skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is insisting that Blockchain does nothing useful?

It provides the following features which everyday financial institutions do not:

- 24/7 operation. Did you ever try to start a transfer on the weekend?
- Near instant results. No more waiting several business days to get your own money.
- Transactions will not trigger "account reviews", potentially locking you out from accessing your funds for an indefinite time, since you were traveling or otherwise spending your money in a way you usually don't.
- Transparency on what data is retained about you and who it is sold to.
- Authentication with cryptographic signature not SMS

All modern Blockchains will do the above without sending you paper mail or requiring you to update your income and address all the time.
I think it is influenced by Paul Graham (a YC co-founder) who write similar articles and naturally they get so much praise etc. Also I will be honest I feel like IT people are more prune to self-help.
I’d be willing to say “there are things with known exploits, there are things which employ techniques that are known not to be safe making them less secure, and the rest is more akin to Schrödinger's cat as far as secureness goes.”
This is why I'm excited for 9elements and Mullvad's System Transparency[0][1] project. The goal is to let the end users know that your server is indeed running the code it says it's running. Of course, open firmware and hardware also plays a role in this as a server running binary blobs still has the potential for malicious code to be unknowingly run.

[0] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2019/6/3/system-transparency-fut...

[1] https://www.system-transparency.org/
>Whether or not Google has a monopoly in advertising is a separate topic and not one of huge significance because consumer protection laws exist to protect consumers.

Again, you are misidentifying who the customer is. The customer is the advertisers not the users. The product is highly targeted advertising to users. The more Google knows about the user, the better their product (targeted advertising) is.

Business to business sales are not exempt from anti-trust laws. One of the things Microsoft got charged for was selling DOS to manufacturers based on the number of computers sold rather than the number of DOS installs. This was deemed anti-competitive and Microsoft's customer in this example was a business (computer manufacturers). This was a business to business anti-trust case.

https://www.justice.gov/atr/competitive-impact-statement-us-...

>If this drove competitors out of business because they couldn't compete, that's fine.

I mean maybe. It gets murky because the customer is the advertisers. Imagine if Google released a car and gave it away for free. Almost all other car manufacturers would cease to exist. They were able to offer it for free because of the profits from search. The cost of running Gmail and YouTube is paid for by search profits. All this needs to be argued / decided in court, you and I can just speculate all we want. It won't be tried in court because of regulatory capture, which is really what the article is about.

>Competition to Youtube crops up from time to time and never seems to go anywhere because Youtube is a business that is extremely difficult to make profitable (i.e. they can't compete because their product is inferior).

Yes, this makes a lot more sense if you consider the product is the network of users to sell ads too, not the users themselves. Now you have the network effect which was built by being able to run YouTube for 2 years without selling a single ad.

>Many competing email clients exist, paid and non-paid

Yes but Gmail is #1 and it jumped there really quick because they were able to offer what no-one else could, because the subsidized moving into that industry with search profits, which no one else could. That's the anti-trust part.

https://corp.inntopia.com/most-common-domains-update-2019/
Yikes. There's a lot to unpack here.

> Does 100% living off of crypto count as 'actual' to you? Plenty of people in that boat.

Who? Lol. The overwhelming majority of people do not "live off of crypto".

> The fact that someone doesn't want to pay an extra $3 and wait 15 minutes to buy a coke is really a poor basis for reasoning.

No it isn't. If I go to CVS to buy a Coke I don't want to be there for fifteen minutes. I want to be there for a few seconds at most.

> Is TSLA also not "actually" valuable? You have to sell it for it to do anything too.

Yeah but it's unlikely people are _living off of it_ or trying to convince other people that if they get in, then they too can live off of it.

> From before the Bitcoin whitepaper, the goal has been to decouple value from arbitrary, inflationary, corporate and state-imposed forces. It was referred to as egold not ePayPal.

Yes, we know why Bitcoin exists. We also know why _it doesn't work_. The power of the State dictates the power of the currency.
I don't see how this place is smarter specially when it is not tech-related.
They existed when people paid for most things with cash. Though I suspect their business model was less lucrative.
I am doing this sort of thing, mostly in a specific domain (physical security), but starting to setup some calls with other consultants to go over the kinds of topics you describe, and related things. Email me: brian@pelicanzero.com if you like.
^^^ for your user class, probably true. But for others, it is deeply needed. The two mainstream use cases I see are transferring money where a fiat bank was too problematic (fees, limits, audits, etc) and purchasing items with the perception of anonymity (e.g. an incognito subscription with a coingate payment option alongside Visa). It is nice to know there is a way to digitally pay for things without major payment processors running analytics on my spending.

And in providing foreign aid, crypto has helped us reliably transfer funds without corrupt intervention. Culture ebs and flows, but in this case core user needs are being met by the tech.
And the next day the value of their portfolio drops by 200%, and never quite recovers.

If your argument is that banks and savings in particular offer poor interest, the proper answer is to look into index funds and focus on long term growth, rather than short-term speculation.
Can you tell us more about your company and how the arrangement was made?
Key word is “permissionless” - anyone on earth can create more projects and anyone on earth can invest. No license, government, or agreement needed.
Yes, @bbarn I also don't think GGP meant any of those things

(Did you wake up on the wrong side today :-))
I wouldn't describe the most extremist viewpoint on most matters as a white angel. Extremism tends to turn off some people from the cause when it looks somewhat irrational. Telling people they're bad and shouldn't play non-free videogames certainly isn't going to help things much. If you make someone who would otherwise be on your side feel guilty everytime they pick up a controller to unwind at the end of the day, that's hard to swallow.
You are under the impression that most folks are investing money somehow?

Nope. Most folks are pretty poor, and realistically the money at the banks isn't collecting interest at all. The banks provide a service: Somewhere fairly safe to stick your money, where it will be available to pay for food and rent and utilities.

What most folks actually save for - when they can - is emergencies. We are talking less than a month's income at a possibly average salary. This money needs to be easily accessible. you know, in case your car breaks down. You might save for a down payment, but realistically you aren't going to be much better off by investing in anything long term. And when you are at these income levels, investing in anything that could mean you lose your money is too devastating to deal with, even if you supposedly can get "up to a 20 percent yield". Not to mention that you can't use that money for anything without planning.
Show HN: Stop wasting ~30% of your workout being distracted
Thanks!

Sorry if this seems obvious, but what is "DNS query tool" useful for?
> institutional pressures can be put on them to make them change their mind.

Which is a weird and arbitrary location to draw the line considering how those institutions tend to lean on other issues, or even the same issue in a slightly different context.
No you should always be cynical and assume the simplest dumbest reason. They didn’t think it through this far. They thought driverless would work. They just did what they thought was best along the way.

(Not to suggest that thinking things through this far out from the beginning is a feasible task)
Google Maps, military objects of Russia have become available in full resolution
> actually a working currency

Isn't "working currency" a "physical real world product"?
The best example I have is the stock exchange. Here's a DTCC discussion from 5 years ago before the whole GME-AMC fiasco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXy0qbwaqhY

There's an issue with unaccounted-for shares that is solved perfectly by the blockchain.
So many complaints about the headline, but for the purpose of getting their point across to the masses and encouraging the use of as-secure-as-can-be-known software, it’s perfectly fine.

If you cover your ass in a headline, which ultimately ends as legalese, the average person will completely ignore it due to wordiness or they will become suspicious and assume the worst.

The body and attachments do not mislead at all and that should be commended.

All this pedantry is counterproductive unless you truly know and trust your audience. Proton should be for the masses, not just for the technically adept.
I think I tested quite thoroughly on very recent Linux versions with Rsync. Of course it is difficult to pinpoint the real culprit with certainty, but USB has no error correction, and that makes it the prime suspect here.
They invest it one of dozens of other regulated ways. For example: Stock market, housing, financial derivatives, etc.

Also: A crypto stablecoin is (supposed to be) pegged to a major currency, usually the USD. So in terms of return, it shouldn't matter if you have your money invested in stablecoin or cash under your mattress. Oh wait, it does matter, because most stablecoins are scams and you'll eventually lose all your money.
> For example, had Russia tried this kind of a weapon against Kiev or Lviv then the s300 and Buks would have taken them out in a matter of minutes.

However, when supplanted by electronic warfare and decent intel, we've seen how Azerbaijan's TB2s destroyed a lot of Armenian SAM sites, without blinking. Even they took out a S300 site by marking it with a TB2 and destroying it with missiles.

So, it's not as clear cut as it seems.
Can VPN be considered as goods?
No country likes itself to be split apart, especially when a relatively rich part of the country tries to separate. I don't know about Spanish law, but serious attempts to break up the country could be considered treason where I'm from. On the other hand the whole civil war they fought 90 years ago makes the point quite complicated to the Catalan people.

If California tried to leave the USA, the American government would do anything in their power to keep them from leaving. This is still quite different, as Spain isn't as loosely structured a government as the USA, but it's equally preposterous from a government point of view.
I actually don't get what the differentiating factor is for Lyft, but based on the ads they ran on a podcast I was listening to, it seems to be "Uber, but at least somewhat trying to be socially responsible." If that's a viable niche, tells you something about Uber I guess.
A middle ground could be more specific feature macros. For example instead of checking for __MUSL__ and assuming that it supports some function check __MUSL_SOME_FUNCTION or similar.

This is basically what your configure script ends up doing (likely poorly) anyways.
The All-in-One Music Game: Karaoke, band games and dancing in the same package
I bought some crypto for the first time recently. Because Mastercard and Visa don't work for me anymore - I can't pay for services outside my country of residence, and maybe there is some obscure way to do it not touching crypto, but I chose to get some Bitcoin because that was relatively easy.
Do any C or C++ compilers behave like that in practice – have signed integer overflow which doesn't simply depend on data types and compilation options, but varies more dynamically, depending on the values, runtime execution mode, register allocations, optimisations, etc?

In practice, the space of actual undefined behaviours is a lot smaller than the space of legally permitted undefined behaviours – it may be legal per the standard for a compiler in a case of undefined behaviour to make demons fly out of your nose, but I don't think any compiler has ever actually done that, and it would be a mighty strange occurrence if any ever did. Less jocularly, even if some particular type of undefined behaviour is technically permitted by the standard, if all major compilers don't do it, it can be a reasonable engineering decision to assume none ever will, and deal with that unlikely risk if and when it actually occurs.
How to design the most controversial button on the internet and not screw it up
And I was thinking it was only me.
I also noticed one more thing since last year: At times, my internet speed would feel stalled, so I check if my wireless connection is still ok. I open the wifi connection tray from the right hand corner and I notice that only my SSID is displayed. The moment I hover over my SSID, the other neighboring SSIDs and my other SSIDs(2G, 5G ones to which I am not connected to) appear suddenly. And 8 out of 10 times my speed gets a boost and everything starts working properly.
There are a few online only banks, but beyond those you don’t have to have access to any computer at all to get access to your bank account at most banks.

> Having an interest does not imply exercising that interest is legitimate.

Whether that interest is legitimate and acceptable is a decision for the user. If I decide to accept the terms for my banking app, what’s that got to do with you?

> one cannot in good faith argue that consumers choose locked products among equivalent unlocked ones

I refer you to the market share enjoyed by the iPhone relative to Android (when it was moderately ‘free’). Clearly a lot of people, myself included, are in fact making that choice.

> the interests of a free society, that needs a populace able to use software other than only what is approved by giant corporations

How valuable can a fundamental, essential freedom actually be when hardly anyone understand what it is or cares a fig about it, and most of those who do understand it still don’t care?
Minus the whole slavery thing, no?
This article has no substance and the author doesn't understand the basic concepts of the ecosystem. For example trustless is completely misunderstood in this context. I agree that we need regulation but not because of the reasons outlined in this article.
That right there is the crux: "And personally I find it rewarding to learn how to properly layer the code in order to factor out platform concerns."

I like tech riddles and figuring out how to make stuff work, investors unfortunately do not.

If you constantly have to defend why you can't just do X if everybody else can just because the stuff is only available on Unity and you have to write the underlying plugins yourself it get's old pretty quickly.
> I never pay for anything on the Web, because I cannot pay anonymously.

Wow. My first thought upon reading that is that seems quite extreme. Having said that, it just shows you how normalized it's become to track all transactions.
Anti cheat is an impossible task like DRM. Fundamentally it can’t be perfect for most games. But continuing the cat and mouse obscurity game has been working pretty well.

How can you possibly verify the mouse was moved by a human rather than a script when the script had the ability to lie about any check you put in place. In the end it comes to making the check so hard to understand that you can’t work it out fast enough to keep ahead.
You have fundamental skills and you have room to play around with them. As in, you have been walking tight ropes (for the sake of example) for decades and its boring, so you try some jumps and runs on it. For them, barely staying on is an issue, so any additional variables is too much cognitive load.

An array wasn't always just "some ordered collection with fixed sequential memory". It was a very specific C# implementation written out as var fooArr = new barType[]. It was confusing that in Python its fooArr = []. "Why is it different? What does it all mean? The syntax is hard to remember. What if this adds errors? I just want my code to work."
I'm not one to approve of the spanish government management of the crisis, which was terrible, but there are quite a lot of missing things here that are important to the story.

> vote with over 80% for their indipendence from Spain

The 2017 referendum vote ended up with 90% of votes for independence. However, only 43% of the census participated, mainly due to the fact that this referendum was not binding at all, and wasn't even "legal". Other referendums have had similar results.

> And then stuff happens that I only read from bad China and bad Russia.

I think regular media picked up on that with no issues. I remember reading detailed articles on Politico or The Guardian, for example.

> Those political leaders are arrested.

They were arrested not for explaining their goal of independence but because they exceeded their functions and competences when they held the referendum. Now, there's a lot of discussion to be had about the political motivations of those charges and the punishments, but I think the reality that they used public resources to hold a referendum that they legally couldn't hold is undeniable. That was the trigger, not just saying they wanted independence.

> Spain then acts hard on the region, holds a gun against the head of many businesses located in the Catalonian region so they have to move out from there.

That's not exactly what happened. Some companies legally moved headquarters from Catalonia to other regions, and some new investments were reduced, but those are mainly motivated by the legal insecurity about what was going to happen (and also, take into account that businesses are led by people with their own ideologies and biases of the situation). But it hasn't been that impactful overall.

> I cannot stop overseeing the paralls to other conflicts around the world, very hot conflicts.

For starters, other than the police action in the referendum, there's been a remarkable lack of violence on both sides. I mean, every 11th of september there are demonstrations for independence around the Diada (day of Catalonia) celebrations, political calls to action and such, and those things are not repressed. So I don't think pointing parallels to "very hot conflicts" is warranted.
Oh fuck off with that apologist bs.

Scenario: you want to sell an app for Mac.

You can put it on the Mac app store and pay Apple’s tax (and live at the mercy of Apple, who are a terrible business partner)

Or you can sell it through your website and not pay Apple’s tax. Except if you do this, Apple will tell your customers that you’re potentially a virus, and you have to invest more on customer support and education materials just to teach people how to launch your app (through no fault of your own). In some cases, it’s just not feasible to do this, and you just have to accept reduced sales and/or increased returns/chargebacks from angry customers that blame you for Apple’s decision.

Apple’s Mac app store has a huge competitive advantage thanks to this unfair practice. Your competitors will beat you if they put their app on the Mac app store, no matter how much money you invest into advertising and improving your product.

That’s anti-competitive behavior from a monopolist. It’s the same situation on Android (it’s actually worse on Android, as Google is the pioneer in this field)
My whole career I had the attitude that the job was more important than the money. I have budgeted and planned so I could retire well even though I have not made a lot of money. The problem is that I did not foresee that a divorce would end up halving my retirement. I think we would all do well to destroy the idea that enjoying work is more important than making money. We have a limited amount of time and effort that we can invest so we need to maximize our earnings.
Re transferring money: Do you think transferring money abroad is expensive because of technology? It's not, it's because of regulation, international agreements etc. What do you think will happen when crypto should go maintstream? Do you think it will just stay unregulated? No, we're already seeing countries starting to regulate crypto. And then you'll just end up at square one.

Re anonymity: Your every crypto transaction is publicly viewable under your pseudonym. Once somebody connects your pseudodynm, all your anonimity is gone. If you purchase something with Visa, only you, Visa, and the company your purchasing from sees your info. I'd take that each time over a public trail of my purchases.
Secure email is snake oil; no amount of cruft can make it both reasonable secure and useful (as in federated). Other protocols better fill that space because they were designed for security needs.
I was maybe condescending but in what place I was arrogant?

And who seems more ignorant - dollars & bitcoins user or only dollars user?

> nobody cares

Except of you?
But they had to get to where they are now somehow. It's hard to believe this exact company culture could habe achieved anything more involved than cloning overseas electrical devices like toasters and microwaves. So was the culture different in the past in some way at least? Like, at least having more technically knowledgeable people in upper management, if not more creative freedom for engineers et al?

I'd like to believe the process has to be at least a little bit similar to how agile, innovative and leading companies in the West can within a decade or two turn into stiff, burocratic slow moving behemoths that at best manage to buy any upcoming competition instead of innovating on its own.
I thought that was just a wrapper around the website, to be honest. But regardless, the app still loads JS from the website and executes it, so it's still a backdoor possibility.
This sounds crazy but why not let go and allow them to decide their own fate?
Spot on.

All the tutorials, articles, etc just cover small bits and nothing addresses the full software dev lifecycle as it pertains to games.

Managing binary assets across even a small team presents a set of challenges the normal web-devs like myself have been unlikely to encounter, as well.
I'm not so sure. Movie aren't all there to see. A vast majority of work to get movies to look & sound like they do happen behind the scenes, off the set, in editing rooms where color corrections, sound effects, cgi, and countless other tweaks are made. That's as much the source code equivalent as the final product. The final product is more like a picture of (some) source code and UI rolled into one.
Same happened to me as a child. I fell down in a deep pool and start sinking. After some time of trying to escape and seeing just water bubbles suddenly pictures of my life started flashing. They looked like photos of random moments with my family changing really fast and continued few seconds before the life guard pull me out. I didn’t really think I would die at that time so seems that the life flashes were completely unconscious.