skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is important to separate goals from results.

It is a goal of crypto to be an independent medium of exchange, free from governments and to some extent the rest of the economy, and perhaps even someday become the basis of the economy itself.

That does not mean it has done these things. It does not mean it has failed these things either, because goals frankly don't mean much. This is in one of my favorite classes of wisdom, "things that sound obvious when I say them but observably by their actions most people aren't thinking this way." Do not be too quick to say to yourself "oh, yes, jerf I know that goals aren't results", because, again, by their actions many people observably do not have this as clear in their head when they are planning and acting as they may think.

As for the results of crypto, it is certainly clear that crypto is a haven for scams, pyramid schemes, and pump-and-dumps. That also on its own does not disqualify it; I think there's more in crypto proportionally than the US dollar but all fiat currencies have also had scams, pyramid schemes, and pump-and-dumps denominated in them. It is much less clear that crypto has attained its listed goals; there is non-zero evidence that they are in play, but it is also very mixed evidence and you can find plenty of evidence to the contrary of all the things I list.

Crypto has largely existed in a regime with 0% interest, as was mentioned. It is a very viable theory that despite the goals of crypto of being an independent currency, that it is in fact a derivative of existing fiat currency. As for the evidence, there is the fact that it is acting exactly like a very leveraged fiat derivative would be acting when money stops being free, which doesn't necessarily perfectly logically prove the case but is strong evidence. Perhaps someday crypto will be independent but it isn't putting on a very convincing show of it right now. Instead it's looking an awfully lot like the most leveraged fiat currency derivative there is out there at the moment, or at least the most leveraged one us normals can see.
You can say that, but when MtGox went bankrupt, and also lost 4 fifths of its stored crypto, the court just heaped together all assets into one big pile and all creditors into one big pile and let them fight it out.

So now there's a bunch of assholes including but not limited to Peter Vessenes, that are suing the bankrupt entity for billions (completely frivolous of course) and all the depositors have waited for 8 years now to get a fraction back that the vultures have been picking on.

It's completely unfair, but the courts simply don't distinguish between someone who partners with an exchange, and someone who deposits money at an exchange.
this is exactly why the unix philosophy is flawed.

this is not a flex.
For me, it was Touretzky's Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation that finally made recursion click. He gives a fantastic, simple, high-level breakdown of different recursion models with simple, non-mathematical examples. The student was ready and the master appeared.
At <$100K, what is the %loss due to fraud?
Pardon for living under a rock, but why are crypto exchanges affected by the mood in the crypto market?

I thought that a crypto exchange functions like a currency market: I put an offer to sell 10,000 EUR for 1 BTC and someone else puts an offer to buy 10,000 EUR for 1 BTC. When orders cross, a transaction happens and the exchange gets a fee, whether in currency or crypto units.

What are crypto exchanges fundamentally doing differently that they are suddenly losing money?

Surely a drop in transactions would make them lose fees and require them to fire some staff, but I expected a "Facebook-like" downsizing, not a full-blown bankruptcy.

What am I missing?
I don't really get what he means here.

>you can't (want to)* want what you want

It seems to me that "want to want what you want" is a tautology, if you want something you already want to want it.

you can't (want to want what you want).
you can't want to want to want what you want).

And it is recursive:

you can't (want to want to want it)
It's in the name, isn't it? An exchange is where assets are exchanged.

For that service they get a fee, usually tied to the transaction volume. Pay any expenses out of that fee and keep transactions rates high is a good mode for survival.

Unfortunately, if asset prices depreciate, fees tank too. But that's manageable.

What's not manageable though if you start using assets of your customers to create a new revenue stream by locking those assets up somewhere or by using them for high-risk trades.

When people start asking their assets back you suddenly have a problem.
> exchange shouldn't count deposited crypto as their asset

An exchange shouldn’t have deposits. That’s a word for banks and brokers. In practice, these shops act like funds.
I didn't call Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme.

It's more of a pump and dump scheme where people extol made up virtues to get suckers to put money in, and as demonstrated for well over a decade now, it's a complete financial crapstorm filled with theft, criminal activity, and people stealing incredible sums of money from the unsuspecting.

But sure, it's not a Ponzi scheme. It just makes them easier to do to people.
thank for you for the considered answer.
To be fair, that data point doesn’t tell you their backup, security, or alerting protocols.
If you split your business into two (or more) parts, segregating legal activities into one entity and illegal stuff into a different entity, that doesn't make strictly the legal company good, or not a scam. FTX+Alameda is a Ponzi and always has been, and the mechanism why they failed (printing clown bucks, then selling them to hype the price, then print more and more) is exactly a Ponzi.
I assume it's about the human rights and safety abuses, but haven't been paying attention to the details.
sorry but your comment shows that you obviously haven't looked into this stuff and are just spewing whatever headlines you've read.

a week a few years back.. that doesn't sound too bad honestly and looks like something you can prepare for on future project. i know that Poland had just greenlit two huge nuclear power plants which i think it's a great idea, wish we would do the same in my country.

there's simply no such thing as a grid scale battery. it doesn't exist and never will work current technology. the batteries in Australia are not what you think they are, in reality they're there to fix another huge problem with renewables which is frequency leveling and NOT to provide power when there's no renewable energy for which it would be good for a whooping 8 minutes. So.. the only viable way is to go with what's called power2x where you can create hydrogen, ammonia or something else, this process however it's quite inefficient requiring you too install around 7 times the capacity you need, as well building new infrastructure and power plants to use these synthetic fuels, this might still be a bit cheaper than nuclear, but we actually don't know that yet.

it's also not a solution to just build insane overcapacity??? are you really suggesting we go several hours a day or even weeks without electricity?? i live in a country where we've give all in on wind and let me tell you.. it's freaking annoying to have to look up the current price to see if you should turn on the washing machine, charge your car etc. and it's simply not true that houses in central Europe can stay comfortably hot more than a day during winter.

to be honest you sound very out of touch, but i guess that's what happen when you make a good developer salary and live in a cheap country. if your house can really stay warm more than a day in winter and still have fresh air to breath you must live in a high tech mansion.
SBF spent 99.9% Dems and 0.1% Repub, according to your first link.

You’re telling untrue facts according to your own sources — to minimize that the second largest Dem donor was a criminal stealing customer funds. Your comparison to Repubs is unfounded as none of their donors engaged in organized crime like SBF.

Why are you spreading election misinformation?
[2] is referring to 1inch offering 8.05% APY on the 1inch token _only_, which is easy when only 621m out of 1.5b tokens are circulating (i.e. more 1inch tokens are printed to pay the fake interest).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Mochary

Mochary is CEO Coach to companies including Coinbase, Opendoor, Bolt, and Clearbit.[1] Mochary was a co-founder and Chairman of Totality Corporation, founded in 1999 and acquired by MCI Inc. in 2005.
Democrats Are Blowing It with Silicon Valley
Nope, because most people are not companies nor wealthy either, so you don't make such an argument on the extremes. That's what is truly irrelevant.
Which is when you get bubbles of all kinds. Because with a bit of painting snd decorating - and wishful thinking, of which there is always plenty - you can make almost any bubble look like a safe profitable investment.

Then the tide goes out and everyone says "How could this have happened?"

Again.

It's all suspiciously faith-based and aggressively anti-realistic.
It's not expected to exchange back, it is expected to give back cryptocurrency deposited there.
At one point I was so used to Notational Velocity that I needed it on Windows and didnt want to adopt other available solutions. So I built a barebones clone in Java: https://github.com/vinodkd/jNV.
For ruby in particular, Metaprogramming Ruby helped me understand the deeper semantics of the language in a way that has been very helpful over the years.
The US just sanctioned TornadoCash's involvement with the US financial system, not from the internet.
https://www.npmjs.com/package/rekwest
Thank you for asking, it brightened up my day.

I am not an expert.

A mix of interest, a compulsion/obsession with learning the basics of anything to make optimal decisons, and get taken more seriously by experts (it turns out all it takes to get your optometrist to take you seriously is to use words like "autorefractor" and "phoroptor"), overconfidence ("I know RF, and light is an electromagnetic wave too, how different can it be?") and I guess also frustration (what do you mean, I need to renew the contact lens prescription every year, I can only be prescribed one type and I need your blessing to try 2-weeklies from the same brand, which you would have happily prescribed instead of the dailies? No thanks, I'll just import them then.)

But really, I've just worn glasses for a long time and nothing I wrote there is actually all that deep. I may have read a few papers.
And quite interesting that most of the FTX team/founders are reported to now be in Hong Kong - arguably knowing they have the protection of China?
Interesting, thanks for the added information.
Perhaps that default-critical stance is just how they thought to solicit "donations" from the industry.
Sounds very positive, awesome they want to help out with climate change.
This happened in Canada
Had a really hard time understanding 3d graphics programming until I watched Chili’s 3D fundamentals course on youtube: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqCJpWy5Fohe8ucwhksiv9h...
https://climatetrace.org/map

Saved you a click.

Looking at Europe it is absolutely bewildering how DRAX stands out like a sore thumb. Absolutely criminal that that thing hasn't been shut down yet. Even more criminal that they get away with receiving 'green' funding.

Also we in the EU should make a particularly large effort in funding the replacement of Coal plants in Poland. Insane how much they disproportionately contribute to emissions.
I think they are more like a bank, when everyone wants to withdraw at the same time, bad things happen.
Crypto exchanges always have lots of money because plenty of people keep their money inside. Those lots of money are getting withdrawn by owners and spend. It would be stupid not to do so. Free money yo. It works as long as exchange grows (more money to spend) or at least does not shrink. It stops working when lots of people want to withdraw their assets which are already gone. Time to hide.
What do you use for your getting things done workflow? I just started using neovim and found the neorg (https://github.com/nvim-neorg/neorg) package which has a GTD module.
> get paid if the movie doesn't go well?

There's something called contracts and not all actors are paid in the same way. "LOL" as you said.
Bill Gates pledged the same and yet his wealth hasn't reduced. Worse, the philanthropy has been targetted ideologically (like encouraging private schools) and somehow keeps ending up favouring companies he has ownership in.
Firstly, people keep their Crypto with the exchange for trading purposes and because it is easier than self custody. This means if the exchange goes bankrupt they potentially lose their money.

Secondly, as it is an unregulated space, we have instances such as FTX where they were using clients funds which should be segregated. This arguably crosses into fraud, and we do not really know which exchanges have been doing this and which ones have been properly segregating client funds. Coinbase is probably the only one we know for sure as they are an audited US publically traded company.

Finally, we also have situations where exchanges are doing things such as not matching client deposits to their reserves 1-1, or hold those reserves in less liquid investments. This could range from another fraudulent situation to good practice, but leaves them very exposed to situations where everyones wants their money back now.
It’s probably not in the spirit of your question and is admittedly a bit tangential but during the five years I seriously studied maths, I realised that sometimes something which seemed obscure or that I poorly understood during a course years ago would suddenly fall into place all at once semi-randomly while coming back to it for a more advanced or an adjacent subject.

I think that sometimes you just need time to properly digest a subject. The pieces are there unbeknown to you but you are somehow saturated and unable to properly connect them.
And that's largely because of the lack of regulation that so many cryptocurrency fans tout.

If it's not legally regulated as a currency, or a security, or anything of the sort, then why would it be considered to belong to you, and not Mt Gox, once you've given it to them?

All you have is a digital account that's basically the legal equivalent of an IOU on a napkin.

Welcome to your libertarian utopia.
CSV data downloads here: https://climatetrace.org/downloads
"At this point I'm convinced Satoshi Nakamoto was actually a public administration professor trying to teach kids why financial institutions have the rules in place that they do.

Given enough time, the entire crypto space will have reinvented every regulation they tried to get rid of and understood why they existed in the first place."
For FTX, turns out they called themselves "crypto exchange" but lent the money just like a bank, making them, surprisingly, vulnerable to bank run, which happened.

Unfortunately, this is common, just like $LUNA called themselves "stable coin" but it was stable only against assets in the crypto that were not stable at all.

Live by "Do your own research" and die by it. I guess.
The things we can observe about the universe tell us that it is non-deterministic.

You have to assume things we haven't been able to observe to construct our universe as deterministic.

And it is pretty simple things such as radioactive decay of a single atom in a vacuum which are pretty easy to grasp.
patch-package is a tool for this specific purpose

https://www.npmjs.com/package/patch-package

You commit your changes as a diff text file and add the patch-package command to your post-install hook so it runs after every install

My main use for it is fixing other packages' package.json exports field and Typescript definitions
There is a serious claim from a reputable source the impeller design is better than the fan for CPU cooling but the implementation is not widely used perhaps for reason of intellectualization appealing to faith in God at maintaining artificial scarcity.
I have used CXX in a project where I had to use a library available only in C++. There were Python bindings but somehow they were very slow. I could have rolled out my own pybind11 but wanted some of the Rust guarantees.

It was probably more convoluted than necessary since I also then exposed the Rust lib to Python, so C++ <=> Rust <=> Python , but it was indeed fun to implement it all.

https://github.com/dtolnay/cxx
'Steroid use in Adolescents'

<https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='Steroid+use+in+Adolesce...>

<https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Steroid+use+in+Adolesce...>

Edit; rewrote the search
> The issue here is crypto exchanges severely mismanaging the assets of their customers.

"Severely mismanaging" is a euphemism for fraud and theft, right?
Most of the well known historical Ponzis started out as legitimate investment funds. Then the fund manager started commingling funds and taking risks with customer money in an attempt to boost returns. Inevitably, there was a loss, and at that point the Ponzi component (paying existing investors with new investor's funds) got started, with the intent being to only do it until they could catch up on the losses and then return to being legitimate. The "catch up" never happens and eventually all new inflows are going to pay out existing investors. It blows up when outflows exceed inflows. In the case of FTX/Alameda it seems the blowup just happened earlier than usual, before they could reach "Full Ponzi".
i thought about it, but now that i'm a hundred years old, i know that boycotting is a very limited tactic, etc.

i suspect i will give it the same level of attention as other shit i just don't care about much or at all - nfl, etc.

i should prob look up if there are any coordinated actions happening that might actually improve conditions/outcomes for all the victims of QWC policies.

tho, i'm usually focused on US crimes, since i'm american, and they're usually a zillion times worse.
Would this affect exodus? Or I guess they don't really compare.
> Basically: If you already have a bank, why would you not just use it?

Basic corollary: if you already use a bank, why not just use money?

> If there were FDIC for tokens at your real bank, redeemable in same number of tokens, then any general public that wanted to use cryptocurrency would likely just use that. Because outside of fringe LARPing nobody wants to run their own bank.

So the only remaining question is why would normies who say (according to you) amen to all above would need crypto besides a ponzi-speculative joy ride?

On one hand we have funny money backed by a world power and all its resources, and protected by ICBMs and an impressive navy and bases around the world and a financial infrastructure around USD & convertibles.

On the other hand we have funny tokens issued by "genius" -mushrooms- who are elevated into the spotlight by the likes of Forbes magazine and the rest of the media circus, protected by nothing [though the genius scammers themselves are apparently protected ..]
crime.
If the fees aren't enough to cover it then the company isn't profitable and should shut down.

Or raise fees.

"I don't make a profit if I don't steal my customers assets" isn't a valid business plan.
Crypto exchanges also function like banks (holding customer deposits, making loans/investments with customer funds), just without reserve requirements or FDIC insurance. The protections against bank runs that we have in place in TradFi are largely lacking in crypto, and the whole sector seems to have reached 1929 in its speed run of modern economic history.
Most of them are committing massive fraud. Gambling with customer funds. Misreporting trading volume via wash trading, and using that to create false impressions in the market that they can trade on. For instsnce, using their own tokens or "stablecoins" and then juicing the numbers for those.
Come for the free money. Stay for the life lessons!
Thank you, I think that is a good logic to apply - but then it begs the question: how do you determine where your edge comes from?

Is it brand, credit terms, insights, etc. There are many types of trades and markets :-)
That seems like a tall order, though a worthwhile one.

You of course need a way to create a repl with visibility into the dynamic context from which it's created, which implies representing dynamic context in a way that's convenient for inspection.

If you want dynamic editing and recovery features similar to those of CL and Smalltalk systems, you'll also need the dynamic context to be represented in a way that permits mutation, which is a little awkward, considering Clojure's understandable preference for immutability and thread safety.

If you want to be able to restart from a user-selected stack frame, then you need something that serves the same purpose as Common Lisp's conditions and restarts, or Smalltalk's activation records. Maybe you could borrow the design of the Common Lisp condition system.

If you want to be able to handle dynamic redefinition gracefully, then you need something like Common Lisp's and Smalltalk's ability to automatically find and update live instances of a redefined type, which in turn requires system-level features for tracking changes to the type definitions of arbitrary instances, and a facility for automatically reinitializing them on-demand (which in turn requires the very breakloop features that you're building, because sometimes reinitialization requires user input).

This set of features is kind of a ball of hair that is hard to get right by bolting it on after the language is designed. The Julia folks have been struggling with it for years now. They work well in Common Lisp and Smalltalk, but I think that's because the languages were designed around these kinds of features from the start. Language support for them in Common Lisp, for instance, is written into the ANSI standard.

Also, of course, if the system can reinitialize live instances, then they can't really be immutable or thread safe--at least not from the point of view of the development environment, because it has to be able to mutate them as-needed. Maybe they can still be immutable from Clojure's point of view, but that implies that the development environment is not bound by the same rules as the language that it implements.

That's doable, of course. No law of nature requires that the development environment obey the same rules as the language that it implements. For example, Leibniz, the development environment for the Newton version of Dylan, was written in Common Lisp.

Of course, that meant that those of use who wanted to modify and extend Leibniz had to know Common Lisp as well as Dylan. But that's not so different from the situation with Clojure and Java.
It's not up for sellers, only for buyers.
I'd rather get paid like a tobacco lobbyist (or a FAANG developer) than a journalist. Our society has clearly shown us what it values.
Ukraine purchased Javelin missiles and other US military equipment with its military aid: https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2019/09/25/what-you-nee...

Ukraine didn't contribute to FTX at all.
Companies that directly or indirectly most contribute to GHG, in _all_ their operations, including suppliers, manufacturing, logistics.
> Ask an American active in tech-orientated social media about it, they'll invariably say "Oh, well of course that doesn't affect people like me".

Until they want to go to a restaurant, but it's been shut down because the owners couldn't get it in their head that they should pay more than minimum wage and no one wants to work for that. Or the restaurant is open, with employees who cannot afford to stay home even though they are contagious, and the tech people get sick. Or their boss wants to shrink the workforce by 10-50% and so they make it undesirable to be there to avoid paying severance.

And it has to be them, not people in the same position.

But it's only some Americans who think like that. Too broad a brush doesn't work.