SevenNation

... This site works primarily by analyzing for each user the frequencies of the most common words and phrases in the English language. Accordingly, the easiest way to avoid being identified is to simply use different words than you ordinarily would when writing. More sophisticated models than the one I made can use punctuation, comma usage, and capitalization to identify you so try alternating those as well. Services like Quillbot can help with you this but depending on your circmstances you may not want to send your writings to a third party service.

HN offers many other threads which could be tied together, including:

- time of posting

- ratio of replies to top-level comments

- comments being mainly upvoted or downvoted

- sentiment (mostly angry, dismissive, questioning, etc.)

- most common topics (keyword analysis of post being replied to)

- ratio of new posting to post replies

- first-to-comment on a post

- lone comment on a post

- etc...

It seems very likely that sooner or later every pseudonym for posting content will get discovered and linked. The lesson here is don't post anything that would cause you undue shame or harm if linked directly to your legal name.

There are more (non-FB) images here:

https://goodinternet.substack.com/p/if-jodorowsky-directed-t...

Highly misleading title. The actual text of the bill is available here:

https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/A7389

The subjects of this policy are not miners, but "electric generating facilities":

FOR THE PERIOD COMMENCING ON THE EFFECTIVE DATE OF THIS SECTION AND ENDING TWO YEARS AFTER SUCH DATE, THE DEPARTMENT, AFTER CONSULTATION WITH THE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SERVICE, SHALL NOT APPROVE A NEW APPLICA- TION FOR OR ISSUE A NEW PERMIT PURSUANT TO THIS ARTICLE, OR ARTICLE SEVENTY OF THIS CHAPTER, FOR AN ELECTRIC GENERATING FACILITY THAT UTILIZES A CARBON-BASED FUEL AND THAT PROVIDES, IN WHOLE OR IN PART, BEHIND-THE-METER ELECTRIC ENERGY CONSUMED OR UTILIZED BY CRYPTOCURRENCY MINING OPERATIONS THAT USE PROOF-OF-WORK AUTHENTICATION METHODS TO VALI- DATE BLOCKCHAIN TRANSACTIONS

Here's the part explaining the active chemistry:

The team were also surprised to detect sulfur dioxide, which had appeared as a mysterious bump in early observation data. Its presence suggests a photochemical reaction is taking place in the atmosphere as light from the star hits it, similar to how our Sun produces ozone in Earth’s atmosphere. In WASP-39b’s case, light from its star, slightly smaller than the Sun, splits water in its atmosphere into hydrogen and hydroxide, which reacts with hydrogen sulfide to produce sulfur dioxide.

Wikipedia has this to say about sulfur dioxide in our solar system:

On other planets, sulfur dioxide can be found in various concentrations, the most significant being the atmosphere of Venus, where it is the third-most abundant atmospheric gas at 150 ppm. There, it reacts with water to form clouds of sulfuric acid, and is a key component of the planet's global atmospheric sulfur cycle and contributes to global warming.[11] It has been implicated as a key agent in the warming of early Mars, with estimates of concentrations in the lower atmosphere as high as 100 ppm,[12] though it only exists in trace amounts. On both Venus and Mars, as on Earth, its primary source is thought to be volcanic. The atmosphere of Io, a natural satellite of Jupiter, is 90% sulfur dioxide[13] and trace amounts are thought to also exist in the atmosphere of Jupiter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_dioxide

This doesn't necessarily mean that the the exoplanet has active volcanism, but it could be an explanation.

The largest elephant in the room to address is probably Rust. ...

Breaking this down, I can only find two practical problems the author has with Rust:

- long compile times

- the ownership model ("the borrow checker")

The rest of this paragraph appears to be much more general in nature.

Given that the project is only 58,000 lines of D/C++, it's hard to believe that compile time alone is so bad as to drive a decision toward an experimental language like Jai.

So it appears that the main problem the author has is the ownership model ("the borrow checker"). It would be interesting to know more, but the author does not elaborate.

AFAICT, the Rust compiler can be viewed as enforcing the good practices that C++ developers already recognize. So how can this be an issue at all, especially given the ability break out of the ownership model into unsafe Rust (or use other tricks) if the situation calls for it?

The code makes it clear that the --release flag is being used, but not the text. Sometimes optimization posts written by authors trying to up their skills end with a "...and then I turned on the release flag and tada - 80% improvement." It might be useful to point out that release mode is being used to compile.

With Rust, though, one needs to learn entirely new ideas — things like lifetimes, ownership, and the borrow checker.

Those three things are actually just different facets of the same thing: ownership. The bad news is that you must learn Rust's ownership model to use Rust idiomatically. The good news is that you can do a lot without learning Rust ownership model at all. Just clone all your values. Not advisable for production code, but great for getting over the ownership model hump.

I didn't see anything about the hiring process needed to get high-documentation culture to work. Many developers don't write well. Some don't empathize with the reader and so can't communicate complex ideas effectively. Others lack the ability to abstract their ideas. Many will be coming from the exact opposite of a high-documentation culture and so simply will not value good documentation.

Asking people with poor writing skills to work in the way described here seems like it could lead to problems without a selection process favoring good writers, or at least a training system to get new hires up to speed.

Here's a simple question: what is NATO's goal in this conflict?

If it is, as some officials have suggested, to throw the Russian army back across the pre-2014 borders, how exactly could that happen?

If militarily, that almost certainly means NATO-equipped and possibly trained Ukrainian forces attacking Russian forces located inside Russia on a regular basis.

How many ways are there to do this without triggering a nuclear escalation?

Even after this news emerged, Podolyak maintained that NATO should enact a no-fly zone in Ukraine, which would likely require Western pilots to fight their Russian counterparts directly, putting four nuclear-armed nations at war. Kyiv continues to deny that it fired the missiles.

Then there's the question of what might drive Ukraine to exaggerate or plant evidence implicating Russia in attacks on NATO territory, or to hide evidence contracting that position. Hopefully, The Tonkin Gulf Incident, and the disgraceful way it justified an unjust war after whipping the American public into a bloodthirsty frenzy, is still on the radar.

Facilitating the exchange of stored value for goods and services without a trusted third party.

... What is the point of it without exchanges?

The point is that exchange of bitcoin for goods and services is possible without trusted third parties. Whether you approve of what is being traded is a separate question.

Holmes in January was found guilty of four charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Wikipedia has this short lay description of wire fraud:

In layman's terms, anyone trying to scam other people or groups through any form of communication (paradoxically, even wireless) e.g., phones, instant messaging, email, or through writing, signs, pictures or sounds can be punished with a maximum prison sentence of 20 years. If the scam involves a financial institution, the maximum fine is raised to 1 million US dollars and prison sentence not more than 30 years, or both.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_and_wire_fraud#Wire_fraud

It sounds like the FTX crew might be facing similar charges at some point.

The disappointment is that, 14 years after the Bitcoin blockchain was invented, little of this promise has been realised. Crypto’s frenzy drew in talent from bright graduates to Wall Street professionals, and capital from vc firms, sovereign-wealth and pension funds. Vast quantities of money, time, talent and energy have been used to build what amount to virtual casinos. Efficient, decentralised versions of mainstream financial functions, such as currency exchanges and lending, exist. But many consumers, fearful of losing their money, do not trust them. Instead they are used to speculate on unstable tokens. Money-launderers, sanctions-dodgers and scammers abound.

Here's the thing: Bitcoin doesn't need you, Mr. Entrepreneur. It doesn't need your black turtleneck savant charisma. It doesn't need your ambition. It doesn't need your "innovation." It doesn't need your groveling before regulators to build your moat. And most of all, it doesn't need your VC money.

This is a problem for said entrepreneurs and VCs. Because they have turtlenecks beanbags, money, innovation, and groveling just burning holes in their collective pockets - waiting to find an outlet.

But it turns out that "crypto" and "DeFi" do need Mr. Entrepreneur and his merry band of VCs. A lot. Why? Because these are efforts to replicate the existing financial system on the sandy foundation of "blockchain." And that's an expensive business.

Toss in the loosest monetary policy in US history and the recipe is complete. A quorum of charismatic entrepreneurs fleecing gullible VCs and depositors out of fake wealth, tossing it into a big pile, dousing with a liberal quantity of gasoline, and setting the entire thing ablaze.

This may or may not be the end of "crypto," but Bitcoin continues to operate just as before - without the need for exchanges, regulators, entrepreneurs, financiers, or visionaries.

Follow the links through the other article gives this:

Bankman-Fried and FTX “management practices included the use of an unsecured group email account as the root user to access confidential private keys and critically sensitive data for the FTX Group companies around the world, the absence of daily reconciliation of positions on the blockchain, the use of software to conceal the misuse of customer funds.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/17/ftx-ceo-shreds-bankman-fried...

Everything up to that last part could be chalked up to idiot savants doing their thing. But as the saying goes, the cover up is the crime.

On Wednesday, the crisis touched a high-profile crypto lender run by the billionaire twins Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss, forcing them to halt withdrawals from their Gemini Earn crypto lending program. ... The Gemini Earn program allowed users to deposit their coins in exchange for regular interest payments — typically at generous rates that could be as high as 8%.

The Gemini Earn page appears to redirect to this announcement:

We are aware that Genesis Global Capital, LLC (Genesis) — the lending partner of the Earn program — has paused withdrawals and will not be able to meet customer redemptions within the service-level agreement (SLA) of 5 business days. We are working with the Genesis team to help customers redeem their funds from the Earn program as quickly as possible. We will provide more information in the coming days.

https://www.gemini.com/blog/an-important-message-regarding-g...

The language of this announcement is bizarre. Withdrawals are "paused," not "halted" as reported. In other words, there's a chance that Genesis will cough up the funds.

But the biggest red flag is that nothing is said about new deposits. Apparently, Team Gemini is still taking them. This is, unfortunately, par for the course with these schemes going all the way back to Mt Got. "Pause" withdrawals, but continue to allow deposits. The language of the announcement makes this look like a temporary blip that will soon be resolved. It's a tactic with a long history and an almost boringly predictable outcome.

Third-quarter revenue [automotive] was $251 million, up 86% from a year ago and up 14% from the previous quarter.

There's some impressive growth there. What kind of moat does the company have on this?

Bankman-Fried has maintained that FTX has never invested the deposits of crypto account holders on the exchange. I pressed him on that point via Twitter, and while he continued to insist that FTX did not directly use account money in this way, he said that Alameda — which he also owns — had borrowed far more money from FTX’s balance sheet for investments than he had realized, which ultimately left FTX vulnerable to the crypto equivalent of a bank run.

Why didn’t Bankman-Fried realize what was happening until it was too late? “Sometimes life creeps up on you,” he said.

This is the central issue of the case. There aren't many paths for an exchange to experience a run unless it's acting like a fractional reserve bank.

So here's an admission that Alameda borrowed from the FTX balance sheet. There's also a denial that FTX invested deposits. There's no way for both statements to be true.

It's puzzling that there don't appear to be any other likely-neutral accounts of this case. Nothing in a local paper or local TV news. No essays or posts. Zip. The case is a year old.

The only thing is the gofundme page linked in the article.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/restore-money-lost-after-wrongful...

An that plea links back to the Reason article.

There's a big overlap between the plea on that page and the Reason article.

It's possible there's more going on here than meets the eye.

Having watched the video, the kind of content Notion AI generates is the kind I typically stop reading after a few sentences. By then it becomes clear that the article has nothing to say, was written by a non-expert, and is really nothing more than filler. It can't help me solve a problem and won't offer any new insights.

That said, it wasn't too long ago that the writing style itself was easy to identify as AI-generated, or even borderline grammatically incorrect.

Notion AI does a pretty good job of mimicking an HR-level understanding of a topic. And that's progress.

I just wonder what it will take to get to a point when the output is of the quality I'd associate with human subject-expert writers who know how to engage with a reader.

Everyone can agree on one thing about the past year. It has revealed quite how little economists understand inflation, including both what causes it and what causes it to persist. ...

The larger problem is the lack of a common definition of the word "inflation". This article is an example. There are 27 instances of the word and no definition.

The definitions used by most experts seem to fall into one of two categories:

1. a general increase in prices, as measured by the US Consumer Price Index or similar metric

2. a monetary phenomenon

But these are not by themselves definitions, either. The CPI is split into core, non-core, and a dizzying variety of other metrics. When people talk about "monetary" inflation, the landscape is equally fragmented. The various money metrics have been discredited by some, flat out rejected by others, and revered with near religious fervor by others.

If there's this much lack of consensus about what inflation is exactly, there can be little hope of predicting its future course, let alone controlling it.

It appears the company is saying that the trading/custody business is not affected, but loan redemptions and originations are.

This Bloomberg article has more:

Crypto brokerage Genesis is suspending redemptions and new loan originations at its lending business after facing what it described as “abnormal withdrawal requests” in the aftermath of the collapse of FTX.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-16/crypto-br...

There's also this interesting bit:

Last week, Genesis said it would get a $140 million equity infusion from its parent company, Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group, after disclosing that its derivatives business had $175 million in funds locked in an FTX trading account. The lending business had previously been affected by its exposure to bankrupt crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, to which it had made a $2.4 billion loan.

FWIW, Digital Currency Group is the company behind the popular GBTC closed-end fund, which is available to US investor brokerage accounts. This fund has had problems of its own, trading at a relatively large (and growing) discount for some time:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-13/grayscale...

Oddly enough, the Genesis Trading yield farming page makes it look like nothing unusual is going on. No announcement, no notice, no nothing. Situation normal.

https://genesistrading.com/services/yield-services

This U.S. proof-of-concept project is experimenting with the concept of a regulated liability network. It will test the technical feasibility, legal viability, and business applicability of distributed ledger technology to settle the liabilities of regulated financial institutions through the transfer of central bank liabilities.

Am I reading this right, to translate "central bank liabilities" as reserve balances at the Federal reserve?

If so, why bother with a distributed ledger?

Yet there is the belief that you can somehow create a coherent experience into a “whatever”. Whatever it is actually. My first mastodon instance was de-federated by accident from my current instance. I moved to that instance though because many other hackers in the Open Source space did, and unlike Fosstodon it seems to allow non English content which I do care about quite a bit. (After all my life and household is multilingual and I don't live in an English speaking country.) Yet that instance still defederates qoto and I'm guessing because qoto permits unpopular opinions and does not block servers itself.

Given the history of email, I'm surprised there hasn't been more about the economics of spam, blacklists, and so on.

Substitute the email-specific parts of the following article with Mastodon-specific terms and concepts, and it doesn't paint a very pretty picture.

https://blog.lopp.net/death-of-decentralized-email/

A lot of requests don’t make sense, because people have not yet learned about the platform. Like “Why isn’t Mastodon a single server?” We're not going to jump on the opportunity to undo all of the decentralization.

The word "decentralization" pops up a lot connection with Mastodon. Yet it's not always clear to what end.

One selling point appears to be moderation, something the article echoes. Distributing the moderation function gives users choices about the incidental messages they'll be exposed to. They choose the server whose moderation policies they agree with. In principle this breaks the difficult global moderation problem into many smaller moderation problems.

But is that really what people are "hiring" something like Twitter for? Isn't one of the driving factors to be able to distribute a message as widely as possible? Doesn't the fediverse ultimately lead to people becoming more isolated than they already were?

The user growth is high enough that at any given time roughly half of the people involved have been at it for less than 18 months. So the space is dominated by the least-savvy and has been for some time.

Many people will never be capable of self-custody because the lack the interest to do it. They see money to be made and ignore the warnings of those who try to explain what they have on an exchange is a promise of money, not money itself.

When you say "nobody does this anymore," that's kind of true, but also not true. Those who have learned the hard way do, the newbies (which vastly outnumber the first group) don't.

Self custody requires knowledge of some basic math, cryptography, and the ability to understand basic security principles.

User growth explodes with exchange rates. Those diving in understand very little about what they're doing and should stay out. They don't listen to people saying such things and the result is, well, predictable.

A common, tired take on HN: crypto bros will re-invent every piece of financial regulation they condemned.

I doubt it.

The reason is simple. If you think this latest round of panics and collapses is anything new, you haven't been paying attention. This is but the latest round in a 10+ year history of shenanigans. They come in waves spaced roughly 4 years apart. Regulation has not and never will fix it.

Nor did that highly-touted financial regulation do anything to stop the panics, scams, and financial idiocy of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Lots of regulation. Lots of oversight. Congressionally-empowered regulators with fancy degrees and highfalutin titles. None of it stopped the Great Depression, the S&L collapse, the crash of 2000, the GFC, or the current brewing crisis in the Eurodollar system.

Indeed, there's an argument to be made that regulation and regulators incited those catastrophes through moral hazard.

Clucking at all the rubes losing their shirts on exchanges is an old game with no reward. It leads nowhere and advances no new insights.

For those interested in a possibly more eye-opening perspective, consider that Bitcoin not only makes financial regulation unnecessary, but practically impossible.

Your stock brokerage, though, is willing to offer you leverage on your assets. In return for a fee (and to gain your business, because this is considered a high-saliency feature for the customers of brokerages), they will lend you money against your assets, allowing you to buy more Google than you had cash for. They might allow you 2:1 leverage when you buy stock: your $1,000 buys 20 shares now.

Not widely known, but it's the US Federal Reserve that tells stock brokers how much leverage their clients are allowed to assume. This is one of the most potent tools in the Fed's toolbox, and it has not used it since 1974:

https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economi...

Forget the sissy Fed funds rates, forget the lamo QE/QT ceremony, if the Fed really wanted to take compulsive gamblers to the woodshed, all it needs to do is raise the margin requirement, thus de-leveraging brokerage customers by force.

Whenever the topic of hash-related gambling catastrophes comes up, there's always an outcry for MOAR REGULATION.

If history had demonstrated that regulators not only knew when to use their tools but that they could wield them in a wise and timely manner, that would be one thing. But time and again regulators do the wrong thing at the wrong time.

After my last post, which hypothesized a relationship between the total size of a program and the bugs in it, I was led to this paper, via this blog post, via this comment. This, by the way, is my favorite thing about blogging.

"this paper", "this blog post" and "this comment" are all hyperlinked. "this paper" gives a 404. "this blog post" gives what should be a 404. "this comment"? Well, that a HN comment linking back to the now-missing post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2991224

This post conveniently ignores the long line of 20th and 21st century banking and finance disasters, which occurred under the watchful eye of Congressionally appointed regulators.

One could also argue that the presence of regulators and regulation creates the very problem it tries to solve through moral hazard.

As long as there are schmucks with dollar signs in their eyes and little patience to read history, these disasters will continue - with or without regulation.

It’s hard to know what to take from that; Steve Jobs was clearly a very smart man, without a lot of empathy for lesser beings. So is he saying “Everything was made up by people no smarter than Steve Jobs”, or does he actually mean it that the average world/company/industry leader really is no smarter than you?

He's saying that the average "you" is no smarter than the average person.

And then I take a look at the clown show that has been tech in the past few weeks...

All of these example trace their roots to extreme market distortions bought about by a massive direct injection of money into an economy that had partially shut down during the pandemic. The normal pricing signals were suppressed for the last two years.

The underlying mistake made in the biggest of the cited examples was to believe the distorted marketplace pricing signals.

The mistake made in the lesser cited examples was that getting rich from the deluge of fake money serves as proof of skill in other areas.

The process of normalization is now underway, and will continue for some time. If those examples in the article make you go "huh," just wait for what's in store as the receding tide reveals all of those bare bottoms and inflated senses of superiority.