Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SETI@home is in hibernation

setiathome.berkeley.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 358 posts

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#301

Post by fho »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #213
fho wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin was "old internet" tech at some point. Just for reference, I bought my first BTC at 0.20 €/BTC. Back then it looked like the future to a lot of us ... "hey! We/Hackers can make our own money. And it is superior to state issued money!" ... looking back, it honestly it is somewhat to see the state of cryptocurrencies today.

Once the original Bitcoin OG cypherpunks shifted from “here is an amazing new technology that could do entirely new things” to tweeting about the USD price of Bitcoin, I knew that era was over. I think it was done by ~2015. The Ethereum research community is still doing very neat cutting-edge things, but they’re a younger generation and didn’t claim to believe in the same principles (only to later disappoint us all.)

Yep ... I just looked it up, I bought my first BTC in 2010/11 ... Back when they were just handing out 0.01 BTC to mess around.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#303

Post by dools »

latchkey wrote: post #275
dools wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fucking hell crypto is such a colossal waste of resources

In comparison to everything else, it is tiny. All of banking could be significantly automated to the point that we don't need to build physical buildings all over the planet and stuff them full of humans who drive their cars to work every day to take your money and write it down on a ledger. Talk about absurd. Remember also, this equipment is being turned off because ethereum has grown to be more efficient. It is now…

The financial system has put a lot of effort into automation obliviously because it means they make more money. So to the extent that they could be automated, they are automated and will continue to increase the level of automation.

It’s also not a reasonable comparison because banks do something useful (even if I think they could be much better regulated and are too profitable and shouldn’t be running the payment system).

Crypto does nothing useful, it’s like an online casino, or an online game.

Do you know any online games that consume anywhere near as much hardware and electricity?

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#304

Post by andirk »

RobotToaster wrote: post #156
fho wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin was "old internet" tech at some point. Just for reference, I bought my first BTC at 0.20 €/BTC. Back then it looked like the future to a lot of us ... "hey! We/Hackers can make our own money. And it is superior to state issued money!" ... looking back, it honestly it is somewhat to see the state of cryptocurrencies today.

I thought it was a dumb idea at the time, that nobody would be stupid enough to invest in. I still think it's a dumb idea, but I've learnt not to underestimate human stupidity.

If you bought $10 USD of it "at the time", you'd have a giant pile of USD. Who is stupid in that lack of purchase?

Point is a lot of things are stupid and turn out to work really well. USD is backed by a computer at the Federal Reserve. Sounds pretty stupid but it works.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#305

Post by LoganDark »

yafbum wrote: post #265
LoganDark wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nor I want to buy a crappy $300 laptop that always feels slow and underpowered. Meanwhile, the expensive laptops with actual desktop-class components have unacceptably shitty peripherals, so you can't even pay more money for what you want; it simply doesn't exist. This is what upsets me the most about laptops.

What do you mean by shitty peripherals?

Low-DPI screens, bad webcams, keyboards with the wrong arrows/numpad layout, off-center trackpads etc. it's different for each person what they consider "shitty", but laptops are always a total package deal (except for Framework) and it can just so happen that nobody makes powerful laptops that also have the exact right permutation of peripherals.

You can find all sorts of beautiful 4K ultrabooks with the perfect keyboard and trackpad layout, and great webcams too—if you don't mind putting up with a Celeron and 4GB of RAM... If you want a really modern and powerful CPU with lots of RAM, you'll be looking at the likes of Clevo and AORUS and etc. that put desktop-class parts in a thick chassis, but... that bodes terribly for the peripherals they end up using.

Some of the Clevo machines have individual gimmicks like 300Hz displays, but none of them seem to have all of "high DPI, good keyboard layout, good port arrangement, high performance". And this is true for basically all laptop vendors.

OEMs think good peripherals always equate to "thin and light" which results in bad performance, either through bad parts or bad thermals. Maybe Frore Systems' new cooling solution will help slightly with ultrabook thermals, but until that happens, laptops are just suck.

You may notice that this only matters because I even care. You may also notice that this is exactly what building a desktop is for. I am building a desktop, but I also have to build a laptop from scratch for the desktop so I can operate it from bed. Which would have been avoidable if I could've found a laptop in the first place.

The point anyway isn't to say that there aren't any good laptops out there, but rather that if you want high performance (e.g. you are bothered by slowness), you can only get it as a package deal with the rest of the laptop... obviously. But the package deals all suck. The laptop market is so annoying sometimes.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#307

Post by LoganDark »

throw6969away wrote: post #298
LoganDark wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nor I want to buy a crappy $300 laptop that always feels slow and underpowered. Meanwhile, the expensive laptops with actual desktop-class components have unacceptably shitty peripherals, so you can't even pay more money for what you want; it simply doesn't exist. This is what upsets me the most about laptops.

> what you want; it simply doesn't exist. Once the patents on Apple's trackpad expire, then we'll see.

I love Force Touch trackpads more than anything. I specifically got an Apple trackpad to use with my desktop because it's so much better than anything else out there.

But having a good trackpad doesn't make up for other blunders like an annoying keyboard layout, a low-DPI screen, or etc., and you bet nobody who makes the thick and heavy high-performance machines is going to care about a good trackpad anyway.

You don't really see OEMs that put top-of-the-line hardware inside a thick and sturdy chassis, and then... add a nice 4K screen and a numpad-less keyboard and put the charging/USB ports on the left instead of the back.

The list of possible blunders is so long that you'd be hard-pressed to find a machine that hasn't been subject to most of them. That's just not how laptops work. Laptops are a package deal, all or nothing. You can't ensure every requirement individually like you can with a desktop.

And the reason I don't like the market is because nobody makes a really good one.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#308

Post by sph »

yafbum wrote: post #266
sph wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a great desktop, and every day I curse Apple and Tim Cook because I cannot get an iPad Pro that runs full macOS. That would be the ideal device for me when I'm on the go, that I can still use to watch Youtube videos in the bathroom. I do not need a full laptop when I work at home with a $5,000 desktop PC, nor I want to buy a crappy $300 laptop that always feels slow and underpowered. It is really sad to have t…

On the other hand, there's a lot of great tech (including, I think, the iPad pro and Apple silicon) that just wouldn't exist if the bean counters hadn't said yes, it's a good idea to invest a few billions of dollars into this...

Uhm, allocating money to a budget doesn't create great products anymore than wishing very hard for something before blowing the birthday candles.

It's the engineers that actually create the cool things.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#309

Post by pfdietz »

dTal wrote: post #256
pfdietz wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was less than 100 deaths from chernobyl There may well be tens of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl. No, we can't state that these deaths absolutely occurred/will occur -- they are spread throughout large populations, mixed into the vast number of naturally occurring cancers -- but technology regulation is not like criminal prosecution where things must be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Technologies are not…

> Technologies are not innocent until proven guilty That depends entirely on the technology, and who is paying who. Fossil fuels have been proven guilty of numerous sins time and again and are still relentlessly defended as innocent. Leaded fuel in particular enjoyed an undeserved benefit of the doubt. Food additives are another category of chemical with very permissive regulation, provided they don't cause lab rats…

That's nice, but it's no justification for that earlier poster lying about the number of people killed by Chernobyl. There's very good reason to think the number is much larger than 100.

Fossil fuels being bad is an argument for getting off fossil fuels, not an argument for nuclear in particular.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#310

Post by yieldcrv »

IshKebab wrote: post #190
ifni wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everything is connected to the grid, you know. Here's an example of a single hydro dam a LONG way from the grid which (pre-Cryptocurrency gold rush) had 12 MW of unused power generation capacity plus they were talking up the possibility of adding an additional 20 MW of generation. https://www.hydroreview.com/business-finance/boralex-acquire... It's not going to be the only one.

Almost everything is connected to the grid. And even if it isn't... Even if it is an isolated hydro plant only connected to a data centre, other useful digital services could have run there instead. There's really no getting away from the fact that cryptocurrencies waste huge amounts of energy, significantly contributing to climate change just to move money from idiots to arseholes. Not just energy too - think how ma…

> other useful digital services could have run there instead.

that's not really true. unless you have a specific example.

there are gigawatt hours of energy already being expelled and wasted with no purpose, and this has continued for decades now.

other "useful digital services" typically need high bandwidth internet infrastructure, or all energy use gains are lost by the physical movement of the data they are processing. in the middle of nowhere where these energy sources are, this becomes more obvious. crypto mining did not need good internet infrastructure, it is low bandwidth and can operate in fairly high latency (ie. in ethereum, valid blocks are found at a target of every 15 seconds, which means you have on average 15,000ms for the majority of the network to accept your block. satellite is okay enough for that).

but ultimately this isn't to change your mind with new information, here is where we are, if you really think you have a solution that nobody else noticed, then you should thank cryptocurrency for pointing it out to you (or pissing you off enough) because you're going to save us all with your amazing observations about wasted energy being expelled for decades.

otherwise, there were some large scale crypto operations that was not removing energy from any other purpose, were not polluting in the process when using clean energy, were reducing pollution when repurposing flared energy, and simply expanded a market for energy.

Post reply on HN