skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that the calls for SEC clarity are pretty disingenuous. From what I have gathered, the conversation typically goes like this:

Industry: Please give us more regulatory clarity

SEC: everything not BTC/ETH is a security, please register them (read: and we'll throw it into the trash because we don't like it)

Industry: but these are clearly not securities, please give us more clarity

SEC: everything not BTC/ETH is a security, please register them

Industry: that's not an answer, we would like to trade crypto

SEC: everything not BTC/ETH is a security, please register them

So the SEC is clear, it's just that the clear answer the SEC is giving is not up to the tastes of industry.

But the SEC is also constrained by politics in the sense of external pressure making them not want to crack down, and by internal politics of hard-to-win cases about proving Howey tests that take forever.

So we have the current situation where the SEC has been very clear that it doesn't like any of the crypto stuff, but the industry pushes the boundaries and sits in the legal grey area where the SEC says it's not kosher but courts may or may not agree. Hence sporadic enforcement actions where they think they have a good case, which then leads to complaining (please more clarity), with the same response (none of this is legal, just because we haven't filed enforcement actions doesn't mean it's kosher).

Edit: ETH is kinda borderline; there is semi-widespread consensus that BTC is not a security, and no such consensus for pretty much anything else.

Edit 2: I don't mean the conversation literally. As far as I know there is no official stance on BTC, but one gets the sense that trying to argue in court that BTC is a security is a losing proposition, whereas <insert governance token for newnotscamcoin> is much closer to a winning case.
> Coinbase can hire lawyers for that until they are certain they can defend themselves in court.

This is exactly what they’re doing. You think they just fired off some press releases in response like some kinda half-informed HN comment?
In my experience it has been failing to adhere to response formats. I can tell it to respond with answers in one of two specific formats, but the success rate is sometimes very low depending on the content of the inquiry it's supposed to respond to. Not sure why, it just seems to lose track of the response format.

I've been thinking maybe that's just the wrong way to approach it, yet it does work sometimes; it seems like it shouldn't be hard for the model to know how to respond when told explicitly how to do so.

It could be problems with my formatting, but the fact that it does work a lot of the time suggests it's something else.
Just no.

Rules and laws aren't supposed to be a puzzle you argue about via $1000/hr lawyers. They're meant to be a framework to achieve policy goals. It is 100% reasonable to ask the other side what their opinions on things are.

If they don't reach out to the regulators then people complain that tech is just trying to skirt the rules again.
Welcome to my life. Let's tap dance from one implementation to another as we wait for an eighteen year W3C draft to get implemented.

FlyingSaucer, prawn, itext, fpdf, PDFkit, pdftk, aaalllll the way to today: Paged.js, Weazy, and vivliostyle

Yeah yeah yeah, I know. Prince is great. That's fine. My customers don't want to pay that kind of cash to make PDFs and I agree with them. Especially a feature that should have made it into browser core almost two decades ago.

I long ago imagined a steamy scenario involving Adobe executives and W3C steering groups, but that back room orgy has grown to improbable durations by the current date.
I'm not sure that is the analogy you want -- You do understand Fentanyl is a legal drug with legitimate uses? If Coinbase claims to want to be a doctor, then by your analogy the DEA is deliberately being unclear to trap doctors. Which, lol, is something that the DEA is known to have done.

In the US there should be an expectation that if a regulatory agency is going to regulate it must have clear and unambiguous rules, and have enforcement policy documented and reviewed. Anything short of that is just a recipe for abuse.

To be clear, all sorts of regulatory agencies do tons of shenanigans, and this is low on the list. But still. We can do better.
How do women get away with these ugly sexist takes?
They aren't incompetent or ignorant (well...on a macro scale). They just didn't succeed in a market that's a niche in a subset of the market they're after.

Intel makes a ton of money selling graphics silicon. They just haven't quite figured out the "plays the most demanding video games on max mode with a side of ML/AI" market yet.

Predictions of Intel's demise are greatly premature.
Coinbase isn’t exactly operating in good faith either with this “oh we couldn’t possibly know what they’re talking about” BS.
In this case, those folks lost all their money, so it seems like they actually did have pretty well aligned incentives...

I think the more subtle distinction would be making short term risk adjusted incentive identical to long term risk adjusted incentive, so people don't mistakenly think gambling is a good idea.
> The whole regulatory infrastructure from the SEC expects a security to be backed by or representative of a physical asset of some sort - be it shares of a corporation with tangible assets, gold, or in the case of futures, a commodity. Even bonds are, they're securitized debts.

No it doesn't. Corporations are very obviously unphysical, as are debts. Securitizing e.g. music royalties is completely normal.
No: https://ethereum.org/en/staking/
The I in PID is referring to a pretty simple arithmetic sum inside of a control loop. Around 30 lines of simple C.

The original post is presumably referring to symbolic integral calculus, perhaps in a multivariable context if we're referring to partial DEs.

The level of rigor and complexity here is a couple orders of magnitude difference. I think there's still a case to be made for autodidaction of higher mathematics (it was certainly the path I went down), but I think unschooling is probably not best for most folks.
You may want to look up the definition of the word "appreciating"
The threats are well justified. It really reads like you (coinbase) is trying to get around SEC's regulations.
So instead of capitalism be overthrowing democracy in each country in its own particular ways, now it would be able to do it on a global scale.
a lot of lessons learned from working on software apply to the rest of life!
I have a feeling it's like the saying "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". At a certain point they could become practically identical things.
Genomic analyses of hair from Ludwig van Beethoven [pdf]
Everyone I know uses the term “invest” or “speculate” when they buy any crypto asset. I haven’t met anyone use the term “diversify” when buying crypto like you would if you bought USD or EURO or bonds.

I know someone who used all of their 200k medical loans to instead buy btc. Clearly individuals believe these to be securities with expectation of profit since there’s interest in the loan. The guy even bought it on binance under a fake name so he won’t be taxed.

Whatever legal mumbo jumbo used by companies might be right. But the users and market treats these as securities - especially with all the derivatives built on top.
> everything not BTC/ETH

What's special about BTC and ETH that sets it apart from other cryptocurrencies?
I would guess that Coinbase, as a long-standing US-based exchange that is now publicly owned and therefore subject to various (stringent? not sure if I should laugh at that or not) business regulations, would be attempting to achieve / maintain legitimacy in the least under-handed way possible given the prevailing winds are already heavily cryptocurrency-skeptical.

Clarity is what's being asked for. If the SEC deems some/all cryptocurrencies a security, then allow Coinbase (or whichever other exchanges) to file the paperwork required to exchange securities and we can all be on our way.

But, it seems that the SEC doesn't actually have any process for that to happen. The paperwork either doesn't exist or the process has a gap whereby cryptocurrency security exchange requests hit a cliff with no bridge.

As per Jesse Powell:

“The ‘This is wrong but I won’t tell you how to do it right. Want to find out if X works? Try it and see what happens.’ approach does not help the industry nor consumers. We aren’t anti-regulation but we need a clear path to operate.”[0]

"Oh man, all I had to do was fill out a form on a website and tell people that staking rewards come from staking? Wish I'd seen this video before paying a $30m fine and agreeing to permanently shut down the service in the US. How dumb do I look. Gosh."[1]

Both sides are likely being somewhat disingenuous, but the SEC, given it's role, should never, ever, fucking be disingenuous. And given it's a government department with its... severely chequered... history, then I wouldn't be betting on it having it's i's dotted and t's crossed.

Kraken and Coinbase were established in 2011 and 2012 respectively, so they've been run well enough as businesses to weather three or four cryptocurrency winters that have taken the lives of many others. In an industry with a dearth of trustworthiness[3], these two stand out from that crowd.

[0]: https://www.coinreporter.io/2023/02/kraken-co-founder-jesse-...

[1]: https://twitter.com/jespow/status/1624177588074848256

[3]: Because traditional US and global finance is a such beacon of goodness and trust
As a non-expert in the field I was hesitant at the time to disagree with the legions of experts who last year denounced Blake Lemoine and his claims. I know enough to know, though, of the AI effect <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect>, a longstanding tradition/bad habit of advances being dismissed by those in the field itself as "not real AI". Anyone, expert or not, in 1950, 1960, or even 1970 who was told that before the turn of the century a computer would defeat the world chess champion would conclude that said feat must have come as part of a breakthrough in AGI. Same if told that by 2015 many people would have in their homes, and carry around in their pockets, devices that can respond to spoken queries on a variety of topics.

To put another way, I was hesitant to be as self-assuredly certain about how to define consciousness, intelligence, and sentience—and what it takes for them to emerge—as the experts who denounced Lemoine. The recent GPT breakthroughs have made me more so.

I found this recent Sabine Hossenfelder video interesting. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP5zGh2fui0>
Most people who understand crypto aren't true believers. The evangelists are generally people with the least amount of information and the most hype.
I don't think the authors care about their resumes at this point. There are rational reasons to use a static scheduling regime and a set of conventions around deployment and support services rather than a dynamic scheduler. If it were me, I'd build this with Nomad, but I can imagine not wanting to manage a dynamic scheduler when your workloads are as predictable as theirs are --- you make their case for them when you point out that they just have a "handful of CRUD apps".
My guess is that SEC is in a holding pattern right now, given the talk of introducing a digital dollar in congress.
A lot of empire building during the good times. Ridiculously heavy layers of prod and eng middle management.
> happen to be always wrong

Which is very very unlikely. When you don't know the answer, you'll guess, which is like flipping a coin.

Suppose you have zero knowledge and always guess the answer. Can you get unlucky that you get more wrong answers than correct answers? Sure. But the more questions you get, the closer your accuracy is to 50%.

Another way to look at it is to realize that a binary prediction has the highest entropy (uncertainty) when it splits fifty-fifty.
Not true. The SEC is regulatory agency and they are in fact in charge of providing regulations and guidance.

https://www.sec.gov/investment/im-guidance-updates
That's a goal of some that shows promise but so far to date concentrated solar power schemes (of various kinds) have only reach < 10 GW (in total, globally) last I checked [1].

Photovoltaics, by comparison [2]:

Solar PV generation increased by a record 179 TWh (up 22%) in 2021 to exceed 1 000 TWh.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power

[2] https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv

All up a hell of a difference (so far) in generation capacity.

In an ideal future we'll see a lot more large CSP plants making better per GW usage of rare earths.
If you read it, this is more about competing with Asana than it is with OneNote.
This is very common in almost all web companies since around 2015.

I've never seen a company with a simple infrastructure, no matter how simple their actual application actually is.

If you choose a slow dynamic language (Ruby/Python) your deployment has to be massively complicated; you have no choice about it.

For one simple reason: you will need a multitude of separate components to be made to work together.

You need many application instances because there's no way one machine can handle all your traffic: Ruby is just too slow.

A sharded database cluster as a source of truth:

You went through the effort of making several applications instances with a load balancer: you don't want a single database server to be a single point of failure.

A distributed redis/memcache index to accelerate queries and lower the pressure on the real database.

You might have several index-type engines for different types of quries. Most people use ElasticSearch in addition to Redis.

You need some system to manage all this complexity: monitor it, deploy new versions, rollback to a previous version, run migrations and monitor their state, etc etc.

This is the bare minimum. Most people have a setup that is way more complicated than this. I don't even know how they come up with these complexties, but they not only come up with frequently: they love it! To them it's a feature, not a bug.
The future of computing deserves to be open
This is how cities -- cities without commercial on street level and residential above, cities where you need to own a car -- die.

By and large, U.S. does cities wrong.
And what would you say makes them different?
"their own datacenter" both previously and now almost certainly means renting bare metal or colocation space from a provider. I highly doubt they have physically built their own datacenter from scratch
As one of the authors, I'm ok with reasonable disagreements (e.g. see D. Bacon's below) about whether our overall conclusions are justified. But I feel it important to point out that your comment above is just a pure misrepresentation of the procedure in our paper.

In a future draft we will bring out this point more clearly, but we do not unroll the post-oracle state into a vector of size 2^n and just look at the winners. We use a well-established sampling technique from the matrix product state literature (reference: https://arxiv.org/abs/1201.3974, also cited in the paper) which runs deterministically and always scales as log(N) = n. (This part is independent of the oracle used.)

Overall our approach scales as log(N) for cases where the oracle can be simulated in polynomial time. We give such a case explicitly in the paper. Of course for many oracles, applying the oracle will scale exponentially which we say, but we show that there exist quite a few instances (we could show many more) where the actual time is minutes or hours to sizes of qubits (e.g. 40 qubits) that would require a million iterations of Grover's algorithm if it were run on a physical quantum computer.
Sorry. I realized it a minute after I posted :(
What a silly definition that is. So are Pokémon cards securities then?
Some likely do, others likely don't. Bitcoin is not a security, Ethereum likely is.
Would work for a legitimately run business, given how well it worked for so long for an inept group of total fuck-ups.
It’s not the SEC’s definition, it’s the supreme court’s:

If:

- It is an investment of money
- There is an expectation of profits from the investment
- The investment of money is in a common enterprise
- Any profit comes from the efforts of a promoter or third party

Then it’s a security.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_v._W._J._Howey_Co.
If you buy a stock on NYSE, you don't actually hand money over to NYSE itself...
Because I have some light sensitivity issues, I use browser extensions including Dark Reader and Midnight Lizard to enforce my own 'dark mode' across the web.

You can also use extensions like that to set the contrast to a more comfortable level on websites that are already dark.

I highly recommend this if you have light sensitivity issues like me.

Also note that when the contrast on a page is higher, you can generally get away with lower brightness. This is pretty convenient on phones, and probably more necessary as well since on a phone you're more likely to have an OLED screen that really surfaces extreme contrast like white on black.
The major point is ultimately that the organization of labor does not inherently lead to higher project costs. You may be right that the peculiarities of American labor are one potential cause of higher costs.
Gold is classified as a commodity. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is the federal government agency that regulates the commodity futures and other commodity derivatives, not the SEC.
and their first purpose is keeping human from probably damage with AI. now, there are no people treat skynet.
I’m jealous of this coming from C#. They kind of have it but not really.
Probably that they have been registered with the SEC.
Don't forget about a more efficient attention that let's them get 32k tokens of context.
URL for the prompt: https://openprompt.co/cron

you can try the prompt directly
As it rightly should!

I think crypto is somewhere script and private fiat currencies but traded like a security, and probably not legal to be openly traded as they are, a legal terra nullius. Until there are court decisions or congressional action to firm up this situation, it will persist as a gray area.
Yes, that’s clearly been their entire business MO from day one.
Show HN: Tear Lant
San Francisco's downtown was already deeply unhealthy in 2017. If it wasn't a workday, everything was closed. The only things that existed downtown were offices and office support, like lunch restaurants.
> Corporations are very obviously unphysical

I think that misses the parent's point. Corporations own physical assets (like buildings) and things with accepted intrinsic value (fiat currency). but they also indirectly own rights to other things that are indirectly backed by physical stuff in a similar manner (like shares of other corporations, etc.). That's in contrast to something like Bitcoin which doesn't come with a direct or indirect right to anything with intrinsic value.
> The value of that entire area for business is headed to zero.

If only there were some other high-value use for San Francisco real estate besides office space.
No, that’s not correct. They have to be tested against the Howey test specifically that there’s an enterprise of some sort backing it. This is why securities are distinct from commodities, foreign exchange transactions, or buying baseball cards.

Crypto currencies can easily be viewed as securities if they meet certain criteria and some have been declared as such. But it’s far from settled that the SEC broadly has domain over crypto currencies, or if they’re commodities, or more neutrally currencies. They trade and behave much more like currencies or commodities, but some things like staking services behave more like securities. But most definitely “whatever the SEC wants” isn’t the criteria.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/howey-test.asp
I'm for it, and I know a few older-generation players who are as well

Smoke grenades have been a sort of movable one-way mirror for too long; being somewhat counter-intuitive
+1. I live in India, coffee costs me 10 INR that is 0.12 USD.
> The market should be allowed to operate freely without government intervention

I'm all for it. For example why should government intervene and enforce copyright or patents?
I don’t think your guess is correct. Working with regulators means you fill out a form, then 3–6 months later they send some questions. You spend one day to answer them and ask a few of your own, then send it back. 3–6 months later you get another list of questions. Some of those questions are identical to the last pass. You spend one day answering and… rinse and repeat for a few years.

From what I gather the SEC just ignored Coinbase’s questions in this back-and-forth.
Steve Jobs as AI
Chat GPT married with the voice of Steve Jobs. Man this future going to be weird.
> regulators are not accepting any regulated venue

Sure they are. Gemini is registered as a trust company in New York State, and has a New York State Bitlicense. They have insurance covering commercial crime, and fiat deposits are held by a bank and are not assets of Gemini. Not that Gemini is perfect, but they are to some extent regulated by banking regulators who actually look at their books.

Coinbase, though... Who audits the assets behind USDC?
No, it's not like that unfortunately. They won't say which cryptocurrencies are securities and are very deliberately vague.
Reading that book takes even longer than getting a renovation permit in NYC.
You may want to realize that if the value of apples depreciated, the store could lose money. The store has an expectation that the product they buy will be worth around the same or appreciate. Buying appreciating products means that you will profit more which is in a store's interest.

If you want a better example of something normal that appreciates take for example holiday themed products. They are worth much less before the holiday, there is a pump in value around the avenue and then a dump. Stores have to careful plan how much to buy to not lose money.
The risks of cleaning with bleach and other disinfectants
There's not necessarily an expectation of profit when staking crypto.
In the comments about every article including Go, generally.
I'm not [mad]. Glad Mozilla is making an effort. I don't know what they'll accomplish, but hopefully something good comes of it.
I try to base my judgments of what LLMs can and can't do primarily on my study and research in related fields. I haven't been surprised by the capabilities of any LLM yet, including GPT-4.
Dishonest, they tried to corner the crypto exchange market by raising the costs to do business by encouraging regulation. I'm so glad it bit them. Coinbase is an evil dishonest company that uses dark patterns to prevent users from getting their money out. Now they are pretending to be the victim. Please shut down coinbase and ban their execs from working with money.
This page is somewhat misleading. It pretends Little Snitch Mini supports blocking but that is not true and only works in the paid version. It does clarify this at the very bottom but weird to have your free app's landing page list features from the paid version. At least put a "premium" sticker on those screenshots or something.
Use another model