skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a friend in federal law enforcement that deals with crypto and financial crimes. He explains it like this:

"First, I need to get a 65 year old Federal prosecutor to understand what this case is about. Then, they need to be able to potentially argue the case in court and to a jury that almost always has no idea what any of this means."

He goes on to say that wire fraud is essentially a universal catch-all charge that distills the crux/burden of the case to two facts:

1) They committed fraud.

2) They touched a computer while doing it.

These two points are much easier to argue, prove, and most importantly get a jury to understand (and convict on). Even though most federal prosecutions result in a plea deal of some sort the simplicity of arguing and proving wire fraud results in a much higher rate of success for a favorable plea deal and/or the threat of going to trial with a crime that's so easy to prove.
As with many inexplicable decisions that come from many large companies: it's what happens when teams make decisions in a vacuum chamber maintained inside a bubble held inside an ivory tower surrounded by a silo. I exaggerate but the teams will not always be in touch with The external feedback often comes as a surprise and if they care, they will scramble for a response.
It goes beyond grants and extrinsic motivation...well maybe the latter category is pretty much all-encompassing.

Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker talked about this at length here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJFKl_5JTnA

Some points:

- Original (risky) research is detrimental and likely fatal to a career in science

- Actually creating systems doubly so
>Nano has the same ponzi-like economics as the rest of the cryptocurrencies so that's a no-go.

Then fork it yourself and change the tokenomics to suit your interests. If others agree with you, then your fork may become popular and useful.

>GNU Taler is explicitly not a cryptocurrency, in particular it should not be used in a fully peer-to-peer manner, there needs to be a centralized operator that's legally required to hold the funds backing the tokens

The issuer does not need to be legally anything. What you need is for the peers to trust the issuer not to double spend. If the law enables that, then so be it, but the GNU Taler system can also function as part of an extralegal system.

>That thing that stablecoins were supposed to do, but didn't because crypto companies don't care about actually being honest or responsible with customers' money.

The difference between GNU Taler and stablecoins is that stablecoins encourage custodial "staking" AKA investing in ponzi schemes. Whereas in GNU Taler, the issuer can only charge the users on withdrawls/deposits like a typical bank.

"because crypto companies don't care about actually being honest or responsible with customers' money?" Please. Users gravitate towards ponzi schemes because they want to be the ones scamming, even if odds are they're getting scammed themselves. The investors are the ones that instigate this behavior, whether that's through a lack of due diligence or otherwise.

>Tokens in a ledger don't have any inherent value or consuming demand, they're backed by nothing but empty promises.

There is no need for cryptocurrencies to be "backed" by gold, because creating coins or double-spending is non-trivial, so there is no desperate need for additional assurances. The goal of cryptocurrency is not to be a sound investment but instead a useful medium of exchange. To that end, it only needs to ensure its value in the short-term.

Cryptocurrencies are not backed by "empty promises". They are not backed by anything at all. If users have an expectation that they will be able to redeem their cryptocurrency for goods and services in the (near) future, then it may be valuable for them if they find utility in it versus some other payment method. But they own that risk themselves, regardless of what snake-oil salesmen will tell them.

>I certainly hope not. All the more reason to make it illegal ASAP.

I agree. We need to make crime illegal again. Should civilians have access to military-grade cryptography? Bring back the crypto wars!
> each of which [wire fraud and wire fraud conspiracy] carries a maximum sentence of 20 years.

So they're looking at maximum 40 years. One of them is charged with two counts on each, so 80 years max.

It's not a light deal...
It's hard to see through the fog of breathless reporting in that link. Here's one closer to the source:

https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/06/08/webb-engineered-to-en...

It seems like they have 4 impacts that are consistent with expectations and one outside expectations. The first 4 can be be mostly corrected by fine-tuning the deformable optics.
I'd be OK with this if they'd split the savings with me--at least in some cases. I don't always need an "MD Doctor."
Go with the flow: New findings about moving electricity could improve fusion
If you had a Bluetooth keyboard or mouse, then Bluetooth would have been enabled before installing the update, otherwise how could you type or click to install the update in the first place? Also, the same thing happens on Mac laptops with built-in keyboard and trackpad. Moreover, it happens on iPhone too, which has no peripherals.

Not sure why you changed "every" OS update to "important" OS updates.
> Every single time I've hired a general-- I've had to fight scope creep; fight to get them to actually complete work; fight to get the actual quoted materials; fight to fix problematic subcontractor work; fight to avoid price increases.

Our experience with looking into GCs for a kitchen remodel was that their premium was so outrageous and their ideas/plans so mediocre that we were much better off just doing it ourselves.

All the specialist contractors and laborers who actually did the work were basically fine, easy-enough to work with, charged reasonable rates, and did good work.

I think we paid about 1/2 what the cheapest GC wanted (some were way higher) and used much better materials than any of them were calling for in their initial plans they used for their bids. I can only assume their entire market is people with so much money that they don't give a shit what it costs as long as they don't have to do any work themselves. "$15,000 to save me some googling and phone calls? Sure, seems reasonable"
Not quite what I had in mind. I'd like to have the entire snack available in audio form (yes this is my little upvote for the 5-minute digest!). I wouldn't want tiny snippets of audio if I'm already reading.
That's approximately correct. Public criticism is very, very difficult to do safely in the UK and that's for the lighter fare. The same is also true in, for example, France. Public criticism of officials (eg police) is legitimately dangerous and can easily get you a jail sentence.
Optimizing Blender's Import
But crypto is not an equity and your 401k is not tied up in it at all?
Amazon to buy primary care provider One Medical for $3.9B
I don't think VC is at all like a Ponzi scheme, even thought most VCs depend on there being a "next investor in line." That dependency is not because we're looking for a sucker to shift a bad investment onto, but because most companies' capital needs grow dramatically. So you end up having lots of investors of all sizes, and that works more like checks and balances than a Ponzi scheme.

investors.gov defines a Ponzi scheme as "an investment fraud that pays existing investors with funds collected from new investors. Ponzi scheme organizers often promise to invest your money and generate high returns with little or no risk. But in many Ponzi schemes, the fraudsters do not invest the money."

A few thoughts here:

- the money is actually invested.

- the founders are the ones that decide how to use the money, not the investors. (And generally no one suggests that founders as a group are complicit in a Ponzi scheme.)

- the next investment round is not required -- some companies get to profitability or have a good exit without further funding.

- the next investment round is far from guaranteed. Most stats I've seen suggest that ~30% of seed stage companies raise a Series A. So if it's a Ponzi scheme, then it's a poorly executed one ;)

- the outcomes generated by founders who get VC funding are high impact. See: https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1546109494228402176 (quote: This paper argues that 20% of the largest three hundred US public firms & 75% of the largest VC-backed ones “would not have existed or achieved their current scale without an active VC industry.")

- the next stage investor is generally unaffiliated with the earlier investor AND evaluates a company on its merits. I.e. if our seed company can't get to a stage where they can convince at least one Series A investor to invest -- and as mentioned above, many cannot -- then it goes out of business and we lose our investment. And fwiw, if the later stage fund does a poor job picking companies, it will itself go out of business.

- 99% of the time, our investors are not paid back when another investor invests, they are paid when a company exits. That means either the public market or an individual company thought the startup was a good enough business to invest their money into.

- returns are not promised to our investors -- if anything, it's well known that VC is especially risky and that most VC funds don't have good returns.

> So much value is absorbed in the VC pipe than by the time a company IPOs the chance of retail investors seeing returns is minimal to none.

My understanding is that this is largely regulation related. Companies used to go public much earlier, but because there's an increasingly high burden and cost to being public, lots of companies choose to wait for as long as possible. And there is now enough funding out there that companies are able to stay private for a long time.
When the U.S. Army Planned for a Fight in American Cities (2018)
Sounds like you're unhappy there. Best move it to start interviewing to find a place with a better fit, and when you find it, go.
Try web development agencies. You may be able to get on an older project that isn't in such a rush and can be moved along by a part time contractor. That's what I'm doing now. I found the open position on the agency's website.
you're spot on - working at apache cassandra has been on my list for 7 years. Not a big fan of the databricks engineering team went to school with a few of them and didn't enjoy my interaction with them
When you gain that information under the understanding you won't abuse it, solely for the purposes of abusing it, you have committed fraud.
Do you have any sources for that claim? Because I've heard the argument that it was actually the Enlightenment, and the removal of religion from government (e.g. separation of church and state, reason and science in place of dogmatism), that was the primary source of inspiration for the country's founding. A search for "Declaration of Independence" with "Enlightenment" provides many references for this.
Link should be changed.
great idea, thank you
Much better to drive across the border and then book a flight with a non-US airline.
A Deep and Sweet Way to End America’s Cold Civil War
It's kind of meaningless to look at popular vote numbers because presidential campaigns are explicitly planned to maximize electoral college votes. Hypothetically, if we picked presidents by popular vote then campaigns would look completely different. For example, there would be a much greater effort to get out the vote in states like Oklahoma and Maryland, which are currently non-competitive.

In the 2016 race, the Clinton campaign spent about twice as much per popular vote received than the Trump campaign. So by that metric, Democrat messaging wasn't successful.
This sounds like a tough position to be in. I once left a position for reasons other than advancement and in retrospect I think I delayed personal growth by not leaning into those reasons and doing the work to change myself.

This may not be similar to your situation. I wouldn't advocate anyone remain in a position causing themselves physical or psychological harm. Wishing you well in this decision.
Coinbase. It's in the indictment.
I worked for an investment bank for many years. We had to sign a declaration that we would not make trades of any kind without permission from compliance (the withholding of this permission in 2012 is why I am not a BitCoin millionaire). However, there was no requirement to hand over login details to brokerage accounts etc. I would be surprised if there was elsewhere.
agreed, i think it's time to check out fintech; thank you
Plus, on what planet would you be refreshing that query every second of the day?
At least in my experience, th orgs near me buy the land, place restrictions on it, then sell it. Only rarely do they hold it and open it to the public.
Insider trading is (roughly) specifically about using non-public corporate information to make money.

Fraud is generally about deceiving people. Wire fraud is specifically about deceiving people using telecommunications devices - imagine when telephones first became popular - a fraudster before had to go knock on every door, expose his face to the town, and possibly be driven out if people found out what he was doing. With telephones, the fraudster could sit in a loft in NYC and call thousands of people all over the country with their fraud, and there would be very little anyone could do to stop them.
> The vast majority of scientific advances in the last hundred years happened before World War I and right after - most notably, special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics.

Specifics: Higgs boson. Discovery of neutrino mass. Quantum chromodynamics. Imaging the event horizon around a black hole. Gravitational wave detection.

More generally: General relativity came out in 1915. That didn't mean that we knew everything about gravity in 1915, though. We only were able to do certain more detailed calculations recently. Do you ascribe all of that progress to 1915?

And, if something similar is discovered today, the later pieces - the more detailed calculations - haven't shown up yet. That makes it hard for anything today to have the impact of things 100 years ago, since much of the impact hasn't happened yet, even if the one-time-event discovery has.
99designs worked well for us, but for a few fairly straight-forward design tasks. And the translation and coding was done afterward in-house.
I'm seeing that some people are upgrading the motherboard and re-purposing the old one as a stand-alone desktop computer... Have you considered selling cases to be used with old revisions of the motherboard?

I mean, I could buy the new motherboard and the case of the old one at the same time, it would make sense.
Thanks for reading!

I appreciate the feedback, but the hard part about feedback like this is: how do I identify who's right? Half the people in the thread are saying the old design is better, and half are saying the new design is better.

If I could flip a switch and try the design you're describing and see how it affects sales, I'd try it, but taking professional photographs and redesigning the site is several thousands of dollars and dozens of hours of management time.

>The photos on https://tinypilotkvm.com/product/tinypilot-voyager2 are good. Put them on the home page.

Sidenote: these are actually computer-generated, not photos. Good right?

>And because I like to do free QA testing, here's a bug :)

Ah, good catch! Thanks! Fixed now.
How is it working for Apple?
Glassdoor is always a strange concept. To give anonymous feedback, use your official work email to sign in...

only a person who doesn't care about anonymity would do that.
100% this.

I heard it said that the only things Americans know about is World war Two and they don't know that much about that. It's a sobering thought.

To your point, if anyone wants to see the effects of unchecked corporate power, just look at the 19th century and the robber barons. most notably, look at the history of the Pinkerton Detective Agency [1].

"Detective agency" is an inocuous sounding name but at its peak the Pinkertons outnumbered the US Army. Pinkertons were frequently used as striker breakers and to quash any form of labor movement. They did so with the blessing of the US government.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)
This is stated to make independent verification of the exploit easier. It might or might not work on other systems, but security researchers and maintainers should waste as little time as possible to reproduce it!
I’ve gotten some very good work from Fiverr lately. You have to go beyond the lowest end and find someone in the $50-100 range.
No, I don't think that at all. A lot of these issues pre-date big tech. I don't think you actually read the article. Explain to me how Apple is ripping us apart by not allowing other payment platforms on the App store and how being able to pay for in-app purchases through PayPal will make everything right again?
Well let's put it this way - if you lose a wing at any altitude, you are screwed. But if you "only" have forward velocity as a problem, then you might just get lucky based on orientation or some other thing which absorbs some energy. If you're high altitude and lose that wing, there are probably fewer freak lucky things which can prevent you from pancaking into the earth.

One example of the latter is the many crashes of speedboats. They certainly can be fatal crashes, but sometimes things go unexpectedly well for the driver.
I agree about HN's skew towards startup, but I think most full-time software engineers support businesses that are essentially available 24/7 or at least 12/7. Anything involving selling online, handling money, any kind of SaaS, or any company with worldwide customer support needs something, even if the main product engineers aren't aware of it (usually to the detriment of the people who are on-call). That's lots of startups, but it's also most blue chips or any kind of infrastructure.

> I’m a research engineer at a innovation lab.

I mean, assuming this is private, this is either an incredibly biased/exclusive or a very startup-economy-ish job itself. If your company is otherwise big enough to have a lab it's big enough there's on-call teams somewhere, and if you want to be a CTO/VP/DirEng/Architect you'd better know how they work.
No such thing as a done deal when all parties have billions to burn on lawyers & appeals
Put a point in the "no third-party web engines" column.
What timestamp on that talk if you don't mind?
While the damage to the mirror segment itself can't be corrected, the effect on the JWST as a whole is negligible and it is still operating within performance limits. Just telling someone that it received "significant uncorrectable damage from micrometeoroids?" seems intentionally worded to incite a negative response directed towards NASA.
This was also my experience. Could never pull the trigger on the Carbon for this reason.
maybe the eucalyptus trees are confusing them and causing them all to blow into the ocean
You vastly overestimate how much PR matters. There's no shortage of companies and politicians with absolute dog water public images, that are still wildly profitable/constantly get re-elected.
It used to be common and it's clearly derogatory, since the acronym itself sounds bad, and it was created to describe a negative situation in the first place (often with blame attached).
This makes it sound like public criticism is virtually impossible in the UK

No, it just means your right to public criticism is dependent entirely on the public opinion of what is and isn't off-limits. You can say pretty much whatever you want as long as you don't direct it at the wrong person. This is of course a situation most Americans would find horrific.
> We can now travel distances in a time that was unimaginable before, but we breathe the poison as a direct result of it.

A city full of horse manure wasn't all that healthy, either.
>is what sets apart the blockchain and traditional financial networks, when it comes to fraud

Are you telling me that fraudsters get caught on the blockchain more than other places?
Security needs to be a default though. It will be a serious problem if this law ends up being interpreted as requiring encrypted messaging systems to accept insecure messages by default.
Agencies as a rule, and I cannot understate this, are always trying to find a way to extract more money from you. It is the core of an agencies work. Most of their thinking and brain power go to extracting money from their clients. They achieved their goal spectacularly.

Realistically, they never would have taken you on as a client for 15k. It would be barely worth their time. Their goal was always to extract about 40-50k from you. And at the end of the day it looks like they did some pretty good work, so hey, you achieved your goal too, just at a much higher than desired price.
Insults have the capacity for correctness.
Hi,

This is Artur, Founder & CEO of Autentica.

After months of hard work, we’re excited to share our progress with the Hacker News community!

When publishing this post, we scanned over 4.5 million NFTs and found that over 2 million (43%) are copies of 57,000 NFTs.

Our report is chronological, dating back to 2018, and the numbers show that this situation is becoming more problematic.

Why do we care?

Autentica is a technology company committed to empowering and safeguarding the creators of the world, and this is why we decided to create the Autentica Blockchain Insights. We want anyone to benefit from the value of blockchain technology and help bring mass adoption to the NFT industry. Newcomers looking to invest are unlikely to have the knowledge to do their own research and due diligence on NFT projects before investing, as scammers use newer techniques to exploit inexperienced newcomers.

How does it work?

We can scan the Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain network using our technology to detect which NFTs are suspicious. We’re then able to define if they are duplicates, which collection it is originally from, how many of them are there, and where they are listed.

What do we do now?

Our goal is to grow awareness of this problem, and that is why we are offering our insights for free to anyone who wants to find out if an NFT is authentic or a duplicate.

Our work continues as we follow our roadmap to include Polygon and other EVM-based blockchains in our tech stack by the end of the year.

We’re seeing steps in the right direction from NFT marketplaces that have created technology to flag NFTs that could be duplicates — a great step in the right direction.

We hope our insights report will help create widespread participation to solve the problem of fake NFTs in our industry.

---

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask and we will happily answer them.
They do, if you try to verify with one it's likely your account will be locked.
You seem like a young and eager engineer. You drove your car into a tar pit. You can stand on top of it and yell and scream until you are blue in the face, and everyone will agree with you that nobody should have put this tar pit here in the first place. But you won't ever get your car out.

Is your passion to make things or burn down corporations on technicalities? If it's really the latter, I'd suggest law school. Either way, get after it!
I wasn't suggesting proxying anything, just that the browser should attempt to correct errors that it introduces into page rendering when it spoofs feedback to the server.

And again, is it a realistic threat model to imagine that a high volume website, trusted enough to be browsed regularly by Lockdown-paranoid users, will be hacked in such a way as to deliver a fingerprinting attack to browsers, and only that?

I appreciate the sense of superiority that you have, but try to follow along.
Is it still reasonable if it makes a contractor earn below minimum wage?
Isn't this all extremely elementary and common knowledge for someone designing these workflows? Next blog post about how to not waste money by just not doing something extremely poorly optimized.