Paul Butler writes on programming experiments, data visualization, crypto mining, and technical curiosities, such as hiding data in emoji.
HN commenters link his posts on Bitcoin miners, resume A/B testing, and the emoji data smuggling trick, and the author joins discussions himself.
>wear on mining machines
There is virtually no wear on mining machines from actual use. There is, but it's negligible compared the main cause of depreciation of mining machines: better hardware coming out every 2-4 years AND the reduction in mining reward rate[1]. A bitcoin mining rig is worth essentially 0 after 2 years due to this depreciation. Not failure from wear. This is also true for GPU miners.
Second, there are many better uses for cheap power - one could use it to store energy in a hypothetical future where we use lots of intermittent renewables. You could use it to produce highly energy intensive physical goods - aluminum, hydrogen gas, fertilizer. You could use it for intensive climate engineering with carbon capture.
Almost anything else you can think of would be better than running a proof-of-waste cryptocurrency network.
[1] https://paulbutler.org/2022/the-problem-with-bitcoin-miners/
This is a delightful read, which reminds me of two other articles. The first is also a caricature of the technical interview, solving FizzBuz with Tensorflow: https://joelgrus.com/2016/05/23/fizz-buzz-in-tensorflow/
The second is a explanatory story, or "discovery fiction" as the article classifies itself: https://paulbutler.org/2022/what-does-it-mean-to-listen-on-a-port/
I love these humorous yet pedagogic technical writings, woven with a bit of literary eloquence and down-to-earth narrative. Thank you for this.
My resumes are typically tweaked to be job specific. Do I get to create just one generic apply-to-all copy?
How about tracking metrics other than just views? Following http://paulbutler.org/archives/experiment-in-testing-my-resume/ there are: how far into resume one scrolls, clickthroughs on embedded links, inclusion/exclusion of sections (e.g. grades for recent grads).
You can buy put options or outright short the mining companies. I don't recommend it unless you really know what you're doing and what the risks are, but it's worked out well for me.
I've written about it a couple times.
https://paulbutler.org/2022/the-problem-with-bitcoin-miners/
https://paulbutler.org/2021/betting-against-bitcoin/
Yes, use sys.setrecursionlimit(n) to change the max recursion depth. Max supported stack depth of course varies by platform.
In many cases, a better solution is to implement tail recursion, which can be done quite easily. See http://paulbutler.org/archives/tail-recursion-in-python/ .
Admittedly I’m not very well read on the whole play2earn. However, I think the article posted on hn the other day about it makes a pretty compelling argument that it’s a Ponzi scheme.
Article: https://paulbutler.org/2021/play-to-earn-and-bullshit-jobs/