glenvdb

The anti-Bitcoin sentiment on HN is frankly baffling to me.

It's one of the most exciting things happening in tech right now, and HN is at best ambivalent and at worst openly hostile to Bitcoin.

Why wouldn't the tech crowd be excited about digital native money which is perfect for the Internet?

Look at what's happening around the ecosystem with the Lightning Network, Impervious.AI, RGB etc.

https://rgb-org.github.io/ https://www.impervious.ai/

No, that's all bullshit.

The purpose of blockchain is decentralised consensus for the Bitcoin protocol. It has fulfilled that function very well for the last ~12 years.

There MAY be other legitimate use cases, but the majority of them right now are varying degrees of money grabbing scams or cargo-cults.

A lot of the "Common Objections" relate to the REASONS people choose to own Bitcoin and how those cases make it a Ponzi.

There are many different reasons to own Bitcoin, however the author seems to only view it through the lens of someone living in a wealthy and developed country with financial stability.

The properties of it being difficult/impossible to confiscate and its privacy make it valuable in oppressive regimes. A refugee could store their wealth in Bitcoin, leave their country, settle somewhere else, and access their Bitcoin without the risk of it being confiscated during the journey, because they can simply memorise the seed phrase (24 words).

It's predictable issuance schedule also makes it valuable in countries suffering from high inflation or hyper-inflation.

This is a good article to rethink the use cases of Bitcoin: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/check-your-financial-pri...

Alex Gladstein works for the Human Rights Foundation and does lots of good work in Bitcoin advocacy. His other articles are worth checking out.

And the data backs this up. Some of the biggest growth in Bitcoin users around the world have been in places around Africa and Vietnam who are subject to some of the situations mentioned above.

Do you think these people see Bitcoin as a "Ponzi"? Do you think they care if such a definition doesn't change the properties they find useful/valuable?

Anyone had experience using it as a gaming laptop?

Maybe with an external GPU?

Lots of interesting work happening in the Bitcoin/Lightning space at the moment.

1st Place https://theworldcomputer.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DE9pbusewNg&feature=youtu.be

> It is baffling how lawmakers who have so little understanding of the technology write these things into law.

And this happens constantly, on all types of things, not just technology.

I think there are some around?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_mobile_pho...

Inferior results to what exactly? Interested to know about alternatives you've used

It seems the point of theology is to make answering anything trivial. Whether those answers are useful or not is another matter.

Is this sarcasm? It's difficult to tell sometimes...

But one good reason for having discussions with people you disagree with is that you get to see things from a different perspective and maybe learn something too.

Depends what you're disagreeing about and whether all parties want to have a discussion in good faith, which seems to be in shorter supply these days.

Otherwise we just stay in our bubbles and enjoy the echo?

This reminds me of the "review bombing" debacles that have plagued Steam over recent years. Valve implemented a system to detect these patterns and discard the ratings. Valve had no particular stake in the games being "bombed", but they do have a stake in the trust people have in their platform. People want to know if a game is truly good or bad and not have to wonder if it was the victim of some kind of vendetta.

At the time no one strongly protested the move by Valve, but in the context of this situation with Google, Robinhood, and WSB it seems to have hit a particular nerve.

I think the long history of events like these, particularly the more recent publicised ones, are going to push lots of communities, and by extension the Internet, to decentralisation.

That's good and bad because communities can't be shut down when they shouldn't, and can't be shut down when they should.

I've always thought that a practical use of mega-structures like Niven's Ringworld (or Halo from the video games), besides colonisation, would be to reach higher energy levels in particle physics, like with the LHC. To reach higher energy levels they need a larger circumference... so if you follow that research to extremes... maybe our descendants in the far future will live on what's essentially a massive science experiment.

I've always thought that if you find yourself loyal to any given political party, that's an indication that there's might be a problem and you should reflect on why you feel that sense of loyalty.

Political parties should have to earn your vote every election rather than relying on a "force of habit".

I love this kind of stuff, but it feels like shooting fish in a barrel when the examples used are inherently visual. Lots of programming deals with abstract "things" that don't naturally lend themselves to being visualised, and it's there that some of the the more difficult challenges of programming exist (perhaps because they're difficult to visualise in the first place).

I'd like to see Bret's brilliance tackle visualising those types of examples.

Maybe most of it simply can't be visualised, but I feel like there's a lot of unrealised potential in that space.

No studies or articles to reference, just what I've heard from talking to people is that workers want to feel like they have impact. You have to get all the other things like pay and conditions correct too, but that should be a given. Once those are in place, giving people the sense that they're having meaningful impact will keep them around.

Not CS specific, but generally speaking, in college you should feel dumb. If you don't, you're not pushing the limits of your knowledge and skills. If you find yourself breezing through all the classes, speak to the teachers/professors about things you're interested in to find something that might challenge you. They might have a project you could work on.

Do it without coming off as being arrogant though.

And it will probably help if you've already aced a couple of courses before you approach them.

My favourite part is his own disbelief as he ... spoiler ... continues to solve it.

A few minutes later... when the first three on the board causes a cascade of solvable cells after a build up of deduction. Amazing.

So... UE5 is Malibu Stacy with a new hat?

I took part in this a year or two ago. Didn't go further than the first heat, but it was a great learning experience in how to condense a message into its vital parts and present highly specialised knowledge for a general audience. Would recommend everyone to take part in this if you're doing a PhD.

I think the ramp will be much longer and gradual than people expect though.

Good. A home is not a school.

That's not to say you can't do lots of learning at home, but the way that learning takes place will (and should) be completely different from how it is done at school.

I'm on Firefox too. Not seeing what you're seeing. The font height is consistent for me.

This is weird combo of "movie hacking" and "real hacking".

Well played.

>My chest feels tight, and I have coughing spells. If I were at home with similar symptoms, I probably would have gone to work as usual.

This makes me legitimately angry. If you are sick, please stay home, I don't care if you feel "well enough to work". Keep your viruses away from me and everyone else you work with. You're not getting any brownie points for "being a trooper", everyone is just going to be annoyed at you for getting them sick.

In a time when dinosaurs and birds both co-existed how do they tell the difference between dinosaur feathers and bird feathers? What are the features of feathers between these species that differentiate them?

I think the lofty and idealistic "end goal" for cryptocurrencies is to be fiat independent, so you don't need any fiat on/off ramps and you will be able to use it for everyday purchases.

Whether that will realistically happen or not I have no idea, but that's the promised land held onto for true believers.

Let them eat cake.

One of the best working periods of my life was when I was studying part time and working full time.

I'd take one day a week to attend lectures/practicals, go to my day job the rest of the week, and study at home nights and weekends.

I didn't have much free time, but that one day a week at university broke up the work week and made me more productive in both activities.

Now that I've had a taste of it, I want to recreate it for the rest of my working life.