Hacker News Reader

Qworgon The Fed released a paper outlining pros and cons of a “digital dollar”

As a follow up, the first steps of Project Hamilton (the exploration of how to build said CBDC) were also posted. It is a collaboration between the Boston Fed and DCI@MIT: https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/one-time-pubs/project...

Qworgon Ask HN: Has Amazon been hounding you?

Amazon (as well as others) are desperate to fill roles - everyone is up leveling quickly, and they didn't have the comp to match. This is why they've roughly doubled their salary cap.

Qworgon Finality does not exist in payments

Yes. In a narrow technological definition of "final", you're right. However, not in the societal or legal sense.

Qworgon Finality does not exist in payments

If you saw the "technosociolegal" position at the top, you'd appreciate a broader perspective.

Why is the couple who held the bitcoin from the hack being prosecuted? How were those funds being unwound if the transaction is final? If all of the exchanges were to denylist coins from a hack, do they actually exist or have they been taken away?

Qworgon Finality does not exist in payments

I wish he would have delved into the cost of finality or reversals - this is a core driver of the cost of an entire system, either in time or in money.

Qworgon U.S. is considering a radical rethinking of the dollar for today's digital world

If it truly is a dollar (which seems like what they're aiming at given UTxOs, etc), there's no recourse for the dollars (tokens) themselves - much like dollars today.

Qworgon That's My Ape - A blockchain-free chain of custody tool

The thousands of stolen artworks from DeviantArt being turned into NFTs beg to differ.

Qworgon DeFi risks and the decentralisation illusion

Different tax treatment. Locking up to buy something with the loan doesn't expose you to gains.

Qworgon Approx. 24 hours ago, Tether printed 1B $USDT out of thin air

Why do you assume the price is determined by the open market? Who are the large scale crypto entities that would bet against Tether?

This happens every time the price dips, but the current best explanation/theory is that Tether prints more USDT with BTC backing from exchanges, who then use that USDT to buy BTC from the market. The issue is that the exchange is part of that loop.

Qworgon Cryptocurrency loan platform implodes in $130M hack

For my part, you can't declare "we're building this outside of the bounds of the legal system, but we're going to lean on that self-same legal system when it fails".

You have to pick between outside and inside the law.

Qworgon Engineer demos how SpaceX is building fracked well gas plant

I was speaking directly to the well complex, not any future power plant. The EPA is definitely involved in that.

Qworgon Engineer demos how SpaceX is building fracked well gas plant

The EPA doesn't have a dog in this fight - the feds don't have much of a role at all, unless it is on federal lands of a particular class that would trigger special protections (ie National Park).

Piping gas across state lines can involve the feds, or if they impign on a wetland or waterway. There's no interstate commerce to trigger any substantial federal involvement that I can see.

Texas was an inspired choice - California would have been a knife fight regulatorily.

Qworgon Army delays $22B augmented reality goggle program

Also, among other things, laser guided airburst 40mm grenades make trenches not a great option.

Qworgon Extreme Ironing

They're designed for a particular level of washer - HE in this case - you could probably extend to a larger one.

Qworgon Extreme Ironing

As an extension to the soap, there are single squeeze detergent bottles now that precisely meter on a one handed squeeze. So simple, yet phenomenally useful.

Qworgon Pocuter – A coin-sized micro computer with WiFi and BLE

Sure, but it would more likely be a reader for the keys you hand to someone on the SD card.

Unlikely though - the physical representation of crypto has been tried several times, but trust and key ownership is hard.

Qworgon Houses in Japan are going for as little as $500

https://spice.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/koreans_in_japan

They don't speak to the particular law, but they are speaking of the patrilinear transmission of Japanese-ness. I'll keep digging - my source was a Zainichi family in Japan in 2004.

Qworgon Houses in Japan are going for as little as $500

The latter IIRC - up until recently, if you had 1/128th Korean ancestry or more, you were disenfranchised.

Qworgon An Introduction to AI Story Generation

This sounded interesting to me as well, so I did some digging - the system is deterministic, as far as I can tell, but with lots of hidden and random information: https://wildermyth.com/wiki/index.php?title=Writer%27s_Guide

Qworgon Bioorthogonal info storage in L-DNA with a mirror-image Pfu DNA polymerase

Per Tom Ellis (https://twitter.com/ProfTomEllis/status/1420798929269149698): "Stable data storage and gene assembly all with L-chirality DNA They made an L-DNA dependent RNA polymerase too.

next they want to do a ribosome but first they need to make a DNase because nothing gets rid of their L-DNA once it’s made."

Qworgon Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

I cannot agree enough - we always used to say the best robots aren't called robots, they're called washing machines and dishwashers.

Qworgon U.S. inflation likely to remain elevated for up to four years – BofA

I've seen inflation adjustments, but cost of living adjustments are far more common.

Qworgon UK regulator clamps down on Binance

There are many popular things that are not in the public benefit, usually things that have socialized losses and indeterminate assignation of costs.

Qworgon Hundreds of fishing vessels vanishing along Argentina’s waters

There are several groups working on IUU fishing - I worked on Skylight some at Vulcan: https://vulcan.com/skylight

Lots of opportunity to help! Illegal fishing is the #1 contributor to slavery worldwide and is in the top 3 financial crimes.

Qworgon Anthropic AI

Current list (in LI order):

* Dario Amodei

* Benjamin Mann

* Kamal Ndousse

* Daniela Amodei

* Sam McCandlish

* Tom Henighan

* Catherine Olsson

* Nicholas Joseph

* Andrew Jones

Qworgon The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox

Someone likely did.

They likely also retired, per the parent comment.

Qworgon Proof-of-stake is inherently self-referential

That's only in a fully deployed system. 70k people won't participate in the first buy of PoS ETH - you'll have a far smaller number, likely less that BTC at scale.

Also, ETH has already forked over a doctrinal issue - I don't doubt it could happen again, but the PoS leaders will just directly double down.

This isn't a PoS/PoW argument - more that most public blockchains are inherently winner take all systems.

Qworgon Proof-of-stake is inherently self-referential

It isn't them though - it is a far narrower group. All blockchains have a rich get richer problem - the earlier you are, the cheaper it is to amass an unassailable position.

Even in something more difficult to collude/setup like BTC, 4 pools could execute a 51% attack. As of Q2 2020, 65.08% of hash power was in China.

It doesn't take many people, especially because you need both money and a desire to be in Ethereum. As another example, 2241 individual wallets hold 42% of all BTC, while 35,604,096 wallets hold 1.24% of BTC - I would expect concentration to happen even more quickly in PoS.

Qworgon “Setting the record straight on Freenode” [pdf]

It is a double edged sword - he's also bound (and may not have been the initiator).

Qworgon Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge

IIRC (it has been a few years), we only need a few degrees to reach a tipping point. The decay of methane hydrates could push out 1000 GT CO2 equivalent suddenly, accelerating warming by roughly ~40-50 years.