I failed basic reading comprehension. The first sentence of the abstract clearly says "It has recently been shown that the mere presence of one’s own smartphone on the desk impairs working memory performance."
So while the presence of a smartphone does indeed seem to impair the working memory, they found "no overall effect of smartphone presence on short-term and prospective memory performance".
I think everyone here has a living experience of how smartphones reduce productivity. Even seeing one makes me want to check if I have new messages for example. Even if this one test did not replicate, I think its fair to say that there is a dark side of smartphone use
That's the case if you often get messages or notifications. I often get less than one message a day on my smartphone, so I can keep it on my desk without problems.
Maybe a bank run on Tether for some other reason than the SEC? It would require a lot of people to lose trust in Tether at the same time, which surprisingly still doesn't look likely. But it might happen.
The paper linked is called "Understanding the Lightning Network capability to route payments" which cannot be found in any reputable or peer-reviewed journal. How is that suppose to be a reliable study?
I always hoped that Bitcoin would become "the people's currency" but currently it does not work as cash anymore. Lightning might become great, but the engineering needed just to send to offline nodes makes me sceptical, not to mention that the cost of funding channels is always handwaved away.
I wonder, does HN hate the "Bitcoin Cash" fork as much as BTC? It's the closest to the technical specification that made me interested in BTC in the first place.
The other issues with channels is that only the entry and exit transactions are validated - every transaction in the channel is not secured by any network.
Meaning you can open a channel, but if you want to sell real-world goods in exchange for anything that happens in that channel, then you'd better trust the other parties in the channel to close it properly.
tldr; Lightning is indeed super fast, but it's not as secure.
This is not true. Lightening network is trustless just like the bitcoin base layer unless for very very small transactions (like few cents). Channels are constructed in such a way that any counterparty that attempts to cheat can be punished by the honest partner. Of course the honest partner has to be actively monitoring the base bitcoin network but this can also be outsourced to a third-party (tehcnically called a watchtower).
That's not the only issue. Channels cost a blockchain transaction to open and close, so you would never open-close a channel for an individual small transaction.
The point is essentially to setup an off-chain chain maintained by a 3rd party. If you are selling non BTC into that channel, you are TRUSTING the other party to close the channel.
If they never close it, you cannot unilaterally close the channel, which means you might never get your BTC because they simple leave the channel open forever and get to keep whatever you sent them (ie other crypto or real-world or digital assets).
Also there's a recurring theme/running gag on NTS Radio that it's faster to find releases on Bandcamp through Google than through the internal search. I've witnessed several times that linking to releases is crowdsourced to the NTS chat because the DJs can't find it fast enough.
And they are pushing Bandcamp a lot, with whole shows dedicated solely to music available on Bandcamp. Mostly on the "no-fee fridays".
So an improved search or an API to enable external discovery tools would be great!
One of my favorite games is “Nuclear Throne Together”, although it is quite hard, and more players make it much harder.
A current good and accessible one is “Vectronom”, a very stylized rhythm game where you play as cubes moving through levels morphing to electronic beats.
Mainstream games Rayman and Overcooked are also very good and fun and instantly accessible even to “non-gamers”.
Another one I discovered which is quite fun is “Hidden In Plain Sight”, where all players look like NPCs and most modes revolve around figuring out who is a player and who is CPU. It can be really intense because of the psychological terror.
“Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime” is fun but gets tedious because of the huge levels.
Most of those those don’t have mich of a story though, except maybe Rayman. But that doesn’t detract from the games being fun.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10538...