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EscapeFromNY

1,066 karma · joined November 12, 2022

still bronze :(
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EscapeFromNY··on Bitcoin as a Nonviolent Tool Against State Financial Censorship
I feel like people make getting an offshore account sound easier than it is. I live in the US, and when I opened my US accounts, I needed to give them my SSN. Canadians don't have SSNs.

Just now I tried opening an account at a few random Canadian banks, and they all say I need to be living in Canada. How is an average joe supposed to work around those requirements?

I'm not saying it should be easier either. When you're dealing with state-issued currencies there are reasons for those restrictions. But the draw of bitcoin is that it's politically neutral and you don't need to jump through the hoops of any particular country, or hire a lawyer to navigate foreign laws. Just download an open source app and you're ready to go.

EscapeFromNY··on “Exit traps” can make your Bash scripts more robust and reliable (2013)
SIGKILL can't be handled. It's the signal you send when you don't want to give the process a chance to handle it.
EscapeFromNY··on Mastercard submits fresh trademark application for crypto tech
If I had to guess I'd say it's a library/SDK.
EscapeFromNY··on Japan to open up Apple and Google app stores to competition
Looks like a direct cause and effect relationship. So to avoid the same outcome, you'll just need to buy your phone in a country where Apple makes the App Store available. That seems reasonable to me.

I don't think there's a danger Apple will discontinue the App Store in any region as a result of these rulings.

EscapeFromNY··on Japan to open up Apple and Google app stores to competition
The official app store will surely have 99.9%+ market share, just like the Play Store does on Android. Not many companies will want to give up 99.9% of their total addressable market. And Google has the same sort of review process Apple does. Are there any examples of critical software that users depend on only being released in a way that circumvents Google's safety mechanisms?
EscapeFromNY··on Japan to open up Apple and Google app stores to competition
> You call it more user freedom, but more freedom to do what, exactly? What’s your pitch for those who are hesitant?

Nothing will change for you if you don't want it to change. This is only an option for people who want additional functionality. Nobody is forcing freedom or change on you by adding one more hard-to-find option buried in a menu somewhere for people who really want it.

EscapeFromNY··on ELO Everything
My first question was Therapy vs Dwayne Johnson. https://i.imgur.com/RIVw4JG.png

How could you ever choose?

EscapeFromNY··on Using loophole, Seward County seizes millions from motorists without convictions
> many of the victims are actual criminals

Very few of the victims are criminals.

https://www.nemannlawoffices.com/blog/law-enforcement-seized...

> One more data point supports this contention: At the federal level, at least, "the vast majority of forfeiture victims are never convicted or charged with a crime," according to Carpenter. Using data obtained via FOIA requests, Carpenter found that 87 percent of federal forfeiture proceedings were civil cases, not criminal ones. "It's troubling that 87% of the time the conviction appears to be irrelevant," co-author Lisa Knepper said.

EscapeFromNY··on In a surprising twist, I just received a second $100k sponsorship for Ladybird
I didn't downvote, but it's probably because of the lack of understanding and/or fear-mongering around privacy/anonymity.

Yes, he'll have to report the donation and pay his taxes. Yes, someone may "take a close look". No, there is no chance he'll be legally prevented from accepting the donation, unless he lives in an authoritarian country like China/North Korea where owning crypto at all is illegal.

Crypto has been used for anonymous donations as long as it's existed and afaik nobody has ever faced any legal problems from accepting an anonymous donation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineapple_Fund

EscapeFromNY··on Why Did the Twitter Migration to Mastodon Fail?
What should we use instead?
EscapeFromNY··on In a surprising twist, I just received a second $100k sponsorship for Ladybird
I like to call these "coin-operated comments". Someone sees an input phrase "cryptocurrency", a neuron fires, and they respond with an output phrase "money laundering". The pattern recognition is good enough to be able to emit a relevant predetermined opinion from ROM, but there's no higher-level ability to adapt to the flow of conversation or absorb any new information.
EscapeFromNY··on Rust vs Zig Benchmarks
Thanks yeah that's the one. It's a completely different site, but the design looks similar to my eyes. That's probably why I got them confused
EscapeFromNY··on Rust vs Zig Benchmarks
> it can add the equivalent of C’s noalias all over the place

There's an open proposal to do this in Zig as well, with the ability to opt out at the individual parameter level (and with safety checks in debug builds).

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1108

Either way we can definitely thank Rust for blazing the trail. noalias in LLVM had never been stress-tested to that degree, and they were finding and fixing noalias-related optimizer bugs for years

EscapeFromNY··on Rust vs Zig Benchmarks
Didn't these benchmarks used to have box plots for every comparison? Or am I thinking of another site?
EscapeFromNY··on Google warns staff about chatbots
Yes it could. If you're working at a company you shouldn't upload your company's secrets to ChatGPT, Bard, Google, Microsoft, Zoho, Discord, Telegram, Pastebin, or any service unless the service is approved first.
EscapeFromNY··on Blocked from Amazon Alexa for a week after racism accusation by delivery driver
> his account had been locked due to a report from a delivery driver who claimed to have received racist remarks.

There's a fun attack vector. Apparently any delivery driver can disable someone's Amazon account with a single report, with no checks and balances

EscapeFromNY··on Men who helped run Megaupload sentenced to prison in New Zealand
Why not?

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...

> Finland, Home of the $103,000 Speeding Ticket

> Most of Scandinavia determines fines based on income. Could such a system work in the U.S.?

EscapeFromNY··on Hundreds of subreddits plan to go dark indefinitely after Reddit CEO's memo
I mean, you linked a comment with 700 votes in a thread where the top comment has over 9000 votes. Maybe read through the thread without cherry picking comments: https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/149cq9f/reddit_were...
EscapeFromNY··on The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes
My theory is that Google lost the spam war. All the leetcode in the world won't teach someone to build an ML model that can tell whether a website is spam. So Google outsourced the spam detection problem -- they heavily bias their results towards only the most popular sites, who either have human moderators or paid contributors, and those sites do the spam management that Google's automated approach is incapable of.
EscapeFromNY··on EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling
1. You're right, that link isn't relevant on second look. I do remember a specific thread but I could be misremembering and my google skills are failing me (or maybe the subreddit has gone private?) I'll concede the point.

2. They could be, but if an American retail trader sets up an offshore company to do their trading with to avoid regulation, you're not a regular joe anymore, you should know what you're getting yourself into and I don't have a lot of sympathy.

EscapeFromNY··on EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling
Yes, that's where the saying "not your keys, not your coin" comes from. But that's another deep rabbit hole.

Since this thread is about Google (don't forget), what's the equivalent of "not your keys" for Google ads? That's why it's an apt comparison, and the subject of the EU's complaint.

EscapeFromNY··on EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling
So your point is after you read wikipedia, it's possible to ignore the information you learned there and find some other rationalisation to send your money away? Yes, that is possible, you got me.
EscapeFromNY··on EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling
Those are fair points.

Here is someone using blockchain analysis in 2021 https://old.reddit.com/r/solana/comments/qs3hb5/alameda_buyi...

My memory of general sentiment is different, but again you can't prove something like that. As far as hard data, all I can think to offer is this breakdown of FTX's creditors by country, compiled from the bankruptcy filing.

https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FFiMwSncXEIMlb70.png

The creditors are 2% USA customers, 93% offshore customers, 5% unknown. The USA did not trust FTX at all.

EscapeFromNY··on EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling
If you do a minimal amount of research (reading wikipedia), you'll learn that neither FTX nor Binance are US-based
EscapeFromNY··on EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling
Not revisionist, you can literally just search reddit for posts from before the collapse to confirm.

https://old.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/cj5ovr/ftx_... (2019)

https://old.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/m6b53a/sbf_... (2021)

You're right about Binance, but the same wouldn't be true about Fidelity, Coinbase, Kraken, etc. People with an axe to grind about crypto like to pretend the industry is homogeneous and always complain about the likes of FTX and Binance (who are in the news a lot for reasons you'd expect), but conveniently never have anything to say about the exchanges with a good track record that people actually use and trust.

EscapeFromNY··on EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling
> Yes, being able to read smart contracts and audit transactions on the blockchain is how everyone knew FTX stealing customer funds from years ago.

Yes in fact! Anyone who looked into it knew. Maybe Wall Street and VCs were duped, but the crypto industry itself saw the train wreck coming from a mile away and distanced themselves from the start. That's why when the inevitable happened, the mainstream were pumping out articles about FTX disproportionately to its importance -- they were the ones that got played.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/the-collapse-of-ftx-was...

https://twitter.com/BitcoinIsSaving/status/15396053464692531...

> There are a huge number of ways crypto exchanges pull of scams

There are a huge number of ways Google pulls off scams too. That's what this entire thread is about and the reason for the European Commission's complaint. Hence the comparison.

EscapeFromNY··on EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling
If you don't want to send your money to the Bahamas, you have the choice as a consumer to use a regulated US-based exchange instead. You don't have to be ultra-savvy to read wikipedia and learn about a company before doing business with them.

With Google, you're spending money in a completely opaque marketplace with 0 visibility or transparency, and no choice as a consumer to mitigate that.

EscapeFromNY··on Reddit Doubles Down
Most of those must be new additions. Whenever I set up a new browser I enable every list, and I only had 5 annoyance lists enabled. I'm glad I checked again!
EscapeFromNY··on Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout ‘will pass’
Your anger is justified, but directed at the wrong people.
EscapeFromNY··on Tipping in the United States has gotten out of control
Tip culture became popular in the American South during the slavery era, as a way for former slaveowners to "employ" former slaves without having to pay them directly.

https://time.com/5404475/history-tipping-american-restaurant...

The sooner the US can move past that era of its history, the better.

EDIT: I didn't expect "let's move past slavery" to be such an unpopular opinion on HN. Yikes.

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