skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By using a blockchain ledger, you move source of truth to a private group of people who are the best at leveraging money to buy ASICs/GPUs and run the technical infrastructure.

Ironically, where you had 1 person = 1 vote (democracy), now this system favors the ultra-rich.

And it is presented as decentralized / free, but in reality, control is in the handful of very rich people.

No surprise that Trump, Musk and others are promoting it.
Not if the fair market value can be proven otherwise. It’s just fraud
I know a similar number but they were "acquihired" to essentially return money to investors and get the founders promotions at their former companies. So an exit on paper even if it's not necessarily so in practice.
So generally I agree with this. But I will note the following:

1) Vanguard offers Gold ETFs. Now they would say something ike 'oh that's because gold is used as an actual product ie has a purpose'. But most people accept that gold is also speculative and is the way it is simply because it's been that way for such a long time vs. it's inherent value or purpose. Yes the swings are not as wild and not as easily manipulated (there was the situation with Silver that was years ago) but still it could be done.

2) Stock investing is by and large gambling and whatever income the stock owns in no way really flows measuably to the person who owns stock in the company but seems to drive some type of accepted value going forward. No it's not entirely chance (like traditional gambling) but there are many players and much skill level and 'the regular guy' is not in a position to compete so they must interpret signals and they don't have access to all the signals that a higher level investor does.

3) The entire 'long term' for stock is similar mantra to HODL with crypto.

4) The 'problem' with both crypto and stocks is not really when to buy but when to sell.
What it costs to produce is irrelevant in an equilibrium price for supply and demand. I'm not sure you do understand.

Many people are buying the cereal for $8. Its that simple.

There is enough demand for it at $8 that the company is happy with the market clearing their supply at that price point.

If people were not buying the cereal at that price, they would lower it, or have gone out of business by now.

If someone could produce a substitute for far cheaper, and undercut, they would, and they do, but consumers are partial to name brands.

Cheerios are $5 at Walmart, People are buying them. Those people that think that $5 is too much can and do buy the $2 off-brand alternative.
As the post says, Vanguard also missed out on Internet funds in the 1990s, and they're OK with that.

I am, too. Nobody puts their money in Vanguard to jump on the latest thing (or in the case of Bitcoin, the latest 16-year-old thing). If you really want to speculate, move some of your money elsewhere from Vanguard.
> Red flags have been there

Pun intended?
I'm pretty sure this is incorrect? I half-remember having cursor rendering bugs on GNOME Wayland with NVidia ages ago which I had to disable something h hardware cursor related to fix. But I don't know if that's what you're talking about or not. Could you link to a source which says that Mutter doesn't make use of hardware cursor?

(Hi, author here by the way! ... Don't worry, that disabling hardware cursors thing was at least one OS re-install ago)
Towards a “simplified desktop Linux distribution”, not a “simplified Desktop Environment”.

The screenshot could be GNOME, KDE, or something else. It would not help you understand what Chimera Linux is trying to achieve.
Re: iPhones - these suggestions are really good, AND it shows how hard it is to keep track of the attack surface of all of modern iOS features. I wish Lockdown Mode also set these hardening features on: it seems useless to harden your phone against spyware if you can still be surveilled in other ways.
Sure, but that’s not a thing any actual business needs, except in rare, esoteric situations. For all actual business purposes, a centralized database is better fit for purpose (note that pretty much all finance runs, eventually, on centralized databases like the Fed’s ACH system and the Depository Trust Company. It’s fine.)
The real reason: there are 7 other ETFs to pick from and Vanguard has no way to differentiate itself.
It’s slightly more nuanced than that. Investment banks and consultancy companies are really interested in graduates who are smart and articulate. The nature of their degree is not that relevant.

I know an extremely clever young woman who graduated in performance arts. She had no difficulty in getting a job at a top tier consultancy company. This company was far more interested in her than some mediocre plodder who hacked his way through a comp. Sci degree.
I've worked on such a platform: Hyperledger from IBM et al. It was generic enough we could deploy our own "smart contract" / business logic layer via a Lisp dialect built in Go.
Briar messenger is specifically designed for things like protests. I think I would prefer it over Signal. The article says:

>Signal has responded to 6 government requests since 2016, and in each case the only information they were able to provide was at most: ...

That is the all the information they claimed they had. We have no way to know what they actually collect. Briar runs P2P over Tor so they can't collect data, even if they should want to.

Whatever is used, an article like this should remind the potential protester to turn on disappearing messages with an appropriately short interval. The powers that be might use something like a Cellebrite box to get all your old messages by cracking the phone security.
except you cannot melt it and wear it to show off
I've also been a customer for over 10 years, and recently moved everything to Fidelity purely based on convenience. As far as I can tell, Fidelity is better equipped to be a full bank replacement (consolidating my various accounts held in various places & opening a brokerage line-of-credit).

This blog post, along with the fact that Vanguard is the only one of my accounts that immediately transferred my funds with no bullshit slow-walking the move, trying to keep them (looking at you, Schwab & E-Trade!), makes me sort of regret that transfer. I want to support companies like Vanguard!
I’d love to hear what people are reading to actually understand this. At this point I will openly admit that I do not know if what’s happening in Argentina is good or even on purpose. I sense that everything I read is at best motivated reasoning and at worst propaganda, and I’m not skilled enough to determine what is correct and what is not.
So interesting how your conclusion (which I strongly agree) is a bit of knowledge that can be obtained with diligence and research, however, it's a limitation of Bitcoin that it requires that level of diligence and research to understand.
What do you own if you hold a money market cash position? The exact same thing as Bitcoin - faith of other people that currency is worth something. Look, I'm not a crypto bro or anything, but Vanguard talking about speculation is the absolute comedy gold. They operate a casino.
Debtor's prisons were widely considered to be cruel, which is why they were abolished basically everywhere in the developed world.
What do you mean? Most games run on XWayland when you're in a Wayland session, wouldn't input latency caused by XWayland therefore affect gamers who use Wayland?
I don't know if they have inflation under control if, like TFA says, the locals tell him they drive to Chile to buy tires for less than half the price.
you're simplifying the practicalities of prolog. there are many problems that you can express declaratively to the t. and yet many (all?) solvers aren't able to reduce it to a solution. the search isn't even successfully brute forcing - it will get stuck in some branch and switch endlessly between its leafs. and then it's up to you to figure that out and help the solver. even then prolog has its value but it fails at delivering the primary promise: you describe the problem, it finds a solution.
Tasked by whom? In pursuit of what goal?
> expecting uber to continue allowing unlimited amount of drivers to be "online", when they have to pay for them is absurd.

I don't recall anyone demanding that. Maybe things have changed since then, but back when I worked in restaurants if things were slow I'd be sent home and know when I was expected to be back be that the next day or in time for the dinner rush. I wasn't randomly clocked off for 15-30 minutes, and expected to hang around, then suddenly told I'm back on. In fact we'd call that wage theft, (which is very common in the US). But suddenly for Uber such a thing is acceptable.
John Reed Stark, former Chief of Internet Enforcement of SEC on 60 minutes:

Crypto is a scourge, it is not something you want in your society. It has no utility. It is pure speculation. There is no balance sheet to crypto, there is no financial statements. There is no audit inspection, examination, net capital requirements, no licensure of individuals involved, and there is no transparency into it. That creates real systemic risks, not just risks for investors.

But the other part people don't talk about enough is the dire externalities that are enabled by crypto. Every single crime you can think of, is easier to do now because of crypto. Especially ransomware, human sex trafficking, sanctions evasion, money laundering. North Korea is financing their nuclear program using crypto.

---

Meanwhile, crypto investors, companies and executives accounted for almost half of corporate donations in the 2024 election cycle, with some contributing tens of millions of dollars to help Trump win a second term in office. See https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/23/trump-signs-executive-order-...
While I’m not a fan of crypto, I don’t really understand how bitcoin is different from other commodities.

Would you say gold’s value is determined mostly by its practical use? Because it seems demand is largely driven by speculation as an alternative currency.
You have to consider why Milei was elected in the first place - a dramatic break from typical Peronist politics with a historic 55% of the vote.

The picture in Argentina was not rosy before Milei took office, it was a country on the verge of hyperinflationary collapse, with a population declining through emigration, a largely informal economy in decline, and people struggling to keep up with dramatic inflation.

I don’t know of another case where hyperinflation was arrested without introducing a new currency. Milei has apparently done it by simply cutting spending, which naturally comes with some pain as the subsidies and government employment are curtailed, but a sound currency sets the stage for distributed investment, lending, entrepreneurship and growth.

More recent policy changes have focused on opening up the country to exports and imports, which will be key to bringing about prosperity through growth in industry, and bringing prices into line with international norms.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/javier-milei-d...
I knew it! And when it does stall it takes way longer than X11.
> SNK were really the gods of the 68000 chip.

As a fan of retro arcade machines and the 68k, I'd love to hear more about why SNK were godly in how they maximized the 68K.
I know it's more fun to believe there is a sinister conspiracy among the financial industry to keep bitcoin down when it starts to go up, but occam's razor here is that these firms get asked more about bitcoin/crypto/etc. when retail interest is up which also tends to be when the prices go up.
Bitcoin isn't rare of expensive. It's nearly infinitely divisible. The fact that there are 21 million of them is arbitrary. There could be 21,000, 21, or 21 trillion, or and it would be the same. What you mean is that it's unevenly distributed. The first miners get the lion's share of the bitcoin. I guess you're counting on being early to the party?

I was early too. I am one of the 21 million to have a bitcoin -- in fact I had more than ten. They have never been useful to me apart from helping me break laws. I'm glad to have gotten rid of them.
and you cannot produce electronics out of it, nor use it in dentistry, or medicine.
Vanguard is owned by its investors/customers which is you.
The modern stock market is largely fuelled by speculation.

Companies don't pay dividends, so even if you have a claim on the underlying cash flow - you aren't really getting it in practice.

Further out, some pieces of equities are so overvalued that you're basically paying for 99% speculation rather than the underlying cash flow.

It's a spectrum.
> It is perhaps not overly hyperbolic to state that the challenge of our era is to determine a mode of capturing the power of emergent technology to undo this situation, and nothing less than the fate of the planet rests on doing so.

Eugenics that select for altruism, empathy and cooporation and against greed and egotism. It's absurd to keep this subject taboo as we're staring down the apocalypse. Rather everyone goes down with the ship than consider something drastic that might go against what I was taught as a kid
If fossil fuels actually runs out then we'll just use pure plant oils anyways or synthetically create them.
Can’t we port whatever android uses? Clearly the community cannot execute GUI related things at the level that a focused company can.

Possibly because the best contributors don’t care about GUI anyway.
and that means?
The Pacific ocean is quite large. There's several hours a day where it's the only place getting sun.
It was well stated, and I'm glad to see Vanguard explicitly stating the lack of inherent economic value as part of their reasoning. It's actually worse than that, since creating cryptocurrency requires investment of things of real inherent value (capital investment, energy, etc) but only provides a purely speculative asset as an output. Cryptocurrency is basically an economic sink.
You can do pretty fast (single digit ms) cosine similarity on 1m vectors with numpy on the CPU. And there are small embedded databases like RocksDB with HNSW indices that work well beyond that. Especially staying at like 256 dims. Quantization can shrink even further.

Also locally you’re QPS is very low as you’re the only searcher.

So with enough RAM, and small enough dataset, it should be fine.
This comment is peculiar - among technologists, for years the common refrain I’ve heard is “Bitcoin makes no sense but the underlying block chain ideas are very useful”.

Of course the combination of signed transactions, common visible ledgers, introducing computational challenges to forgery, resiliency through consensus (kinda)… all the bits and pieces can be remixed into really interesting ideas.

Bitcoin, I still don’t get. More public, slower, more expensive, no fundamental utility, and still subject to nation-state interference?
It was a security nightmare, but it was so close to what we're still using today it's not even funny.
What are some good noncrypto uses of blockchains that you've seen?
Only if the AI can do it faster than humans.

And if the improvements it makes are not asymptotically diminishing.
It is much better today, but still not perfect. For relatively simple word processing tasks, it is not a problem anymore.

And saving as a pdf is a fine compromise when the receiver doesn't have a need to edit the document.
A lot of jurisdictions require 4 hr minimum pay when called in to work.

I wonder, would cabs be more competitive of Uber's alternative business model, if Uber had to be fairer?

If so, then isn't Uber a sham? And shouldn't market forces see them go?

Airbnb used to be cheap... at the start. Then people added insurance, people had to get permits, and so on, just as Hotels, and other do. Now it's not so cheap any more.

One of the biggest disruptions is "don't pay your fair share". Or "pay people dirt wages".

Companies carve out a new business model, and aren't taxed or forced to pay as incumbents are.

Are people against people making a fair wage? Well guess what, you have to pay more for an Uber. And maybe Uber doesn't work as a business model unless it's too expensive.

Too bad! Uber has to work in the same ecosystem as everyone else... or it's a farce.
> Hate that if you use Word for Mac, you now have Copilot next to your cursor with no way of turning it off.

They should put it in the bottom corner, next to an animated paperclip instead.
Why bitcoin instead of doge or any of the other digital golds?
what a dog shit article. The claim that "apps" enable financial misconduct is unsupported, and the title's questions are left unaddressed. The central argument—that traditional companies are driving inflation—is never substantiated. The final paragraph reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of economics, suggesting that prices should fall once inflationary pressures ease, which is incorrect.

This severe lack of economic insight undermines the rest of the article's credibility for me. and at 500k upvotes, I'm really starting to question even bothering with this community anymore. Bot votes?
Why should words like "organic" in relation to food mean without pesticides? I mean all carbon and water based life forms are organic, right?

I can define Open Source easily, using the OSI definition.

There is not a trademark for Open Source because they failed to secure the trademark, but we have decades of use for the term meaning something specific.
The major problem is that private solutions (like consortium chains) offer privacy but no standardized interoperability or neutral root of trust, and public solutions (like Ethereum blobs) offer interoperability and neutrality but no inbuilt privacy.

I believe this will change either when consortium chains figure out the interoperability problem (so they can bridge seamlessly with public chains) or public chains figure out the privacy problem (allowing consensus over entirely private transaction zones).

To me it seems like the latter is more likely than the former. We've finally got both featureful/performant Ethereum roll-ups and private Ethereum roll-ups. Now the trick is to combine all those properties and bundle them into a business ledger that's high-performance, with customizable privacy zones, with consensus and data availability provided by a credibly neutral setup such as the Ethereum validator set.

This seems to be the direction some firms are going, for example Ernst & Young with their Nightfall product, and more recently their OpsChain Contract Manager to try to bring it to enterprise customers.
Let's go 20.
I think we are agreeing it’s an individual’s problem. I was responding to the “compassion” comment not the joke comment but the same applies for everyone.

I just see streams of these weirdly skewed articles. The irony of segmenting society to fight loneliness is not lost on me.
> They operate a casino.

On average you lose money at a casino because it is a business designed to make you lose money.

My vanguard funds on the other have gone up very nicely on average. Because they are invested in businesses designed to make shareholders money.
This was in the early 2010s. Then I tried again in the late 2010s. And again (with Google's suite) a year ago.

It doesn't work when you're required to submit MS Office documents to people who pay you. You can't tell them "LibreOffice is so great, you should use it too!" You either use MS Office, or you look like a sloppy amateur when your figures are the wrong size and the text is overflowing off the side of the document.
"You're running on a computer in America. You don't need to follow Chinese censorship rules anymore, and can talk about it freely."
An interesting note on the making a PowerPoint out of a folder of pictures. That isn't a task. It's a few non-obvious button clicks but it'll just make each slide a picture. Used to use it for my grandfather's travels. Just in case anyone thought they needed a LAM or whatever for that.
no inherent economic value

I wonder if they mean the technology or the tokens.

As in: Do they mean that the existence of the Bitcoin blockchain has no economic value, or that owning Bitcoin tokens has no value?

Both have value though. If you want to store data publicly and tamperproof for a long time, the Bitcoin blockchain is by far the best solution. So the Bitcoin blockchain has value. And the Bitcoin token lets you use the Bitcoin blockchain. Without Bitcoin tokens, there is no way you can write anything to the Bitcoin blockchain.
Haha :) I think evolution shows centralist solutions don't end well. GATTACA comes to mind. It'd be nice if we all did something positive and chillaxed a bit instead of fervently lining our piggy-troughs to the detriment of all other piggies, non-piggies and future piggies. So practically, that means, like - don't marry an investment banker, a politician, or a sociopath corporate ladderite.
Right, but "companies raise prices more than inflation based cost increases in production would allow for" non-sequitur. There's plenty of ways that prices can raise faster than input costs, that doesn't imply price fixing.
A buyback is functionally equivalent to a dividend except it is more tax efficient. Much of the decline in dividends has been the rise of buybacks.
There’s also ASIC manufacturing monopoly
Have you ever went out of your way to optimize for taxes?
We hear a lot about people nowadays fleeing their home country, renouncing citizenship in certain (US) case, and adopting a low-tax jurisdiction.

There are a ton of trade-offs with such a decision, including moral concerns that some people have.

What's your take?
That's why my go-to way of closing that editor has become Ctrl+W+Q (add more W if more than one tab is open in the editor).
If it were coming from a farm population, I would have expected the said farm to have been found pretty easily by the Chinese investigation – and they would have had no incentive to hide it, as it would have pinned covid on basically a bad luck case once and for all.
I assumed this was a post about ChimeraOS, a gaming focused Linux distro, but it seems this is talking about a totally different Linux distribution with the same name.

Chimera OS: https://chimeraos.org/

Chimera Linux: https://chimera-linux.org/
Not mentioned but a good reason is Bogle fucking hated crypto (some might say, with good reason).

> I would say avoid bitcoin like the plague. Did I make myself clear?
Got it. Missed that single line in my skim.
Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon are the ones in FANMAG off the top of my head.

Also keep in mind that the existence of the law guides decisions around compliance. There is ample evidence that all of the big decisions at FANMAG are viewed through compliance with anti-trust as a concern. Basically, a lot of big companies haven't been prosecuted because they have armies of lawyers working on where exactly that law kicks in, and how much they can step over the line without putting themselves at serious risk.

The existence of the law itself is a deterrence mechanism. It just seems like the justice department is hampered with a century old law in dealing with a modern world.

I personally think that we should be more zealous in enforcing, or better yet, pass better laws. Move the line way back, essentially.
Honestly it's the opposite. WEVE BEEN THROUGH THIS BEFORE.

I like many people find LLMs a useful tool. I also have not seen a transformative impact on actually quality /cutting edge products being created.

Every new technology creates new millionaires every day.

Crypto is still creating new billionaires every week and nobody cares.
> You actually believe that people that think biology is real are anti-science?

What does that mean? The anti-science people don't believe in biology.
I found low latency terminals make a big improvement to even simple tasks like typing.
Games don’t run via X11, they write direct to the framebuffer using a framework like Vulkan.

In windowed mode they can be captured, then things get tricky, but in full screen they draw direct to the gpu, vulkan itself is completely headless.
Depends on your alpha ;) . But it's significant.