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RustyRussellon The Lost Art of Commit Messages

I don't care, as long as a commit which fixes a crash, compiler error or test failure quotes the errorv. This helps searching for issues, and also helps later if you find they mis-diagnosed the problem.

Other peeve: quote the core of the bug report you're closing, so when GitHub inevitably goes away/turns evil/starts charging, you don't lose half your knowledge. The git tree should always stand alone.

RustyRussellon Recommendations for designing magic numbers of binary file formats

We use the same for Lightning: even bits for incompatible changes, odd for backwards compatible changes.

RustyRussellon Monster Cables picked the wrong guy to threaten (2008)

OK, the whole "I am a lawyer" was next-levelled by this closing sentence: "Not only am I unintimidated by litigation; I sometimes rather miss it."

RustyRussellon Recommendations for designing magic numbers of binary file formats

It's a trick I stole from ext2, and simplified. In that filesystem there are three bitsets: one for reading, one for writing, one for fsck. If you don't understand a bit you can't do that action.

For most protocols there's only reading and writing, so you can use odd bits to mean "backwards compatible features, you can read even if you don't understand" and even for "stop, we broke compat".

RustyRussellon Recommendations for designing magic numbers of binary file formats

These days I generally advise that you interpret the version number as odd and even bits: odd means it's compatible with readers, even means it isn't.

RustyRussellon The Night Watch (2013) [pdf]

I actually laughed out loud. But my wife would not understand...

RustyRussellon Archivists work to save disappearing data.gov datasets

But there has to be economic incentives to maintain the data, and only Bitcoin can even to begin to make that claim, and even it is only 16 years old.

Still, Open Timestamps does exactly this, and had been running for over 8 years now.

RustyRussellon It's time to abandon the cargo cult metaphor

When I was working for a large US tech company, one of colleagues used that term to their American managers in a positive way (we were Linux people, after all): turned out he didn't know the origin. Significant faux pas!

RustyRussellon What it's like working for American companies as an Australian

Worked for American companies for 25 years. Generally Americans come across as more confident, and yet conform to hierarchy in a way I've never seen en-masse in Australian culture. It always seemed to be that only the most weirdo Americans are blind to relative status, whereas for many Australians it's the norm?

Employment-at-will takes some cultural adjustment, too. But for tech folks tends to be a net win. You just need to set your expectations accordingly!

RustyRussellon Court tells EPA to consider fluoride risk

Worth reading this silly thread to hit this gem.

Hope you have a great day!

RustyRussellon PayPal (USA) will automatically share data about you to participating stores

Don't see anything relevant in Australia...

RustyRussellon Craig Wright said he invented Bitcoin – lawyers proved him wrong

Please don't do this.

He's repeatedly denied it, and your ignorant claim can only bring him and his family trouble.

(Also, I've known Adam for a number of years through multiple Bitcoin conversations and I can personally vouch that it's not him!)

RustyRussellon Craig Wright said he invented Bitcoin – lawyers proved him wrong

Actually, it's estimated that about a quarter of mining is in China. The largest players moved, the rest are lying low, so it's hard to get exact numbers.

RustyRussellon L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

When solar or wind is curtailed, I would call that wasted energy?

RustyRussellon L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

Can you provide evidence of this? Thanks!

RustyRussellon L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

This I'd wrong. There are at least 4 independent, FOSS implementations and an open specification and spec process.

RustyRussellon L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

It was Satoshi who introduced the block size limit though. Awkward!

RustyRussellon L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

If censorship resistance and reliability are your metrics, there really isn't a serious competitor. There is huge incentive to claim to be so, however!

But if you're trying to build something for decades, as you should be for internet infrastructure, there isn't much option.

RustyRussellon L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

Why? Using wasted energy at scale doesn't seem to cause significant CO2 emissions, especially given that it's such a price-sensitive buyer, and curtails so well.

Curiously, this energy hunger is driving decentralization despite the otherwise inevitable benefits of scale.

RustyRussellon L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39210946

Heres the inline:

See https://github.com/rustyrussell/runes for a simpler alternative and implementation (this has C and Python, but there's also a Rust implementation because why not?)

However, the "no db access" property has proven to be untenable in practice. Users end up wanting to see what runes are issued, blacklist them, know when they were last used, and have rate limits. The last two are a killer, requiring some state to be kept (unless your system allows you to return a modified rune to the user, which is a different workflow from normal bearer creds).

RustyRussellon L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

That's a long stretch from "why aren't we seeing more adoption" to your assertion that "no wallets/exchanges/no one uses it"?

Because payments happen been pairs, there's no easy count of activity. The best estimates I know of are things like https://blog.river.com/the-lightning-network-in-2023/ which is almost 12 months old.

As to "no wallets support it", that's a strange thing to say, since lightning wallets support it, obviously.

I'm yet to see any comparable statistics in L2s on Ethereum? Was hoping you'd have something there, too :(

RustyRussellon L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

This does not seem accurate, but perhaps I'm too close to see it? Do you have a source for this?

RustyRussellon L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

Presumably the macaroon itself contains a shortish timeout.

You can rate-limit (runes do this, which are simplified macaroons) but then the server is no longer stateless. Pretty sure I've ranted about this in HN comments before, could dig it out if you're interested?

RustyRussellon L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

Different problem?

Having created a micropayment network, you quickly discover that infrastructure does not exist where you want to use it. Web APIs are kind of the obvious use case, but because there was no micropayment system they trended to an account and batch payment method by necessity.

This aims to fill that infrastructure gap. Of course, there's a huge chicken-and-egg bootstrap problem, but you have to start somewhere!

RustyRussellon GCC's new fortification level: The gains and costs (2022)

> Even `new_pointer == old_pointer` is not allowed.

This is legal. But dereferencing old_pointer even after this check had passed is undefined.

RustyRussellon GCC's new fortification level: The gains and costs (2022)

Yes, came here to say this too. Of course it varies, but some measurements would be nice!

RustyRussellon Jeff Lawson buys The Onion

I still refer people to the classic film review of The Sound of Music:

https://www.theonion.com/the-onion-looks-back-at-the-sound-o...

RustyRussellon Simplified Technical English

Indeed: thanks, that actually has good examples and counter-examples.

RustyRussellon Why the 2% inflation target? (2023)

This argument goes back to Keynes IIRC: inflation was good to keep wages reduced.

It's hard to imagine a deflationary world where bosses had to negotiate with workers to reduce their salary annually, which kind of shows how powerful this idea is...

RustyRussellon Judge rules Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto

Please don't do this.

He's repeatedly denied it, and your ignorant claim can only bring him and his family trouble.

(Also, I've known Adam for a number of years and I can personally vouch that it's not him!)