skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not backed by the US Army, it's backed by the US Governments ability to pay it's debts, and the integrity of the US economy and financial system.

Now that is obviously supported by the US Military. But to state without context 'it's the US Army' is just false.

There's a lot of question marks about how Central Banks do money supply, but it's part of governance, their books are public, at least now they are.

That Tether can still exist even though it's a proven fraud is at the core of the problem: the new RobinHood Armies (not just them of course) are keeping everything buoyed up.

Nikola is a similar thing - they have vapour, and yet are worth billions.

A lot of this froth exist in regular stocks as well, across the board, but even in Google, Tesla etc..

It's a problem.

A lot of this might go away with slightly higher interest rates. When things get close to 0 then a lot of weird leverage things happen.

2% -> 1% interest is one thing, but 1% -> 0% (or negative) and systems start to go weird.
It's backed better than your bank. Currently the required cash reserve by the Fed is __zero percent__.

Yes, ZERO. Please check with your own eyes: https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm

Please observe that 3% is actually much higher than 0%.

The rest of bank's book is usually assorted IOUs as well: commercial paper (aka bonds issued by companies) and mortgages. All of these assets that the Fed buys whenever any bank is in trouble, you can look this up in any news source.

Tether is simply just another offshore bank.

None of offshore USD deposits are insured by the FDIC. Yet, offshore banks hold trillions of dollars. They also have higher than zero reserves, just like Tether does.

There is nothing going on, just clickbaity nonsense media churns out for ads.
Yeah, I don't get it either. Despite all this uncertainty, somehow 1 USD = 1 USDT. The more I read about Tether itself the more it looks like fractional reserve banking to me.
This was the thinking of some people who didn't want to inconvenience themselves in the face of a respiratory pandemic. Some of them died, but more to the point many of them are still suffering long-term effects even though they've "recovered" from their illness.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...
You're probably thinking of the wrong service. Freenode is an IRC chat network, not a web site or other service with permanently stored "content".
They are the minority with a VERY small staff, compared to most others. (Also HRT engineers work a lot, not leasurely 40 hours per week)

Pointing to extreme outliers is not giving your opinion much credence. Because I can point to some people who work in crypto, that earn $600k+ without breaking a sweat - in Singapore with Singaporean taxes(which blows HRT salaries with US taxes out of the water)
I run my own little ad blocking DNS service and the thing I'm probably most concerned about is websites/publishers/etc. deciding to serve their ad and user tracking assets from their own domains. Though most would probably need—or choose—to use subdomains and be easily blockable all over again.
“people keep saying this about bernie madoff but he keeps not going bankrupt. in fact you can withdraw your money right now” - poor sap 2007
The other day I had Google Drive tell me not to use IE (I was using Epiphany)
> you've probably never lost your phone while traveling.

Yes, like most people, I have not. If I did, on most trips I’ve had a laptop and anything critical would also be in the shared vault on my spouse’s phone.

If I didn’t have any of that, I could install the client on another device to access my vault, if someone would let me; a risk but possibly worthwhile in some critical hypothetical and not really different than using a browser on it (I don’t even know what such a scenario would be, if I was robbed of everything?). Or I could buy a device (even if I was robbed, I could call my parents to pay).
I know some very prominent programmers that hunt and peck...
I don't know if the confidence actually is at an endpoint, it depends if this article and similar sentiments get widespread acceptance.

If people disregard this article as irrelevant because we're all just amicably agreeing that one USDT is still worth one USD then there isn't a problem (today - the potential for a problem doesn't go away). Economics is like 90% whatever people say it is, and if we say this isn't a problem then it isn't - if we say it is that's when people start accepting USDT at fractional values of what USD is and then USDT will quickly hit hyper inflation and become worthless... down to a limit! And that limit is the reserve they have, which is why a 100% guaranteed currency backing for a coin like this is so critical since, if users start refusing to accept coins at 80% of USD value then middle men will step in to happily execute the transaction at full value in a different medium and the only result will be that the consumers that refuse to accept the coin at stated value will lose their ability to compete with consumers that do accept that value due to losses from arbitrage.

If confidence is done and the backing isn't there then we can expect to see a quick inflation - if the confidence isn't done or the backing is there then we're safe. But if we're relying on confidence alone then at some point that rug will be pulled from under our feet - and this effect will be accelerated if the company loses confidence dramatically fast (i.e. by being exposed as fraudulent).

Also, whenever this happens it's not unlikely that the fuse will be partially lit by some people that are hedging bets against USDT by having, for instance, outstanding options to buy as part of an ongoing non-instantaneous transaction.
> Shitting on RH because they had to obey the clearing house rules is intellectual cowardice.

I think if you are going to operate as a brokerage you need to be able to fulfill all types of trades which in turn means you meet the needs of the clearing house, to limit investors to sells when you have funding from someone with a clear interest/holding/shorts (whatever) is a pretty stiff conflict of interest. This is just one of the reasons why they shouldn't be a brokerage. I understand that the clearing house changed the rules, but if you want to play in the game those are the rules. It is pure (even if it was truly non-intentional) market manipulation. They should have stopped all trading if they could not meet the needs of the clearing house (this can be debated as well). And if you cant meet the needs of the clearing house you do not deserve to be a brokerage IMO (I can see how this is also up for debate).

I agree your other points about gambling and gamifying, etc.... But the 'you are allowed to only sell and not buy a stock' is so grossly wrong I don't see how anyone can look past that unless you are 1) on the losing side of the coin (the shorts) and want to stop the bleeding or are heavily invested in RH performing a successful IPO.
> Do you think somebody at Frontier stole the bIlLIONs of US gov money and bought yachts?

May 27, 2020: Court signs off on $38M in executive bonuses at Frontier. (Source: https://www.channelfutures.com/telephony-uc-collaboration/fr...)

SEVEN WEEKS LATER, July 16, 2020: Frontier seeks, and is granted an ADDITIONAL $25M in executive bonuses. (Source: https://www.law360.com/articles/1292694/frontier-wins-ok-for...)
runs on bitcoin?
What happens when everyone tries to withdraw their money from their banks at the same time?
The article also said that BTC has already dropped into the dead zone just one year ago during the pandemic crash. Tether is still alive and BTC is worth 10 times more.

I don't know how reliable of a prediction this could be.
Yeah, but in the US the FDIC insures my bank account up to $250,000 (per account!). Tether has no such guarantee, which makes Tether's financials a lot more important.
All ponzi schemes keep not collapsing until they do
Why the hell was it abandoned in the first place?
That just shows "Siri Suggestions" and I have to type in the box. I don't want to search, keyboards on phones are universally bad. I want an alphabetized list.
Point is, if you sell ETH for USD on Coinbase, they will report you to IRS.

But if you convert ETH to DAI, no one will get a report for that.
There are serious environmental concerns being raised about the amount of electricity being used to mine Bitcoin (see, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27135776). My comment does assume that less electricity use is good, because that's the context in which Ethereum posted this.

I'm mining crypto (very small amounts) as I as I type this, so I'm definitely not going to make the case that all crypto mining is an immoral waste of electricity. But I remain very interested in transition to a PoS system, so as to reduce the strain of crypto on the environment.
That Salesforce outage: DNS and an engineer, but no blameless postmortem
All coins are Ponzi schemes. Tether is a coin. Tether is a Ponzi scheme.
The great thing about pipewire is that it provides a jack stub as well — you can use both pulseaudio and jack software side by side, and even pipe them to each other. I truly believe that once it stabilizes, linux will potentially be the best platform for audio production.
Central bank prints a shitload of money
Theres a whole world of split mechanical keyboards out there, like the Dactyl, Manuform, Kyria etc. I think splitkb.com has a discord where the very specific subset of mechanical keyboards that love ergo boards hang out.
No, I was assuming you were pushing for a “right of return” to Israel.
Bernie Madoff was paying redemptions from his "fund" for decades.
I find it rather annoying how the word "ponzi" is being redefined to just mean "shady business".

Tether is definitely shady af, but I don't understand the obsession people have for calling anything they don't like (bitcoin/gamestop/nfts/etc) a ponzi.
How would this prevent it from being a Ponzi scheme?

Ponzi schemes do keep paying out, for as long as they are growing.
If Tether were not exchanging USDT for dollars it would be impossible to support the market prices on exchanges between Tether and other stablecoins. Kraken also has a real USD/USDT market that is quite liquid. There is no way that these could be operational and liquid if the company was not exchanging the stables for real dollars.

And none of these Tether hit pieces ever attempt to explain this in the slightest. Until they do, there's not really much to see here. The explanation given in the piece is utterly transparent nonsense.
The types of issues upgrading e.g. glibc or openssl can cause are largely predictable, aren't they? That's why there's libtool and sonames and that kind of stuff. The only missing piece is support for this in the package manager…
Discrete MOSFETs Make Up This Compact CPU-Less Computer
Yeah. I have been to Fort Mac many times, and lived in Prince George for 6 years. Fort Mac is kind of the end of the earth. But I know how hard it is to manage ICE cars in that kind of cold. Plug in the block heater. Leave the engine running when at the store. Carry deicer always. Fractured windshields. Ice on the inside of the windshield. Cracked dashes. Flat batteries. Hard starts due to bad fuel/air mixtures. And let's also include bad handling, because you don't really know how bad ICE cars are on actual ice until you've driven a good AWD EV like any Dual Motor Tesla.

All of this is better with EVs. Yeah, you basically will end up going from plugin to plugin so that the battery doesn't freeze up hard, but in those conditions you do anyway. The level of comfort and drivability provided by a Tesla Model Y will easily exceed any gas car or truck today. Why? Because the car will always be warm and ready. The traction control is 10x better. The car can pre-melt the ice. If you're lucky enough to have a garage, well you can pre-heat while the car is inside the garage. The list goes on and on. The main problem for the Model Y is the frameless door means the window has to be defrosted before you can get in. But you will, of course, do that from the comfort of wherever you are.

Frankly, Cybertruck is going to absolutely crush this. The range really meets the needs of the far north. Tesla already has a supercharger in Edmonton, and they have deployments planned for Prince George and some locations on hwy 16. This is really going to open up a lot of territory. EVs are made for the north, excepting the range.

Gas cars in the north actually suck pretty bad, except that they can handle those day-long commutes. That clock is seriously ticking, and for many cases, is already up.
It's ridiculous to call anything a 'gen Z' economy when most gen Z aren't of asset-holding age.
Wait, you're serious?
They're guaranteed to get at least $250,000 back based on the FDIC based on each bank account. At least in the US.
Lol. A billionaire doesn't give money to $causeOfTheDay - they're "selfish" assholes.
They do give money - they're informed they can't buy forgiveness or they should have given more or the patronage is paternalistic and heaven forbid if the billionaire is a white male American.

May as well keep your money and let those fend for themselves.

Much better art created when people do it for the passion.. on their own time.. with their own resources.. after they've worked an 8 hour day.

Whingers are going to complain anyway - no point in affording them the time and resources to do it more.
This is not what Ponzi scheme means. They lied that every coin is backed by the US dollar, but it is not. That’s all.

Does every country that has a pegged currency have 1-to-1 reserves? No, the only difference is that they don’t claim they do, and people don’t base their trust on this false fact.
And I'm over 50. My point remains.

Very often things invented when we are older seem to be utterly pointless to us. We literally can't get why people are excited about them. And I see this tendency in people in my age range more than in my teenagers. I personally have to back up and go from first principles to avoid it.
$250k per account, up to 6 accounts. So the FDIC insures up to $1.5 million. If you have more then that, I think you can find other ways to secure your money.
Crypto Investors Fume as World’s Biggest Platforms Are Disrupted
Anything above FDIC insurance limits and you’re in US Treasuries, backed by the full faith and credit of the US Treasury. They’re one of the safest financial assets in the world. The risk of default is almost, but not quite, zero.
I live in Lancaster and have been around Mennonites my whole life. I don't disagree with some of your points but I think there is more nuance to it. My understanding is that it isn't about delaying judgment on new technology, it is about chasing "wants" or "keeping up with the Joneses". This is what their culture is designed to protect against. They know that cars are more efficient than a horse but if one person gets a car, another person will be tempted to a nicer one, and the next one even nicer. So to prevent the chase, they say they aren't allowed. The same with clothes or appliances or technology. This is how they can still do okay with farming because they don't have any million dollar tractors. Their costs are super low and they have large families to do the labor so they don't need to hire workers.

Lots of Amish have cell phones but it is mostly the younger ones and they hide them in the corn fields. They sneak out at night or use them when they work off the farm. It might be surprising to some that the Amish have moved into the trades with a force. Most of them can't farm anymore because there isn't any farmland for sale in Lancaster anymore, and lots have pushed west to Ohio or Indiana or Iowa. The ones that work in the trades, get picked up every day and ride in someone else's $80K crew cab truck, they go into the convenience store and buy breakfast and lunch just the same as everyone else. They have learned that there is more money out in the "English" world than in farming. It will be interesting to see what happens across time as they get used to "keeping up".
It happend with some people I know, they at least shuts down the account temporarily.
There is no standard URL but there is a standard link from the website to the feed: the <link> element in the header. See https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery
> faith & credit of the United States Government

Why should I have faith in the government?

> USG has a 200 year history of paying it's debts

Wait what? https://www.worldometers.info/us-debt-clock/
The long-term solution is decentralization.
Dark Patterns Tip Line
Well, I have the same exact experience and frankly, it is not what I intend to repeat again.

At least developers can do that. But most of the people who maintain filter lists are not developers and cannot afford enjoying compiling WebKit for the sake of finding what exact rule has blocked this or hidden that.
Well the thesis per the article is that unless more cash keeps piling into tether in order to handle withdrawals then tether could collapse, which is pretty much the practical definition of a ponzi - don’t be the last one without a chair when the music stops
Nice! I'll add that. Probably I'll just add both versions.
Show HN: Learn Linux, Vim, Tmux, Git and More
Well it’s clear that small companies have a much harder time obtaining credit, while huge conglomerates don’t have a problem. I also have a feeling that new money has been disproportionally funneled toward the financialized economy, instead of funding research, education or other long term focused work. Perhaps my qualms should not be attributed simply to the monetary side of things (cheap money), but also to the lack of fiscal action.
Another big benefit is ease of use setting up the Yubikey. My understanding is that these newer key types can be generated very easily using the ssh tools which already exist on your systems. Previously, it was very common to set up GPG keys and integrate them with SSH, which is not only more work but also fairly involved.

These new key types make it a lot easier to get up and running with storing your SSH key on your Yubikey. I would have used this format instead of GPG when I was setting up a Yubikey a month ago, but GitHub (and some other providers I use) didn’t support a new enough OpenSSH version.
> Did the college have its own power source like a research reactor?

Not the person you're replying to (and never directly involved in electricity generation), but my university just had it's own small power plant: https://www.fs.utoronto.ca/utilities-and-building-operations...

I assume it was a mix of historical coincidence and a solution for less-interruptible power supply for the labs, but I'm not really sure.
It get's really old to see people to continually misunderstand the nature of what a ponzi scheme is.

Things can be fraudulent or unethical without being a ponzi scheme.

Tether could be called maybe an indirect type of pump and dump on the crypto space. It could easily be called a confidence scheme. It called also involve accounting fraud and securities fraud as well as outright fraud if any of the audits were deemed to have not really happened.

None of these make it a ponzi scheme because it fits essentially none of the characteristics of a ponzi scheme
That's possible. I haven't read the whole thread, and am taking the GP's word for how they perceived it, since it's the perception that creates the reaction anyhow.
Investor Alert: Celebrity Endorsements
Scale. Crypto mining on rented hardware will scale itself up to infinite machines if you let them, while “real” hardware-taxing use-cases are niche.

Renting out hardware involves setting a price point that turns a healthy profit assuming some average hardware lifespan.

Crypto miners that rent hardware are leveraging arbitrage though, where the price of hardware rentals is just low enough that the crypto mining generates more money than the rental cost.

This means they will rent as many resources as Hetzner will let them and hammer them as long and hard as Hetzner will let them, because it’s pure profit. All the risks associated with buying hardware for crypto mining is dumped on Hetzner’s collective lap for a fee that’s too small to justify it.

Either Hetzner can raise prices to eliminate this arbitrage opportunity (at the expense of their normal/primary customer base and core business), bet big on crypto and pivot to being a crypto mining company and cut out these middle-men, or just ban crypto and go back to business as usual. If Hetzner has any faith at all in their core business model, banning crypto mining is the obvious choice.
Fractional reserve banking doesn't work without insurance. The practice of fractional reserve banking is actually encouraged by governments around the world due to the generally acceptable amounts of risk and the increase in effective cash supply, these are advantages that are seen to outweigh the risks. The issue is that tether may be imposing these risks on the market without any coordination of either insurance or widespread liquidity benefit - they may just be doing this to increase their effective private market power.

In America's situation, FYI, that insurance is supplied in the form of a gigantic economic engine and lots of guns to get more money if needed - elsewhere in the world this risk will often times be subsidized by the IMF.
Do modern healthcare TUIs support UTF-8?
Which is why banks are highly regulated, have reserve and capital requirements and central banks acting as lender of last resorts.
the fed has never not bailed people out, whether it’s money market funds or anything else even if not fdic insured
> it's backed by the US Governments ability to pay it's debts,

https://www.worldometers.info/us-debt-clock/

I don't see a whole lot of difference between this and USDT honestly.
No, you can’t. And their TOS state they have zero obligation to do so.
China was never really a world power, even at its height. Look back at Western history: Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, the British Empire, or the Mongols, or further back, the Xiongnu. Han China mostly stayed confined to its own self imposed borders, with the exception of the acquisition of Xinjiang and the Tibetan plateau, and some voyages by Zheng He.

I guess what I'm saying is, if China becomes a hegemonic power, it won't be militarily, it'll be economically, sort of like monopolies/oligopolies today, and those kinds of powers can be resisted much more easily by soft power methods.

The economic growth argument fails to impress it. Every nation that goes through an agrarian->industrial conversion experiences huge economic growth until they transition to a developed service sector economy.

Much is made about Chinese infrastructure building, but did you ever look at what was done by FDR under the New Deal? 1 million kilometers of roads built. 10,000 bridges. 40,000 schools. etc. The Tennessee Valley Authority built tens of thousands of miles of electric grid. Or take progress in the Space Program of China. It looks impressive, but Von Braun founded the US rocket program in 1945, and NASA was founded in 1958. 11 years later, there were men standing on the moon.

Things only look fast now, because developed Western economies have settled into long term 2-3% service oriented economy growth. With China's declining birth rate, rising cost of living and wages, it too will experience a slowdown.
The article says the algorithm was trained on eye tracking data, and if the predominance of data came from men then referring to the male gaze as a possible source of unintended bias seems valid.