nmlnn

Also, some people call "aubergines" "eggplants", they can't both be right!

That's just something people repeat over and over again until it seems true. In reality it just provides cover for malicious actors/actions.

It seems like it's going that way though.

I used a MBP as a phd student and postdoc for scientific computing and at the time ~2010-2015 it was fantastic for that, all my peers thought so as well. At conferences/seminars, there would just be a sea of macbooks with a few linux machines scattered around.

That is definitely starting to change - not by choice, more like people are being squeezed out due to the increasingly restrictive nature of the OS.

I recommend learning more about the bitcoin payments space before trying to criticise it.

A bitcoin transaction does not cost $10 (https://mempool.space/graphs#1w). If you are going to add in your (completely made up?) estimate of mining costs to a bitcoin transaction you would need to include the costs of the entire fiat payments and settlement infrastructure to the costs of credit card transactions. From gold mined and stored by central banks all the way through to the energy used by the back offices of commercial banks all over the world.

Someone should teach Google management about the Lindy Effect, and how most people use it as a barometer for whether or not to take something seriously.

Fee rates over the past week: https://mempool.space/graphs#1w

I'm complaining now.

Who's to say they won't add that in future as a new "security feature" - especially now that they are "fixing" this issue by encrypting the calls home. Apple is a master of shifting consumer norms, behaviours and expectations over the long term using this boil the frog slowly approach.

It strains credulity to assume no malicious (i.e. data harvesting) intent. They are requiring millions of devices to phone home every time they open any application, rather than just pushing an update to a locally stored certificate blacklist when necessary.

In fact China and Australia already had a bilateral FTA between them that came into force in 2015. Pieces of paper are meaningless to the CCP.

Yeah, if looked at in the larger context of them booting iOS apps from the app store that don't pay the 30% Apple tax for any in app payment - it's clear where they're going. It's just a boil the frog slowly strategy of making every major OS update more restrictive and trying to placate (with amazing hardware) those who complain.

Personally I drew the line at Catalina, and I think an order of magnitude more will draw the line at Big Sur.

TIL, electronic voting machines are CLOSED SOURCE (hardware and software) - that should be completely unacceptable in an open democracy.

It makes me wonder how a statement like this can be proved.

> There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised

When it comes to something as important as elections the mantra should be: don't trust. verify.

Let me tell you a story about this frog and this scorpion..

Not uncoincidentally this was the year 1984 was published, and Newspeak is the official language of Oceania, so..

> What percent of the working population are video editors? Some tiny fraction, how did that become the default type of professional in the context of talking about computers?

They get outsized influence because they're the ones that make the shiny youtube reviews (using their video editing skills).

So far my smartphone history has been:

HTC Desire (approx. Nexus1) -> Galaxy Nexus -> Nexus 4 -> Nexus 5 -> Nexus 5X -> Pixel 1 -> Pixel 2 -> Pixel 3 -> ?

My favourites where the N4 and P2. The P2 fixed the shitty cameras, and now it looks like finally the P5 will fix the shitty battery life. Can anyone with a P5 comment on how it compares. I'm glad they finally realized the 4 was a mistake. And from the reviews/specs/features the 5 seems perfect - but I'm worried I'm missing something. I don't want to keep changing phones, it just happens because there is always one deal breaker built in.

> Bitcoin simply isn’t that

Agree to disagree. I would say you're the one twisting the definition of "hard currency" (Wikipedia is not the source of all truth).

"Hard money" originally reffered to gold. When paper currency took over the term "hard currency" was used to distinguish between good and bad paper currencies.

I maintain that the "hard" part (which derives from gold) refers to the inability to be inflated easily. But I'm happy to concede that Bitcoin is not a currency yet in most peoples' eyes. I'm happy to switch to calling it a hard money.

The "hard" part of hard currency refers to its monetary properties - i.e. how easy it is to inflate the supply. On this metric Bitcoin is harder than anything else out there. So then we are arguing about whether it's a "currency" or not.

I personally accept is as payment, and therefore consider it a currency. Why would I want to buy things with it today when I can use ever inflating dollars for that?

Sigh.

Speculation about the (unknowable) future is how we allocate all resources in the present. A lot of people on HN seem to lump the "buy because price is rising" speculators in with the "buy because Bitcoin will become the foundation of the financial internet" speculators.

Investors who understand Bitcoin's potential do it an indispensable service. They inform the public (through price information) of that which most of the public is unable or unwilling to figure out on their own: that Bitcoin has tremendous potential to change the world and warrants serious attention, both currently for certain people as a hideable, unconfiscateable, transportable, no-third-party-risk store of wealth and in the future for everyone as a transactional currency (and as the cornerstone of the financial internet).

They went from being worth $350K to $1B. What currency could you possibly convert them to that is harder than that?

0.1st world problems

In 1970 when these AML thresholds were set a dollar was tied to gold at $35/oz. So based on the gold price today it's actually:

$10,000 (1970) = $10,000 x 1880/35 = ~$537,000 (2020)

Exact same boat here. My motivation died around 30 (34 now) once I realized I wasn't going to make any kind of impact on humanity. So now it's harder and harder to answer the question of "what's the point?". Whereas, drinks with friends or walks by the sea never seem to give rise to that question in the first place.

So even though I still like to read about interesting things, once any initial curiosity has been satisfied, I'm out, there is no depth to the learning anymore, and soon enough you forget it all anyway.

This line bugged me also - the definition of wanting your cake and eating it too. How would such products ever get to the volumes required for prices to come down if even people who "care" aren't prepared to buy them.

Still can't understand the logic, the website is open! If the information can get to my eyes and ears I can put a recording device in-between. At the end of the day the video is being played on my computer. The only logical endgame, if stuff like this allowed to stand, leads to general purpose computing being outlawed.

YouTube's design choice is to serve all their content via an open api, which is why youtube-dl works. It's not circumventing anything.

And people could use human brains to store that information. We need read/write access to your mind just to be safe!

My point is that money is fungible. It's weird to me to see this complete disconnect between science funding and the trillions being created and pumped into the financial system. She/we are treating science funding as zero sum, yet completely ignoring the trillions being wasted (relative to spending on fundamental research) by central banks.

It would cost at least 3 times as much to get the same amount of talent working on something like that. Projects like the LHC are able to massively leverage the money spent just because smart people are happy to work on exciting/deep problems for much less.