skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This isn’t a defense of Bitcoin. I’m often quite critical of cryptocurrency and believe the world would be better off without it. However, “banning” it won’t have the effects you’ve described, and you seem have some misunderstandings about how Bitcoin works, especially as it pertains to the criminal world.

1. Bitcoin transactions don’t require access to the internet at the time the transaction takes place. There have been solutions for performing offline transactions, though none have really taken off. Nevertheless, it’s not hard to do, though it’s riskier for the recipient than an online transaction. I won’t go into the technical details, but it’s nothing fancy. The idea is that you can place money in any number of accounts ahead of time, then simply pay people by handing them the keys to those accounts. There’s little overhead for creating new accounts; often merchants will use a fresh account for every transaction. Of course, the recipient has to be able to trust that they’re actually receiving keys to an account with the right amount of currency, which is a harder problem to solve.

2. This isn’t necessary. Bitcoin was popular in certain criminal communities long before there was any easy way to convert between Bitcoin and fiat. Cashing out dirty Bitcoin to USD remains risky.

3. The UX is already terrible. The UX that criminals experience isn’t the same UX that investors experience. They can’t use services like Coinbase to cash out.

4. Prior to Bitcoin going mainstream, the cover was that you could exchange your Bitcoin for various illegal products and services. (Want to buy a stolen car?) When there’s a whole underground economy whose participants are thoroughly convinced they are outside the reach of the law, any currency will work, as long as there’s a consensus within that community.

Banning cryptocurrency would have some interesting effects, but it would be nearly impossible to enforce, and it wouldn’t have the impact you’re seeking.
I don't know much about brain-gut connection, but just a note: Tardive dyskinesia has some treatment options now (valbenazine is one of the options I'm familiar with). They're not a total "cure" but I've seen the benefits in a few patients when I was in school.
Bitcoin is only useful currently when it can be turned into cash. There are no real businesses that don't turn their payments into a taxable national currency at the end. If you just ban exchanges in a few dominant countries btc is effectively useless as a hold of value and you're back to convincing the pizza guy to accept 30 coins for one pizza and other one off transactions
This can't be real, it seems to be especially crafted to break most if not all common-sense programming rules...
So far, these attacks don't seem to have prompted security improvements. I guess that for large companies, the payment is a small sum, comparable to the fines they pay every once in a while.

Security improvements seem to be driven more by regulation (GDPR), competition (when did ElasticSearch release TLS support for free? Not after the Nth open ES cluster - only after Amazon competed with them), and large costs (switching to Linux servers because they're cheaper. Though there are concerns about current security practices there too...).
> THAT is transformative.

We may argue about what is transformative - first orbital flight, first flight above LEO, first lunar landing and first hand-off of expedition on a space station all are.

From question "do we have progress?" we switched to "do we have big step up or not?". And if you look at achievement during 1960-s, all subsequent steps were incremental over previous, from technological point of view. Yet people managed to do something which wasn't done before - and to have a period in time, roughly 1960-s, when, if you compare what you had before that period and after, you have accumulated achievements which seem like a lot.

Yes it's a lot. Yes it was built on top of what was possible by then - with a lot of efforts during 1960-s. Yes we plan to have similar situations soon :) . However - even though we don't have Starship yet, and no matter if Crew Dragon is needed for that (it is), we still have progress right now.

Only instead comparing years 1960 and 1970, you have to compare 2005 and 2020. Shenzhou was a refined descendant of Soyuz, with corresponding limitations learned later, while Crew Dragon is a clean sheet implementation of what we know about capsule flight, a complex dance of engineering and economy. Discounting it as an insufficiently ambitious is a little like dismissing ITER just because it's not going to support itself economically, so can't be economically scaled.

In other words, I'm not talking about Starship here, focusing on Crew Dragon.
> because those instances are banned for obvious and good reasons.

What benefit does Mastodon offer over Twitter if you think that censorship is good?
I would be very surprised if any mixer operators are located in places that care in the slightest about a US subpoena (russia, etc).
I only spotted one error here. Well, maybe two things.

While both computer chess and human chess use the same Elo (not ELO) algorithms to calculate the strength of a player, I believe that they use different pools to players to calculate those values. Since Elo rankings are all relative to the rest of the pool that they are measured from, human Elo rankings are not directly comparable to computer Elo rankings.
The ransom payment isn't really a theft or robbery, they didn't have to give it.
You clearly haven't talked to Latin or Greek teachers if you think nobody bemoans our lack of fluency in those languages nowadays. It isn't that long ago that knowing Latin was almost a prerequisite for calling yourself educated.

I do believe that we miss out on a lot of nuances by not being able to read Latin or Greek. But I also accept that, pragmatically, we can't all be learning these languages anymore, so yeah, I'm not one of those grumpy Latin teachers. That doesn't mean it's not still a loss.
"People lose their health insurance that allows them to afford their life-saving medication."

Only in one country on the planet.
Let's say getting those n and m values has a nasty type like `getNM :: IO (Maybe (Int, Int))`. All you need to do is map twice when using the original function.

foo (n, m) = take n . filter p . drop m

bar = fmap (fmap foo) getNM

It's a little awkward, but no major refactor. A small price to pay for the nice types we get. I'd argue that if other languages make dealing with IO and optional values easier, its because they don't bother restricting IO (not necessarily criticizing that), or they don't bother checking completeness over optionals (i.e. a stray `null` can show up anywhere and derail the program, which I do think is a bad thing). Overall, Haskell provides many powerful tools for composing complex types, such as the functor/applicative/monad classes.
Well in the case of UCSF, they paid $1.14M[1].

But really, I expect such a law would provide for exceptions, with a maximum payout capability. And for such a law to come after an offsite airgap backup requirement for such entities.

But really, the answer is that the equivalent physical criminal action: walking into a hospital and absconding with all of their medical records, would result in criminal action against the thief. Their actions may be akin to manslaughter if deaths result.

[1]: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/06/417911/update-it-security-...
Yeah. I don't mean to be disrespectful to the OP, but what's the point of having wallpapers, anyway? Distraction is one thing, but it's also obstructed when you open a large window. I can kind of understand having a screensaver with a beautiful picture, but today screensavers are things of the past.
Synced Semantic Versioning
Thank you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_the_real_numbe...
Have you learned nothing from artists, comedians, authors, game creators, musicians, peace activists or civil liberty activists?
San Francisco flattened the curve early. Now, coronavirus cases are surging
yes, and it proves GP's point about crypto enabling crime. It's trivial to implement.

It's just a ledger kept outside so there is no link between the money going in and the money coming out.
> > In fact, for reasons I’m yet to discern, my iBook’s internal AirPort Wi-Fi card can’t connect to modern Wi-Fi networks—they simply confound it.

there's a huge number of 802.11b and 802.11g devices that simply won't operate at all on a 2.4 GHz radio of a 802.11n/11ac/11ax network that is set to "dual 40/20MHz" channel mode. And definitely not on a 40 MHz channel. Remember that in older wifi systems there was no such thing as a 40 MHz channel.

same thing for old 802.11a 5 GHz band devices, they don't understand anything other than a fixed 20 MHz channel.

And that's before you run into problems with modern usage of WPA2.
> The government should similarly hold firms accountable when they are hacked

What should the govt so when govt agencies get hacked?
This particular hacker. What's preventing another hacker group doing the same? The company is not able to fix all of the security issues immediately.
You can buy a "record" with those dots on it, but then you'll also need a neon bulb connected to 60 Hz power to flicker at the right speed.
Undocumented labor doesn't pay income taxes. So the money is actually taxed in the company.
Scenario 1: Keep head down, company gets attacked, shrug shoulders.

Scenario 2: Sell solid security and backup principles to management, fighting annoying budget and corporate culture battles along the way. Company does not get attacked. Nobody notices.

Scenario 3: Quietly set up an immutable backup service with hourly backups for your enterprise without anyone really noticing. Company gets attacked. "Actually, we do have backups. We can just reformat all those Windows machines." Hero!
If you understand enough about Bitcoin to know how the immutable ledger works, your questions feel bad faith. One of the biggest “selling points” early on was obviously anonymity.
Do you want a solution that makes such an attack unprofitable to execute (i.e. it raises the cost of doing a similar attack above $4.5M)?

Buy insurance and pray. There is not a single readily available enterprise solution that would even dare to put that in writing, let alone deliver. If there is one that does dare, ask to test their claim by having the deal conditional on them putting out an open $4.5M bug bounty and nobody collecting on it (you should also be the one to determine if they have to pay). Every company will either back out or get collected on, no question. This is a good test because if it costs more than $4.5M to do such an attack, then it would be unprofitable to collect on the bug bounty. It is also unlikely to give a false positive (their system is good when it is not) since $4.5M is more than than almost every other bug bounty and it is totally above board, so you will get the best of the best trying to break into the system.
Or online money laundering.
Libertarianism seems to follow pretty directly from individualism, which most people reject. (I actually support it.)

Individualism is directly comparable to utilitarianism.

The rational people in our society should be debating individualism vs. collectivism vs. utilitarianism (possibly vs. others).

That is in lieu of discussing the higher-level political instantiations of these things (e.g. libertarianism vs. socialism, etc.).

What political system you want depends (at least) on what moral system you favor.
The 0th law of UX: Any website that attempts to describe good UX will itself be criticized for bad UX.
Not being owned by a Silicon Valley giant? No advertising? API access that doesn’t get shut off for idiotic reasons? I’m sure there are plenty more.
> it seems like malicious actors could easily weaponize this.

This is exactly what happened to the "OK" hand symbol, which people have lost jobs over: It was a 4chan prank. There were alternate suggestions for what a bunch of different common hand symbols could mean, and this was the only one that caught on mainstream.
There is some really good history of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) found in this Foster Garvey Cross-Border Business Law Blog post from 2018, https://www.foster.com/cross-border-business-law-blog/cfius-....
They are likely based in a country not regarded to be a technology leader. Say you were the CTO of a firm looking to improve security, would you engage a Nigerian cybersec consultant? Almost certainly not, you would look in your home country, or the US/Europe.

If they were to start a consultancy, even if they are as skilled as anyone else, they’d have an uphill battle from the get go; and have to either stick to their home market, or heavily discount their services. Either way making less than from their ransomware.
If they are so valuable then why are they not paid well? Markets are just people deciding what value is with their money. Perhaps you think a service is valuable, and you can pay for it. But if no one else wants it and will not pay for it, then it is by definition not valuable to society.

Sure there are issues with the rules of the markets like anything--but markets in general are pretty good for determining value.
A sequence of rational numbers need not converge to a rational number, so you can't play the game with rationals. As a trivial example, consider the sequence of rational numbers 3, 3.1, 3.14, 3.141, 3.1415, ... converging to pi.
The idea is that you can't track any of the transaction paths. There's nothing tying a specific input transaction to a specific output transaction, and great pains are taken to ensure there cannot be any publicly available link.
Although I refuted some of your arguments above (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24033759), I agree that cryptocurrency has fairly limited utility, especially given the costs.

The biggest issue I have with cryptocurrency is that it’s an utter waste of resources. It incentivizes the consumption of electricity (and talent) purely to print money, rather than to produce value. Yes, currencies provide some value to society, but we already have more sustainable options.

I see the appeal if you hate taxes and regulations or live under a particularly oppressive regime. However, given that it relies, to some extent, on public infrastructure like internet and electricity that governments can outright shut off if they so desire, there are better options. Raw materials and bartering work pretty well. Just don’t invest in tulips.
Luddite?
> don't write anything to do with passwords, logins, roles or sessions etc

I'll take this a step further and say don't push anything important to production that isn't covered by tests.
If there were, the prices to unlock would skyrocket.... Unlike most kinds of insurance, the cost here is not a set thing.... It's arbitrary.
I'm not really a big fan of Bootstrap.

I'm never going to use this for my commercial projects.

I'm going to use these for friends and family, who keeps asking me to "please, build me a website."

I like to help a team of developers doing something different and earning money. Best of Luck. Bought one license.
Can you share some info/hygiene tips for a situation like that?
There's generic cyber attack insurance so yes.
Perhaps. Back in the 80's, folks on Usenet would add words like "nuclear", "bomb", "spy", "communist" to their email footers and posting signatures, in hopes of overloading the (suspected/expected) NSA monitoring of traffic. I'm going to guess that sophisticated filters dealt effectively with such things back then, and even more sophisticated filters would deal with your random encrypted bits too.
The mixers keep a ledger outside the blockchain, so no—and a well written one wouldn't store any logs. You could possibly know that someone used a mixer but you wouldn't be able to track from the blockchain where the money came from. It could've come from 1000s of other transactions all with different amounts—none that would trace back to the source funds wallet.
And the ridiculous Goya boycott resulted in Goya selling even more.
ASK HN: What startup information should be public to all the employees?
Banks deal with cartels and other bad guys, they make lot of money and pay a small fine when they get caught. Why do you think paying ransoms would be different?
What Is Synced Semantic Versioning?
I work for myself, so I definitely have the benefit of a flexible schedule. I used to be a product director, now I’m working on building a tool to scratch an itch I had in my past role.
couldn't you just store your data in append-only fashion?
Influencer marketing|how can a company find the right influencer to work with
With the increasing popularity of TikTok and other social media platforms, many brands have started to reach out to influencers for marketing. But the pain point is how to find the right influencers to work with as there are millions of them.
To solve this problem, we built a platform called influencer.fm, a platform which collects real-time data of 2M+ TikTok and 1M+ Instagram influencers, including the number of the influencers' followers, fans growth rate, the number of likes influencers get, and their engagement rate.
Brands can also find the right influencers using the filter functions.
After selecting the right influencers, brands can then add those influencers into their contact list and send influencers emails on the same platform.
Hope this tool can save some pain of many marketing professionals and make marketing easier for both influencers and brands.
Amazon given go ahead to launch thousands of satellites
What is the point of Mastodon if its creators practice the very censorship that centralized platforms like Twitter and Reddit practice? I feel like I can’t trust a platform/protocol whose controllers harbor anti free speech views.
https://reclaimthenet.org/mastodon-blocks-gab/
why not set a timer and disable wifi/network for the duration of the time you are setting aside to work without distraction. Or, maybe just close the tab/app with the distracting alerts? lots of way to achieve the same result without limiting yourself to such ancient hardware. Modern Macs have Do Not Disturb mode. I use this frequently
Microsoft says it is still talking with Trump about buying TikTok
> Just wanted to make this same point - right now, cryptocurrency has negative value for society. Perhaps this is a justification for banning the current implementations.

Ehhhh, I think the overall impact of Bitcoin is negative, but the "democratizing large-scale crime" argument is a pretty poor argument for why that is. First, Bitcoin isn't "democratizing" anything good or bad--people need to stop using this word with regard to Bitcoin. But assuming you mean something along the lines of "enabling", or "empowering", I'm not sure that the shift in computer hacking crime which is caused by Bitcoin is actually negative.

Prior to Bitcoin, the people who paid for poor security were consumers whose data, money, and time were stolen. In theory if an entity exposes your data, you can sue them, but in reality, data breaches are common and when entities actually get sued, they rarely pay out significantly. I've followed the Equifax case every step of the way for years and still haven't received a dime, and I doubt many people would follow through all the hoops they've put in place--I'm mostly doing it out of curiosity at this point.

That still happens, but more and more, ransomware's biggest targets are large entities which should have secured their services better. Not only does ransomware punish the entities who should have prioritized security, not the consumers, it also makes it public knowledge whose security is lax.

Now there are a lot of complexities here. In theory, ransomeware hackers could also sell the data--but as far as I know that doesn't happen much, probably because they rely on the "honest crook" effect to ever get paid. And sometimes ransomware is employed against individuals.

And to be clear, I'm not endorsing ransomeware attacks. I'm just saying this looks like harm reduction to me: if a big business is going to not prioritize security and get hacked, then I'd rather they pay a ransom than have user's private data sold on the darkweb. In a more just system, that's just the fines they'd be paying anyway.
Can the money be followed here? How they are going to spend it if it’s marked as stolen?
It might over time. If I was deploying ransomware, the first thing I would do after receiving a ransom payment from a company would be to try them again in a month or two.
clicked through the transactions and found this wallet: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/17A16QmavnUfCW11DAApi...

a balance of 16m and over 1.4 trillon usd has passed through this account.

the oldest transaction i could find was 2019-11-02 14:19: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/17A16QmavnUfCW11DAApi...
I’m using the one in Krissy Moehl’s book. So far, so good! It feels pretty balanced.
Even just hiring one guy whose only job is to take backups would solve ransomware for much cheaper.
The US Train system sports the only US based private security that has full arrest authority. Maritime law is a bit of a special case and falls under international treaties.
RSS is still not dead! You are on a website, RIGHT NOW, that publishes fully operational RSS feeds! So do all the popular blog CMSes! So do all the popular static blog generators!

Even your own blog that you just linked publishes working RSS! https://wrt.nth.io/luke/feed/

The replacement for RSS is to stop inexplicably thinking RSS is somehow gone.
>If the user types qwe123 to log in, and you hash that in Javascript to 200820e3227815ed1756a6b531e7e0d2 ...

By your own words it's already been run through one hash algorithm. Even considering it's being hashed again on the server, that still isn't plaintext.

The plaintext here is qwe123, because that's the raw user input. If it avoids further pedantry, we can agree to call it cleartext if you prefer.
Lord and Taylor is well-known to anyone from the DC area but not necessarily if you're from the South. At the same time, some people from the Mid-Atlantic aren't familiar with Dillard's.
1. Passing keys around risks the original sender (or anyone listening in) grabbing the money after 'payment', and voids any guarantees Bitcoin etc. might be able to make - the transaction isn't even listed on the chain.

This would turn a 'trustless blockchain' to a 'non-blockchain relying on trust'. Assuming this transition can even be done (what would be the point of cryptocurrency in that case?), the result would be like the known hawala networks, which at least do not enable so much criminal activity and have some decent uses.

2,4. Bitcoin had an aura around it. Something experimental not really concerned with money or big crime, maybe a way to buy light drugs. Later on as a magnet for speculation. Remove the official cover, and laundering would become way more difficult.

3. There's terrible UX, and there's 'terrible horrible UX when one could easily lose money because the ISP closes your lightening connection'.

So I think this is possible to enforce, not completely, but there's no need for 100% enforcement to have a positive effect.
it seems logical to me a sophisticated syndicate would run their own tumbler. I'd assume there is some kind of OSS wordpress for mixing out there. And I don't think it'd be that hard to get other people to use it to get liquidity (just offer it as a free service).