pretend that the countries in the EU are doing any better either.

At least the UK has a functioning government whereas France is in a deadlock and will soon go through it's 4th prime minister/government of the year.
Suburbs are for standard of living, for me.

I want more space, both in my home and in my yard, than I can get in the city. I want a 2+ car garage where I can build and drive a go-kart with my kids, fix my own car and have a little workshop to do woodworking.

I want a garden that isn't blanketed by city air, and room for some fruit trees. I want room for a fire pit, and enough trees that I don't have line of sight into my neighbors windows.

I don't want a farm. I don't need country living. Somewhere between 0.25 and 0.5 acres is about right for what I want to do, and that means the suburbs.

I live in a Cologne, Germany right now. I have lived in Sao Paulo in the past. Big cities with lots to offer. I know big cities and their conveniences, and they're fine. But for the life I want to live, suburbs offer a better standard of living.
It’s probably semi realistic to ban bitcoin mining since it could be easily detected by the massive unexplained power consumption.
> I'd never suggested Firefox is akin to IE. Safari is, however, as it's tied to macOS.

This analogy is strange, because Internet Explorer was cross-platform and indeed was the default web browser on Mac OS X until Safari was created.
(not the parent poster)

https://www.academypublication.com/issues2/tpls/vol05/04/25....

> Abstract — There are disputes over the role of memorization in language learning. Memorized language, a mainstay of education for almost all of recorded history, was widely repudiated for suppressing creativity, understanding and enjoyment in learners. This paper aims at highlighting the fact that, despite these criticisms, memorization is a helpful strategy which can be employed by the learners and teachers in their process of language learning and teaching. It is discussed that memorization: 1) provides the learner with linguistic data; 2) is the first step to understanding; 3) enhances association in memory; 4) causes cognitive development as a learning strategy; 5) helps noticing; 6) provides rehearsal; 7) is especially helpful in early stages of learning. It is also pointed out that all these become possible when memorization is accompanied and
complemented by other strategies and techniques.
Maybe the high housing CoL is a change in recent years compared to the time period before that?
Do you have a blog per chance? Or any recommended reading on pre processing / data chunking strategies to improve results?
I've been semi-self-hosting on S3 for years. Pipeline is a private GitLab repo -> GitLab CI -> S3 bucket. Works well, though I've started hitting artifact size limits lately that I need to manage...
>Mozilla has literally become an advertising company

How is this relevant? Assuming what you say is true. The alternative GP promotes is building browsers atop Google's engine. If Mozilla is "literally an ad company", what is Google with ~80% revenue off ads?
Would you be willing to speculate on how VectorChord's ingestion and query performance might compare to Elasticsearch/OpenSearch for dense vector and sparse vector search use cases, particularly when dealing with larger full text data sets (>5M records)?
> Have you actually seen Firefox source code?

Yes.

> It's horrible; not one bit surprising that Chromium won!

Nope. It's just old (maybe older than you, even, IDK). It's Netscape, actually. It's very commendable that the codebase we're talking about has been successfully evolved up to that point [0].

[0]: https://arewefastyet.com
“Trying” is an overly generous interpretation of what’s going on.

Training an LLM is not actually working on AGI just as people building skyscrapers aren’t getting to the moon. It’s an inherent limitation on the approach.
Please do (unironically).
How do you measure whether there's a crisis without resorting to feelings?
> With that said, the more I think about BTC, the less sense it makes to me. Exceedingly few people actually use it for anything practical.

The same can be said of gold.

It's primary modern use is jewelry, with some industrial uses (electronics, aerospace) as well as medical and dentistry. For a little while it was used as (the basis of) money, and now that particular fetish has stuck around:

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249245.The_Power_of_Gold

Bitcoin and gold are now simply commodities, like oil or frozen concentrated orange juice.

Human psychology is weird.
Ask HN: Constraint to enforce pairwise distinct values in two columns in table
I'm kind of stumped by a seemingly simple problem in Db design, but the more I think about about it, the more it twists my mind.

Let's say I have columns C1 and C2 in a table. How do I enforce that the pairing of values of C1 and C2 is pairwise disticnt? That is, a specific composite value for C1 and C2, say X and Y, can appear any number of times in the table, but once X/Y appears, you cannot have X/Z, or W/Y.

It seems such a simple constraint to model, but several hours of research provides no clear solutions. I'm using PostgreSQL, but I guess the issue is db-agnostic. I explored partial indexes, but that feature seems too limited for this problem. Any ideas?

To put this in more context, my problem arises from trying to design a users table that maintains version history with the following columns:

- internal_id (auto-generated integer, primary key),

- external_id (varchar, not null),

- auth_id (varchar, not null, phone #, email address, etc),

- display_name (varchar),

- access_level (integer, not null),

- record_version_number (integer),

- record_version_created_by (varchar, not null),

- when_record_version_created (timestampz, not null),

- when_record_version_expired (timestampz),

- unique (external_id, record_version_number)

A record is valid from when_record_version_created to when_record_version_expired. This should basically work, but without enforcing the pairwise distinct relationship between external_id and auth_id, it would be possible to associate an active auth_id with more than one external_id, which would corrupt the data.
Bearblog would be my first choice.

I run a blog (err… website) for a living and writing my own static site generator was sensible. Jekyll with GitHub pages is also a sensible option if you like offline text editor-based editing.

Basically, opt for content that is under your control, even if it’s hosted on someone else’s server. Definitely host something under a domain that you fully own.
Are you serious dude?

> Have you actually seen Firefox source code? It's horrible

That's the first time in many years I have seen anyone saying something like this (on HN, reddit or other forums where I waste my time). It's so elitist and ridiculous that it's almost funny -- really? You read (likely a very small portion of) a product's source code and use very short-sighted, biased and subjective understanding of the code to determine whether it's a good product? How is that any better or more meaningful than flipping a coin?

I happened to have read the HTML page source of some random Amazon product page and Apple product page a while ago. Wow that seems a horrible unmaintainable mess with lots of waste of bandwidth. But that's just my very uneducated opinion by quickly scanning the code without more context and could be completely wrong. Even that's "true", it doesn't matter -- it does not affect my shopping experience a single bit, and they are both great websites to use in the end.
From the article:

> “Bad things could happen because of either the misuse of AI or because we lose control of it,” says Yoshua Bengio, a deep-learning researcher at the University of Montreal, Canada.

God, I hate phrases like this. We've already lost control of it. We don't have any control. AI will evolve in the rich medium of capitalism and be used by anyone due to its ease of use and even laws will be unable to restrict that. At this point, since we've set up a system that promotes technologies regardless of their long-term cost or dangers, we simply cannot control them. Bad things are already happening and human beings are being integrated into a matrix of technology whose ultimate purposes is just the furthering of technology.

Even people like Dr. Bengio are just pawns in a system, whose purpose is just to present an artificially balanced viewpoint as if there were a reasonable set of pros and cons, designed to make people think that we could "lose control" but with the right thinking, we don't have to let that happen. I mean come on, just suppose for a second the hypothesis of "AI is already out of control". If Dr. Bengio and their colleagues acknowledged that, then they'd be out of a job. So just by evolutionary pressure on "organizations that monitor AI", they have to be artificially balanced.
> First comment of any bitcoin thread on HN is always something like this, generally negative and a bit grumpy.

And not entirely wrong.

Bitcoin is now just a commodity play: it doesn't have to be rational to make money. Humans assign "value" to all sort of arbitrary things:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
Indeed, many people prefer living in the suburbs, but a big reason for this is the hidden subsidies the US provides for suburban development.

When housing units are close together (town-homes, multi-unit buildings) the cost of infrastructure (sewer, water, roads, sidewalks, etc.) are shared by more units, and thus by more taxpayers. If the houses are farther apart, the cost per unit goes up.

So its fine if you want to live in the suburbs, be we should have an honest accounting of the costs so suburban households are paying the full price of their spacious lifestyle.

See this StrongTowns post about this issue:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/7/6/stop-subsidizin...
The large ints thing is because people forget that numerics in Javascript are all officially floating point. The optimisers might often see that they can use real integers for performance, but you can't depend on that so have to assume it isn't happening.

Integer numbers are accurate up to 2^53-1 (and down to -2^53) as the IEEE754 double precision type is used, which is sufficient for a majority of tasks, but obviously not all.

Native BigInt (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...) is widely supported these days (has been since late 2020 IIRC, or early 2023 if you waited for LTS releases without the feature to reach EOL) but is not yet widely used (many don't seem to know it is there, or assume it isn't widely supported, or are concerned about performance). Performance isn't usually bad (about 60% or the basis Number type last time I compared) but there are other issues with JSON or with many libraries only supporting Number not BigInt.
Bitcoin as a digital store of value is fine. It makes sense to store money in something digital and secure to hedge against local instabilities in currencies, governments etc. People store money in it because it currently secure and it been battle tested, nobody has been able to hack it.

However, I am concerned about the security model on a 5-10+ year perspective. Miners secure the blockchain and get paid for it in bitcoins. We have seen that the mining has become more and more sentralized as the mining gets progressively harder (as by design). Progressively harder mining means that the price of bitcoin must rise in pararell to cover the expenses of the miners securing the network.

Here are my concerns:

- Increasingly centralized mining means a higher risk of a 51% attack (controlling 51% means you control the entire network).

- Bitcoin not able to maintain a constant price growth that will lower the incentive to keep mining as the difficulity increases.

- Quantum Computing actually cracking the encryptions which will kill the entire network instantly.

- Instability in the world might lead to spikes in electricity prices, which will affect the incentive to secure the network with mining.

I also think spending so much energy on security, when there are other viable options available is insane in our current age.

Transitioning to a Proof of Stake model like Ethereum instead of a Proof of Work model would be much more robust with a fraction of the power consumption, but thats just my opinion.
I made an API to help you build Human Design apps using NASA JPL's Ephemerides
My bet is that your friend can't really afford a car but is well off enough to try, and instead of taking transit is making a bad budgeting choice. If she ditched the car, fixed her lifestyle so she was using transit or a bicycle or her feet, she would probably be fine. She's just probably signed up for things that are too far apart from each other to do that, and that will be an uncomfortable transition.