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bidandanswer

28 karma · joined December 13, 2023

BidAndAnswer.com

Post a $$$ price at which you promise to answer questions.

Ask questions with posted $$$.

Upvote and downvote to establish reputations.

Eternalized on distributed file systems.

submissionscomments
bidandanswer··on Robinhood Crypto Gets Wells Notice from US SEC
That's in the specific context of staking and promising returns, not crypto in general.
bidandanswer··on Robinhood Crypto Gets Wells Notice from US SEC
They've been reprimanded by a federal judge for blatant extrajudicial power grabs like this one. None of their huge cases claiming various cryptocurrencies are securities have succeeded, except in the super cut-and-dry cases like ICOs and centralized schemes that clearly pass the Howey test.
bidandanswer··on LLMs approach expert-level clinical knowledge and reasoning in ophthalmology
On that note, legacy computer vision models have exceeded humans at identifying pathologies from images of retinas, etc., for probably decades now.
bidandanswer··on LLMs approach expert-level clinical knowledge and reasoning in ophthalmology
> I don't need an LLM for that, just the right google queries do the trick.

LLMs are clearly superior at presenting the information and have tangible room for improvement, whereas Google has regressed over the last decade and is getting more brittle by the day.

Open technology (LLMs) are going to offer much more robust and reproducible solutions to such questions as "here are my symptoms, what's wrong with me?" than Google.

You can nitpick my statements all you want and I will probably agree with you, but the overarching takeaway should be that LLMs are a much better solution, especially for laypeople who cannot use Google effectively.

bidandanswer··on eBPF Documentary
> ebpf isn’t really novel beyond the interfaces it provides. They are just kernel modules that have been vetted and are sandboxed. Inserting executable code has been part of the kernel since forever in module form and kprobes.

This should be sung from the mountaintops. This concisely summarizes nearly everything that uninformed reader should take away from the comment section.

bidandanswer··on eBPF Documentary
A Turing Award for avoiding a context switch?

I mean, I love eBPF more than most, but this is a practical engineering solution to a logistical problem that didn't really need to exist in the first place.

This is not genius and not an order-of-magnitude improvement to an important computer science problem; it's an improvement to a costly artifact of the Linux kernel.

bidandanswer··on eBPF Documentary
That's a cool conjecture but it kind of misses the point of eBPF.

The point of it is that you can run user-defined programs while avoiding the costly context switch between user space and kernel space.

The kernel already is the kernel. Compiling kernel code to eBPF programs would offer seemingly no performance gains, since you're already in kernel space; there is no costly context switch to avoid.

bidandanswer··on eBPF Documentary
eBPF allows user-defined programs to run in the kernel.

This is huge for performance-sensitive code that executes against network packets: you don't have to context switch between kernel space and user space.

It's worth pointing out Solana's extreme competitive advantage over other chains is almost entirely due to it running on a variant of eBPF. †

This is an order-of-magnitude leap over other implementations and essentially the way you should do it, if you were to write it from scratch, aside from special purpose hardware fabrication.

† The second reason Solana is so fast is extreme parallelism: all accounts that are used in a transaction must be marked as either "read-only" or "writeable" before sending the transaction, allowing the runtime to parallelize all reads and only solve write contention when necessary.

bidandanswer··on The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)
Not true. It's sad that you all quantify and gamify relationships.
bidandanswer··on The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)
> Have a vacation house, which enables building social capital through hosting friends

Psychopath

bidandanswer··on Ask HN: Opened a LLC in USA, where should I look for clients?
> The 3% fee is a much smaller problem to have than what the world of crypto brings.

That's not an argument. Name the problems specifically.

> Oh and while we are at it, remind me how to get majority of customers to pay in crypto who are used to just credit cards or wires

There are tons of off-the-shelf checkout flows that allow customers to pay in cash and companies to receive the funds on chain.

bidandanswer··on Ask HN: Opened a LLC in USA, where should I look for clients?
Standard Stripe fees on $250k revenue:

- 2.9% + 30¢ per charge

- Assume net-30 invoices

- Total fees: 2.9% * $250k + 30¢ * 12 = $7,253.60

- Stripe can freeze your money arbitrarily and indefinitely

Standard USDC fees on Solana:

- Less than 1 cent per transaction

- Total fees: < 12¢

What's your argument?

bidandanswer··on Ask HN: Opened a LLC in USA, where should I look for clients?
And the number of companies that made use of computers was low when they first came out, despite the fact that the fledgling technology was genuinely valuable to them.

What's your point?

bidandanswer··on Ask HN: Opened a LLC in USA, where should I look for clients?
Okay. I have personally saved tens of thousands of dollars and hours of headache by just doing my business on chain.

How valuable is 2.9% of $1m+ to you?

bidandanswer··on Ask HN: Opened a LLC in USA, where should I look for clients?
All of the facts contradict you.

Two years ago I had to fend off contracts that paid in USDC.

It's easier to find someone to pay in USDC today than it was then.

Market share and volume will continue to grow.

What do you have against a genuinely useful technology with tangible benefits?

- Cheaper

- Faster

- No arbiter risk

- Built-in escape hatch for political dissidents and enemies of the state

If you want a trusted arbiter for all your financial transactions, you can continue to use the legacy financial system and pay the costs for doing so. I'm not arguing crypto will replace it. Both have their use case.

bidandanswer··on Ask HN: Opened a LLC in USA, where should I look for clients?
Trading and finance. It makes sense that they are crypto friendly, given their close proximity to it.

I suspect the rest of the commercial world will become much friendlier to it as more and more businesses are onboarded.

The pros vastly outweigh the cons and if you need something like escrow (or another trusted intermediary) then you can always revert to the legacy financial system for that. Both have their use cases.

bidandanswer··on Ask HN: Opened a LLC in USA, where should I look for clients?
See my other comment. Not hard.

And it will only get easier as time goes on.

bidandanswer··on Ask HN: Opened a LLC in USA, where should I look for clients?
In my experience, clients have asked me if it's alright to pay me in USDC, not the other way around.

The genie's out of the bottle. Once your funds are on chain, you have instant settlement, zero fees, and zero risk of an intermediary arbitrarily freezing your funds. No point in going back, unless your counterparty demands it.

bidandanswer··on Ask HN: Opened a LLC in USA, where should I look for clients?
In my experience, that's not true.

I've accepted hundreds of thousands of USDC in revenue in other ventures.

I've also wired and accepted wires for similar amounts. Each time I get a call from the bank and it takes a half a day at the very least. Sometimes it takes weeks to unfreeze my money in various payment processors.

On chain, it's faster. It's cheaper.

bidandanswer··on Ask HN: Opened a LLC in USA, where should I look for clients?
No explanation, just downvotes?

Standard Stripe fees on $250k revenue:

- 2.9% + 30¢ per charge

- Assume net-30 invoices

- Total fees: 2.9% * $250k + 30¢ * 12 = $7,253.60

- Stripe can freeze your money arbitrarily and indefinitely

Standard USDC fees on Solana:

- Less than 1 cent per transaction

- Total fees: < 12¢

bidandanswer··on Ask HN: Opened a LLC in USA, where should I look for clients?
Traditional recruiters have really good leads. Just say you're looking to structure the "job" through an LLC instead of W-2. Pick a niche and demand easily outstrips supply. You can set your own hours and command very high rates.
bidandanswer··on Ask HN: Opened a LLC in USA, where should I look for clients?
Stripe takes a hefty cut. Use USDC. Costs a fraction of a penny and settles in less than a second.
bidandanswer··on Tell HN: Cryptocurrency transactions >$10k require filing IRS Form 8300
Nothing. It's probably cheaper to swap Euro stable -> USDC on chain than whatever fees your banks charge you.

Additionally, if you're building a legitimate business on chain, then all your cash is already on chain.

bidandanswer··on Tell HN: Cryptocurrency transactions >$10k require filing IRS Form 8300
Nothing. Send USDC to Circle, Coinbase, or any centralized exchange for a fraction of a penny. Swap to USD for free. ACH transfer to bank for free.
bidandanswer··on Tell HN: Cryptocurrency transactions >$10k require filing IRS Form 8300
Structuring like that is explicitly mentioned in the tax code and is forbidden.

Transactions that attempt to avoid the $10k threshold must also be reported on Form 8300.

bidandanswer··on Tell HN: Cryptocurrency transactions >$10k require filing IRS Form 8300
Wow, that's horrible. Sending $1m nets $560 in fees.

That's like 5.6 million times worse than typical Solana fees.

That's a Michelin-star meal. Or two.

bidandanswer··on Tell HN: Cryptocurrency transactions >$10k require filing IRS Form 8300
Try sending $10k to a US lawyer from outside the US. Takes a lot of time and money. Do it on chain. Takes 400ms and costs a fraction of a penny.

> Engineers writing the code that is used to pay them?

The DAO is not the smart contract.

bidandanswer··on Tell HN: Cryptocurrency transactions >$10k require filing IRS Form 8300
And that was flagged because the information I listed was considered incorrect. This updated post has corrected the errors.

Act in good faith.

bidandanswer··on Tell HN: Cryptocurrency transactions >$10k require filing Form 8300 with the IRS
It's a DAO; it doesn't necessarily have a bank account.
bidandanswer··on Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?
The rust borrow checker often requires too much critical thinking for ChatGPT, as well.

LLMs confer a tremendous productivity boost. You just have to understand their limits and know when it's faster to think through and write the solution yourself.

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