an immutable black hole might as well be a shredder. the OP in the reddit did precisely that. that money is GONE. locked away forever. it has not been transferred to anyone else.

Indeed, an "immutable black hole" could be described as a shredder, agree. But that's not what that address is. The semi-official "black hole" address for Ethereum is 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 (https://etherscan.io/address/0x00000000000000000000000000000...), currently has $29,461,295.02 worth of ETH in it. Any other (valid) address is just another address on the network.

"It's not a black hole, because black holes are collapsed stars, which is clearly not what we're talking about."

This is basically the style of argumentation being used here. Frequent equivocation over the terms "valid" and "black hole" to avoid addressing anyone's actual point.

Why do you see a difference between colloquial usage of ‘black hole’ and ‘valid address from which tokens cannot be retrieved’?

Call me weird, but I'll take callbacks any day over async await.

If it goes too many levels deep, we have to ask what we are trying to achieve and perhaps consider a better approach (a specialized state machine? threads?)

tangent: why is the basis of most async functionality a form of polling underneath?

Why are interrupts not used? or are they?

source: epoll, select(bsd at least), isn't kqueue also like a multiplexed epoll?

interrupt-like things are used to schedule the next poll of the function. Polling doesn't happen randomly or within certain time intervals, but when an external event (via a Waker interface) tells the runtime to schedule the function again for polling.

And the US was already having issues in terms of STEM competitiveness...

I believe the term is "decline" or "decadence"...

I do not approve of publicly funding parochial religious schools, for example. This is a bad road to take. The would-be-theocrats don't even comprehend the damage their wish's fulfillment would bring.

I had the misfortune of attending such a "school" once and found it full of fake curriculi and it set me back a year at a crucial time. It was a total joke. I attended approximately 8 different public schools prior to that and after that, including some rather lousy ones, and all were superior to these weirdo cult luckily didn't have to spend much time in.

Public funding? public standards.

and here i thought this was about undocumented behavior in a programming language... https://crystal-lang.org/

There's also a cult classic movie called Dark Crystal: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083791/

I actually wouldn't be surprised if this project was named after that movie as their project logo looks similar to the crystal in that movie (but that could just be coincidental).

There's a pretty good Netflix Dark Crystal show too. Also made by the Henson company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Crystal:_Age_of_Resis...

Unfortunately it was cancelled after one season.

That's what I was hoping for: HN's treatment of Hensons' masterpiece. Pity.

I have issue with the massive cost in other peoples lives you seem to be ok throwing away with such pronouncements.

We have to FIX our system, not make it worse. The reality of trying to force our entire civilization to commit mass suicide is a slow horrible intensification of all that is wrong with the world.

Please do your part to spread the word to your fellow nihilists. (by definition, not my opinion nor an insult)

energy usage is RISING with increased difficulty of proof-of-work, as intended.

except that bitcoin doesn't replace any traditional financial systems. in the real world, crypto holders also have banks and buy and sell cryptocurrencies with/for fiat.

very few retailers of any quality/price/repute sell physical for bitcoin, let alone denominated in fixed prices in bitcoin, even at peak hysterical hype (right now)

apples priced in bitcoin would fluctuate wildly and you wouldn't be able to count on being able to eat any given day of the week buying food denominated in bitcoin. the reality is that bitcoin is an unregulated security. It's a volatile investment and it's fluctuations make 'fiat' currencies inflation/deflation pale in comparison.

why not (get rid of) both?

When do we auto-organize as a species and ditch these primitive blame games and Mutually-Assured-Destruction madness such as competitive wasteful economics systems that cause people to drive hours to a place they don't like to "work at a job" doing something that is useless for the overall group and displeasing for the person doing it, simply due to dumb plumbing not organizing us. Maybe we should ask some machines how to run ourselves... (partially joking, but you know what I mean...Where is our group common sense and ability to hive-mind when we need it?)

I have no notion of what metaphor you are referring to. In real life, POW is a waste of electricity that produces nothing external to proving that CPU cycles were wasted, with an ever-increasing difficulty in the case of Bitcoin (getting worse with time, on purpose)

Not a metaphor. The general theory of relativity is proof of work, so is a bridge. Being too big to fail is an example of proof of stake in a system and how it can be gamed.

> an ever-increasing difficulty in the case of Bitcoin (getting worse with time, on purpose)

This is not how Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment works. It increases/decreases with the value of the block reward. This is proportional to the value of bitcoin, transaction fees paid, and decreasing new bitcoin issuance. Bitcoin users pay miners for their PoW because they find the value of using such a system to be worth the cost.