skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>1. You need to have a computer constantly online or your counter party can easily steal all your money. This leaves you vulnerable to all sorts of attacks.

This isn't not the case. You can outsource channel monitoring to other peers in the network such that if anyone attempts to cheat you, they can punish the cheater and claim a reward. Bitcoin makes various security assumptions such as 51% of the mining power is honest, users have access to perfect information about the blockchain, etc... The LN, if the software is designed correctly, is likely to more realistic security assumptions than Bitcoin itself.

>3. It's relatively expensive to create and destroy channels at about two transactions per channel. Lightning proponents claim that this will be rare, but that can only be the case if there is minimal net flow of money. This is trivially not the case because users will be sending bitcoin more than they recieve and the reverse for retailers.

Channel factories[0] address this problem such that you can move channels between participants without touching the blockchain. There are also ways to do this whereby you switch n channels for a single transaction that spends log n outputs.

[0]: Scalable Funding of Bitcoin Micropayment
Channel Networks https://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/a20a865ce40d40c8f942cf206a7c...
I think I can understand and appreciate many different aspects of Computer science, but programming language theory truly is a bit too arcane and formal for me. I still try to follow it somewhat though (like when the Morning Paper had its nice writeup about RustBelt) and I enjoy learning Rust (which exposes you to the theory underlying its design more than other languages). Maybe it's good that the results of formal methods now find more practical application, so it's easier to get people (who aren't hardcore logicians) interested in the whole topic.
Sure, but there’s services you can outsource that to. Furthermore, if you only use lightning for sending payments (the majority of us) then publishing an earlier version of the channel benefits you!
2. Where is the evidence of this? Sure, routing can be easy and short if it's centralized and the number of hops is small. But, if it's centralized, then what's the point of using Bitcoin? Where is this mystical routing algorithm that will work in the presence of constant capacity changes over a decentralized network?

3. The issue here is that the flow for all channels across the entire network needs to be about balanced for things to work out properly. Once someone starts either net accumulating bitcoin or net dispersing bitcoin, then there will be problems somewhere on some link.

4. I can take money out of my checking account at any time at no expense.
How does a compiler know that signed overflow will happen in the above snippet? Couldn't all integer math result in overflow? If so, how does the compiler ever know what to do?

I do not think its plausible that the compiler is emitting code which checks for an overflow and then in a deterministic fashion skips all dependent logic there after. Im sorry, but I think this line of argument has been taken to such an extreme it has detached from reality.
That sounds glorious.

I've had plenty of meetings where 15 min in I have to ask "What's the purpose of this meeting?" Or at the end of the meeting, "Ok who was taking notes? No one?"
For the most of my career, I was certain that there was something wrong with me. After the first few months at a new job, a sense of meaninglessness grew in me. Is this it? Am I really babysitting this ASP.Net app from here on out? I tried to find meaning in my work but always came up short. Cue a miserable year followed by a job hunt. Rinse and repeat every 2-4 years.

After 12 years of this, it suddendly struck me - I don’t like working. I don’t hate it, not at all - I enjoy coding and fixing bugs. However I fail to see any deeper meaning in the work I do. So last month, I quit, started my own consultancy and sell my skills and time to the highest bidder, max 6 hours per day. Couldn’t be happier! I really feel more like a plumber or electrician than a coder and for the first time in my career I don’t feel anxious about doing something meaningful, because I’ve redefined what “meaning” is.
Make Sprints Great Again
> You don't need to wait for a new block if your signed transaction is in the mempool

Still, many companies have always required a few confirmation blocks before accepting a transaction, regardless of the amount. Like currency exchange companies, for instance.
https://pragprog.com/book/atcrime/your-code-as-a-crime-scene
1) invest heavily in a much better user experience: retail, hardware and software. Establish and organize deep, responsive feedback system.
2) invest in whatever it takes to eliminate all wires and adapters associated with Apple products
3) Double or triple the number of Apple retail stores. In addition to more big destination stores, develop smaller footprint stores that can go in smaller communities.

4) create entry level products for developing markets.
FPGA is more "general purpose" because you can reconfigure it for almost any purpose. A CPU, compared to it, is more "application-specific", though not as specific as e.g. an ASIC for handling crypro.

I probably added too much contrast into my original comment.
I totally agree, imagine a country like Australia which has solar-rich land to spare. The efficiencies might not matter so much in exchange for a constant supply of easily-handled fuel.

Or maybe a nuclear-powered site which can convert CO2 into CxHy on an industrial scale. With the added advantage of removing CO2 in the process.

You also have the added advantage of not having to ship fuel in from chaotic regions of the world. Shipping produces a significant amount of the world's CO2.
No, I wasn't able to do anything until I paid $15/month to use it.

I would have been happy in exporting the contact list and running it on my own mailserver and webserver. A single list of 200 people isn't hard. But I couldn't even get the data if I had paid.
I see what you mean. Three thoughts on this:

* The time lock on commitment transactions is typically set to be a few days, so you don't need to be online "constantly." At most you need to check in about once a day.

* As the white paper says, you can delegate this function to a third party, without giving the third party the ability to steal your funds.

* If the other party tries to steal your funds and you catch him, you get to steal all of his funds. So in practice I don't expect this to be a common situation. If the other guy believes there's at least a 90 percent chance that you'll check the blockchain on any given day, then the expected value of broadcasting a revoked transaction is going to be heavily negative.
Well, of course that would help. I am allowed to work from home occasionally with some reason as per my company culture. However usually there is one F2F meeting/interview that I have to take for which I need to go.
"Torque increases linearly with speed" means "more speed more torque".

The "linear braking torque" you are talking about seems to be a completely unrelated concept referring to how the brakes react to inputs from the pedal. A braking system can have both of those, none, or any single one.
Don't channel factories only allow you to move channels between users who were a part of the original multiparty transaction?

It's a fantastic idea, but I feel it more has usecases between popular hubs and less for actual users.

Although they also have the side effect of making the initial transaction on the blockchain up to 90% cheaper, so they are useful there too!
What are the trade offs to having say 100,000 other parties monitor your channel for you?
Yep, there’s a reason it’s the “Holland tunnel”. :)
Ah, I agree with you. I simply meant it’s our individual problem in that it’s not the devices causing it, it’s our ability to be distracted in the first place. Collectively, we share the same problem as humans. Poor wording on my part.
Were you a web developer?

I found my web dev colleagues were much more aware of the gender imbalances in the world and the expectation that I (female) would be the nurturer in my family.
Bitcoin Cash can’t even scrape together enough transactions to form 100kb blocks. It’s rather disengenuous to say it’s scaling better when it has a fraction of the users. Furthermore, larger block size is directly related to centralization. The bcash crowd hopes people forget decentralization is important.
That's why ETH is among the top ten universities in the world.
The group wasn’t worth paying $15 one time to save? You realize this story makes you sound bad, not Meetup?
Sounds like you're familiar with the tech, maybe you could answer a couple of questions:

> If I give money to you for a good/service and drain my channel. Then I buy more Bitcoin from coinbase, coinbase can route that BTC to me through you to rebalance our channel so it is all on my side.

Could you point me to details about how cross-channel rebalancing happens?

Since lightning network channels are purely 1:1 (per the whitepaper); say you drained your channel to me, how does your channel with Coinbase allow you to route BTC to our channel without reopening a channel (requiring on-chain transactions)?

The whitepaper mentions hops, but I can't find any details on how they actually work.

> But also locktimes are normally a few days.

Does that imply that every channel needs to make an on-chain transaction every few days to reopen/keep the channel open?
> I really don't understand why so many high profile computing people have endorsed it.

https://www.backblaze.com/company/partners.html
It is not trivial to crack unknown ancient scripts. One of the poster children of this is Linear A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A), a script encoded with the same characters as the "cracked" Linear B, but we have no idea what Linear A actually contains.

Modern cryptoanalysis still requires large corpus' of data to work through.

For an example of the work it takes to break classical cipher methods, consider the Kryptos sculpture (its a sculpture at the CIA headquarters with 4 enciphered texts on it).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos

It was unveiled in 1990. The forth puzzle is still unsolved.
My favorite was some newsletter (I can’t remember the website) that allowed me to log in using my foo+bar@gmail.com email address, but the unsubscribe form backend didn’t accept the “plus” character, thus I could never unsubscribe.
Not necessarily. Easy to build a lightning wallet that uses a hardware wallet for signing.
Who’s Able-Bodied Anyway?
It’s funny to say ‘replacing’ bitcoin to me because we talk like it had a strong value and use in the past but really this has all just been speculation since the start.
We all seem in agreement that blockchain as a technology is legitimate but none of these currency implementations float my boat yet because of how highly speculative the whole market is right now.

Aside: last week up I looked it up and sure enough there’s a ‘PonziCoin’ out there
My understanding is that Stellar is both a payment solution and a platform for facilitating decentralized exchanges. The two go hand in hand.

Nano is also interesting, but limited. In terms of moving value around, I think Stellar is more compelling.
There were some episodes in the latest months of very intense traffic (either an “attack” or someone stress testing) and Bitcoin Cash has endured it just fine.

Let’s see how it works out when adoption grows. If it doesn’t scale, then the timing for off-chain scaling will be more appropriate.
Read the last sentence, and please reconsider your comment.

"But I couldn't even get the data if I had paid."
I've been failing my entire life. Anytime I'm successful, I move the bar to restart the process of my next failure.

I'm very satisfied with my life as I've achieved 10x what I ever thought possible. I'm future failing startup #8 at the moment. It's been dragging out a few years but I'll get there, or fail again!

I always looked at failure as a learning process, not a function of who you are. Hell, if you won all the time, it would get boring. So instead of picking easy things so you can always be a winner, I pick things that are beyond my reach (in my estimation) and attempt to achieve those goals.

Life is what you make of it, it can be like a rollercoaster at times and a lazy day on the beach at others. My biggest issue in my mid 40s is the "been there done that" attitude.

Success isn't a destination IMO, it's a temporary culmination of prior good choices. And it can go away at anytime with as few as one bad decision.
Ironically it might make more sense to avoid taxes if the money is not for you. (For example, someone who takes effective altruism seriously.) But then again they could just donate the money anonymously.
0 conf transactions are incredibly insecure. If you accept one you are putting a great deal of trust in the person paying you. Bitcoin transactions are suppose to be trustless.
It was a great talk, it's in my top 3 of the weekend :)
Yeah, I finally found the post by searching the body text.

Just crazy on /r/shoplifting - people bragging all the time about their "scores". They don't know that their profiles are pretty readily accessible via snoopsnoo.com , Im guessing.
I only came to this comment thread to find the climate change denier. I was not disappointed.
First world problems!

I competed in two different Olympic sports and although I attended the Junior Olympics for one of the (big whoop, right?) and didn't place, I never once thought I was a loser--you just look at the competition and how a mere few seconds determines the winner versus going home with nothing. People have peak days, others are just a tiny bit off. What I realized is that greatness has a component of luck to it. I figured I was lucky to be able to compete there at all. There are letdowns for sure, but you're not competing with others as much as you are competing with yourself.

ETA--Having attended the Olympic Training Center around age 16, I can't tell you how depressing it was to see 20 and 30-something athletes living in the dorms there, striving for their moment of glory while everyone else was out having fun, working, starting families, etc. I look back at that as the moment I made a very conscious choice to focus on having a career. Olympic sports aren't pro sports, you aren't getting endorsement deals unless you're in one of the "popular" sports like swimming or downhill skiing.
I wonder who has the best-maintained list of these password requirements for popular websites. Probably some group that does black-hat brute forcing of passwords.
You didn't even explain what you want from Apple. Is it about performance or some groundbreaking new feature?

I think most professional MBP users would happily trade 5mm thickness for 32 or even 64G RAM, and a better CPU/GPU.
New Intel Security Issue Lets Hackers Gain Control
> This is down to kerchoffs principle, which states that you should not rely on the secrecy of what cipher is being used, only on the secrecy of the key. As such, writing in another language is not cryptography.

Since "language as cryptography" breaks Kerchoff's Principle, doesn't that just make it bad cryptography? Shouldn't that make it all the easier to use cryptanalysis to translate it?

Unrelated point: I thought Steganography was the art of hiding the _fact_ of encryption. If a Japanese analyst hears someone talking in Navajo, it's no secret that some unknown message is being conveyed.
Now we have 10 meetings a day. We pay engineers to take minutes (they are the only ones who understand the need). Nobody is fixing the spelling mistakes. Standardized formating is dead. And whenever something important happens nobody seems to know which documents have been authorized or not.
About 2, like I said we should know soon if it will work. I just don't think that most channels will be updating as quickly as you think, and even if they are, a channel will know of someone is trying to route through it, so it can avoid trying to route another tx for the duration of the first.

3. Fees can and will help balance things out. If a channel is really unbalanced, negative fees can strongly incentivize rebalancing in many cases. If it starts to get unbalanced again, fees can increase to help reduce the speed that it unbalances.

4. You can also take money out of LN at any time (assuming your counterparty I cooperative). Only in the case of non-cooperation do you need to wait for locks to expire, and in that case you get ALL money from both sides of the channel, and need to wait for the lock to expire.

Id love it if my bank could give me 2x my money if it takes more than 3 days for me to get my money...
Fortunately, Chrome for Linux and Chrome OS don't ask. Both OSes trust users to control access at the session level.
One interesting comment about the third point is that once a channel gets sufficiently depleted (say down to 10% of the balance on one side), then there is an increased incentive to cheat (because the potential losses are lower). So you will usually have to keep channels at above a certain balance for security reasons.
Not really. A spoofed ip during handshake will fail. course, unless OP configures the log file format such that Nginx is told to log something not the real ip address. If your user enters your load balancer/proxy server (e.g. Nginx) and then you forward that HTTP request to your backend, the backend sees the ip address of your load balancer/proxy server, but conventionally you can set X-Forwarded-For header, then backend can read the X-Forward-For and "trust" that's the original IP.

But this header can be set to whatever the value you want, if you have the control of the load balancer/proxy server. You can also
Another good question to ask is "Did we all really need to be here?" after someone adds a mailer to the invite..
One of my Italian professors from undergrad, Marcello Simonetta, also cracked a 500 year-old code. He found an encrypted letter [1] sent by Federico da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, that showed he had helped orchestrate the Pazzi conspiracy [2] to assassinate Lorenzo de' Medici.

Interestingly, to break the code he relied on a code-breaking manual written by one of his own ancestors, Cicco Simonetta [3]! When I first learned about this, I thought it was incredibly silly that he didn't ask a modern cryptographer for help. But in some ways, Cicco's manual, written around the same time, is more useful: it focuses on precisely the kind of codes that would have been used for the letter, and the techniques it describes are reasonably effective (essentially frequency analysis, with some specific tricks for documents written in Latin or Italian). And it is certainly more narratively satisfying that he ended up breaking it on his own, following his ancestor's manual!

If you want to know more, he wrote a book on the subject:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001AL6656/

And as another fun bit of trivia, he ended up consulting on the historical aspects of Assassin's Creed II, which takes place in Florence around the time of the Pazzi conspiracy!

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/06/books/1478-assassination-s...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pazzi_conspiracy

[3] http://cipherfoundation.org/older-ciphers/voynich-manuscript...
Sure, but company ethic is a different axis from innovative-ness. It sounds like you chose to work at an ethical-but-conventional position over an unethical-but-innovative one, and good on you for it. But you can have both (or neither) at once, too. Where Google falls on the ethics dimension is a good question, but that didn’t seem to be the poster’s complaint.
Having professional minutes was amazing, maybe we’ll be able to automate it at some point. I would assume that an automated transcript isn’t so far away.
The value is not the tech, its that new people who know of meetup.com can discover the group, and people who prefer an app with notifications/calendar integration over a mailing list will use it.
Lightning uses the same routing algorithm as tor — it’s an onion router. It has the added benefit of no one in the network knowing where transactions are from or whom they’re to.

With regards to channel capacity — fees in lightning are proportional to the amount of the transaction. If you are sending a transaction which consumes a large amount of capacity, you pay a high fee. Note how this is a fundamental difference from onchain transactions where fees are proportional to the amount of block space used.

Lightning is more akin to an atm. You pay a fee to take out cash, but you can then transact instantly all day with nearly no fees.
The thing I've always found fascinating is that this cultural ethos is in direct tension with social organization.

Despite this narrative arc of the primacy of individuality we still (quite predictably) shun people who manage to actually achieve it and generally celebrate homogeny among our cohort.

I couldn't enumerate the negative effects this inherent contradiction may have produced, but it seems unlikely to be a list of zero length.
This is illusionary, as billions worth of bitcoin couldn't be cashed out at once. How do they take the potential for crash into account.
Also, is intellectual property also taxed, like all the mssing
Anything tied to Bitcoin is a zero. What's 1,000,000 times 0?
In the US, we have laws and the SEC which require executives to be transparent about important aspects of their business, such as their personal equity interest. In general, corporations are accountable to their shareholders by law.

What about crypto currencies? Obviously there's nothing immoral about the founders holding equity in their own currency. In fact, as an investor I'd prefer to know that the founders had some skin in the game! But, the idea that I don't have any transparency or accountability to protect my interest is unsettling. Further, the notion that a founder could just liquidate and walk one day with no recourse doesn't leave me with very much assurance that my investment is safe.

I think coming to terms with the morality is a fun thought experiment but not entirely useful. We should be thinking about how to apply the right amounts of transparency and regulation to keep the public safe.
I'd like to add that I use tools from fivefilters.org daily. (Mostly Push to Kindle) If the authors are on this thread, thank you so much for making these tools free to use and for such consistent uptime.
How the term 'open source' was coined 20 years ago
I'm not sure you can actually just pay for one month...

wait. looks like you can - or at least I'm grandfathered in to some scenario where I can, but it's $19.99. $14.99 is for 6 month block prepayment.
I've yet to see a good open source one to use (either as is or by forking/contributing improvements).
Bitcoin transactions are confirming for less than 5 Sat/b since the spamming stopped.

http://core.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h
Much less actually. Paraguay is currently the cheapest with $5,200.

See the list with no or low taxes at https://flagtheory.com/tax-free-countries/
Are they "close enough"? How can we be sure which wallets belong to who? As far as I know (which is admittedly little in this space) the very point is that we can't be sure. So really there's no assurance at all.
A pharmaceutical formulation lab needs to know which documents have been authorized, so I’m assuming that this is still a thing, with or without a secretarial pool.

We also all had day books with numbered pages for all working notes. Signed and dated daily, and when filled, archived.
> Modern cryptoanalysis still requires large corpus' of data to work through.

I think this is the key I was missing. Like, it's a catastrophe if something is degraded to RC4, but we can't break something from 500 years ago. But I guess for modern communications you automatically get a very large corpus if you just wait for a little bit.
Photos from inside Apple's new $5B headquarters