geekpowa

Mobilecoin doesn’t use mining

Their stated design goal was to create an actual usable payments system; not a speculative asset .

Edit : Urrgh got that wrong . Fixed distribution of coins and yes the founders control most of them

The author addresses cause and possible solutions in their longer essay.

The fundamental cause is taxation policy changes around 2000.

The solution is further policy changes, but the wicked problem is that the democratic majority do not want these changes; or can be easily persuaded these changes are likely harmful for them.

So Australia socially and economically exists in a death spiral; where wealth channeled into real estate is not consistent with its productive utility.

Podcast with the author on same news outlet:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/audio/2023/nov/25...

Cannot be stressed enough how much of a pernicious and destructive force housing policy is in Australia.

I am working class background and my boomer parents have not been as fortunate as some of their peers with housing driven wealth creation. I am lucky enough to own a home. All my siblings will probably never ever own a home.

Audiences are fickle and audiences captured during a websites golden period of explosive growth steadily move away over time.

I am daily fark user for 20+ years. The site certainly is past its prime but this is just the natural lifecycle of many online communities I suspect. I wouldn't characterize it as dead. I wouldn't characterize its decline from peak popularity as caused by user-hostile actions of its owners.

I don't think fark is a useful cautionary tale in context of reddit. Probably a more useful example might be slashdot.

Fark has made changes: with its ux and its moderation policies and implementation of those policies at times, users grumbled.

It's perilous to actively antagonize your audience, to take away things from them that have genuine utility for them. A site dies when you drive away your key content creators and contributors. None of these things happened at Fark I believe.

Another useful example of a site that stepped back from the brink of mass audience exodus is onlyfans and their rolled back attempt to ban adult content.

It’s an argument about survivorship bias in any critique of Covid policies that imply Covid response was unnecessarily harmful

My personal pandemic experience was luckier than many . 3 wilderness years of lost time only; of no growth. no loss of business, work , home etc. more importantly I’m alive and so is everyone I love

The living complain about the adverse impacts they experienced, while the dead remain dead.

Ordinarily this would be victim shaming / blaming. Though the endgame of crypto is dystopian. A reversion to centralized command economies where the gatekeepers of economic activity are early adopters.

Understand what you are putting your resources into, and how it measures against Kantian categorical imperative. It is difficult to be sympathetic to someone harmed by something that is harmful when universal.

First article google search returns today != the first time NYT reported these things including clarifications as they became public which was months after the event around April 2021, and widely reported in detail by the press at that time.

In regards to the underlying events, and my motivation for commenting, it is splitting hairs. Media reported what was established at the time but none of it significantly changes the core history of what happened on Jan 6. The protest was violent with lots of assaults and injuries. This is now extensively documented, even with investigations still well in progress.

Are we blaming traditional media companies for the content overload shitshow we now find ourselves living in?

If NYT could provide a remedy, what would that remedy even look like?

Wikileaks' ascendancy was on the narrative that traditional media is broken and untrustworthy. At the time I brought into that and the premise that they were disrupting this traditional industry and remaking it better. Now I realise like alot of IT focused disruption (including disruption I've worked on directly myself as an IT practioner), all they achieved was recreate the very thing they sought to disrupt, but poorly and generally worse version of it.

Older and wiser now and I realise personally that the trust problem is something much more than something for 'others' to step up and fix, but substantially in how I myself consume content.

I search "Jan 6 Deaths" and very first hit is this NYT article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/us/politics/jan-6-capitol...

The article contradicts your claim "reported and quietly fixed days later without ever really owning up to it". Firstly it is the first hit so hardly quiet. Secondly it outlines that initial reporting of Sicknick's death was simply reporting what capital police said, later revised by medical examiner. All front and center in this article.

As a non American I see the US as a country with significant structural problems. On that basis, the narratives are justified.

Especially after Jan 6 riots and the absence of a bipartisan response to this event. It is hard to discount the notion that the US is about 1 or 2 election cycles away from a society changing political crisis. Peaceful transfer of power no longer seems like a given.

1 data based point and 1 anecdote news/item.

1) America is considered a flawed democracy [1].

2) A recent tweet [2] from Gavin Newsom highlights pervasive political fragmentation across the US. Using same legal mechanisms applied by Texas and considered by other red states to curtail abortion access, in this case to curtail access to assault rifles.

Your comment you say "we need more unity". As an outsider I cannot foresee an easy / pragmatic way for the US to move closer to such a goal.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

[2] https://twitter.com/GavinNewsom/status/1469865185493983234

I originally tried this with a project I am working on, moving as much of the logic as possible into the DB. But abandoned the effort quickly in part because the logic I need to implement was simply too complex and was better expressed & validated in a client side language.

plpgsql performance is a serious issue for anything non trivial.

debugging is slow and challenging.

General rules I apply with procs

* try to keep procs to SQL, not plpgsql. More performant usually and sometimes pg will inline these. But sometimes I've found forcing it as plpgsql is good too, as it effectively 'fences' the query planner just like CTEs used to. As supportive as I am with pg's philosophy on querying hinting, sometimes you need to press your thumb on the scales a bit.

* procs for very complex and subtle queries where performance is not such a concern but readabiltiy of client code or dependent queries is useful. Like a client side function, something whose inputs and outputs are easy to reason about and you can easily build client side regression tests to validate.

* consider using plpgsql proc instead of recursive CTE for things where CTE recursion is needed. I've found for some types of jobs, plpgsql outperforms a recursive CTE. I think bc query planning for recursive CTES is very difficult.

Merchants are not allowed to add a surcharge line item for using Afterpay. Instead they have to increase base pricing across the board to cover their increased costs. Afterpay are quite happy for merchants to do this, what they don't like, and what they actively police, is merchants adding a line item passing Afterpay costs onto the consumer.

The macroeconomic impact is potentially enormous. Your mission is to capture an entire generation of consumers (millennials) to use your payment mechanism, and embedded in that is a hidden cost which is comparable to consumer VAT (called GST in Australia) that the sovereign nation also levies. Eventually regulators will take notice of this massive some of money.

A comment I once read of HN as while back resonates deeply with me, that is how broken and unsolved the problem of paying for things electronically remains, in terms of costs, reliability, security and ease of access. Inspite of all the incredible transformation that has occurred over the past 30 years. You think about all the money that moves around for electronic payments, in an ideal world, the net levy should be a fraction of a %, not the 1.5%-3.0% that is charged by credit cards or the 6-8% that BNPL charge.

Afterpay's business model relies on high merchant fees which merchants, under their merchant agreement, are not allowed to pass onto their customers. So from customers point of view, afterpay often appears to be cheaper than other payment channels such as credit card / paypal.

Afterpay roll into a new merchant, cannibalise existing payment systems and at leat for the low margin merchants I work with, who are not savvy enough to look at their own sales data, their business becomes less profitable.

Their whole business model is deeply unethical IMO, harms merchants and harms customers who do not use Afterpay as merchants have to amortize cost of business across all their customers. The Australian regulator dropper the ball last year when considering legislation to align Afterpay with credit card instruments on this issue. Eventually regulators will realise this is harmful behaviour and align things correctly.

The energy usage of itself is a red herring.

My issue is just how incredibly wasteful and inefficient PoW is. It's resource requirements completely disproportionate to the the underlying problem/solution space.

It offends my sensibilities and aesthetic appreciation of elegance in design. It is like contemplating a trillion record bubble sort.

Rationals are to decimals as arbitrary precision decimals are to binary floats.

Drill the junior devs: use decimals if you want accuracy.

What is unsaid with this: if you want accuracy with monetary representation.

Lots of problems out there where decimals are simply inappropriate.

One day, rational as a core type in postgres would be a nice addition. Rationals should belong as a core type in most every platform where general purpose compute can happen.

Insisting that Facebook / Twitter workplace should be apolitical, is as persuasive as Wernher Von Braun and his rocket engineer colleagues insisting that their workplace was also apolitical.

The authors writing is quite moving, certainly moved me.

But taking a step back, my read is that the author wants the allegations to be essentially tried in detail here and now.

To what extent is this appropriate in such a hearing?

Other link you shared is useful here. Still I have no real insight into what to ordinarily expect. More neutral reporting source would be valuable.

From the article, Assange's very limited access to his legal team, of itself, seems appalling and very unfair on its face. Surely access is an easy thing to accommodate.

If only PayPal were as accessible and responsive as stripe. There is a serious regression in their API right now : it is so bad and obvious it shouldn't of even made it past their internal testing stage. Been there for 2 weeks now. You think I can get anyones attention at paypal? They don't even seem to have a decent issue ticketing system to track it.

Query plans are dependent upon actual data itself. Plan performance issues can be difficult to replicate in test envs.

AFAICT, this product relies on LVM snapshots/copy on write : so is ideal diagnosing, trying out ideas on large databases.

"Any fugitive status he may have had has been proven to be political in nature."

Proven you say?

Things asylum seekers typically say: "If Obama grants Manning clemency Assange will agree to US extradition despite clear unconstitutionality of DoJ case"

“Mr Assange showed all symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture, including extreme stress, chronic anxiety and intense psychological trauma.”

Emphasis mine. His terrible mental health condition is not under dispute. But I am disputing the use of the word torture, as opposed to 'symptoms typical for'.

Torture (noun): the action or practice of inflicting severe pain on someone as a punishment or in order to force them to do or say something.

While he was in the embassy he was fugitive and definitely under duress to turn himself in, no doubt. What rights and privileges is someone entitled to as a fugitive in comparison to their rights and privileges once in custody? My bias is anti Assange, for some common reasons some people are anti, I try to keep an open mind and be a compassionate person and feel compassion for his terrible mental health circumstances, yet articles like this, I read it with a pile of skepticism and just feels weak, lacking in evidence, overstating things and drawing inferences I think are poorly supported.

Rich Client / Consumer PC. SQL backend (originally was proprietary DB), fairly tight coupling between UX and model, old school rich client event loop. An unhealthy amount of global state ( what the original programming language encouraged )

I think my original comment mischaracterized my project.

It is a refactor, but a refactor that is going to take about a year to complete, where there will be nothing to show for it until it is finished. From old codebase, probably about 20% to 30% of it will be ripped out and replaced.

Its not my first major project in terms of keeping this codebase capable. Previously written compilers/runtimes and IDE modules to keep it going : to gain control of codebase which was written in a commercial/proprietary dev environment into something I have full control over. That effort took a year.

The difference in this case is I am deliberately, intentionally throwing code away, alot of it, for the first time and contrary to my instincts. Still a post mortem might be interesting. My successful efforts to code my way out of a proprietary dev environment was an interesting and risky project, discussed at length with relevant dev communities at the time, but probably worth writing up one day.

Evolution will not let you escape local minima, intrinsic/sprawling design decisions that cannot be evolved away from.

I am sitting on a codebase whose oldest line of code is about 20+ years old and has evolved successfully in that time such that product it was 20 years ago and todays product are unrecognizable from one another. Its database schema is even older, encoding decisions made 30 years ago. Reasonable decisions at the time, but no longer reasonable.

I am working on a major rewrite which will take a year. The nature of the changes required mean I cannot break it up into pieces and do it bit by bit as I have been for last couple of decades with major enhancements. A functioning product is all or nothing. As someone who is anti-rewrite, pro-evolve and accustomed to working on old codebases, and being my own business so its my own money on the line, the decision to embark on a 12 month rewrite is not taken lightly.

Apparently rednecks have bandwidth and time to burn.

Home page load: * 48 requests * 5.68 / 5.69 MB transferred * Finish: 42.53s * DomContentLoaded: 1.67s

I am guessing blog author has got some things wrong here. I would expect JIT will be useful in a fastcgi setup.

Edit: to clarify, PHP processes in fastcgi persist across multiple web requests. So seems reasonable to me that a JIT would do useful work here. The JIT could even run while the PHP process in a fastcgi pool is idle waiting for next job.

M-Pesa was a foreign commercial product.

Even server infrastructure was hosted offshore until relatively recently[1]

[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/m-pesa-shuts-down-as-they-mov...

G-Cash, in the Philippines, was the first mobile based money transfer platform. It was launched in October 2004, a year before M-Pesa.

There have been many attempts to replicate M-Pesa's extraordinary success. M-Pesa in Kenya is a significant outlier in the mobile money space.

[Edit: assumed M-Pesa founding date of 2007 in wikipedia was when M-Pesa launched. It actually launched pilot in Oct 2005. Exactly one year after Philippines system]

Inflation is an emergent property of money. It isn't set or enforced it just naturally happens because of money. Monetary policy can be set to try to corral it to certain ranges based on economic beliefs about what rate of inflation implies in terms of growth and risk.

2008 happened because of bad debt. That the bad debt was cheap debt certainly poured fuel on the fire, yet the fundamental issue was deregulation and high risk lending practices that followed from that deregulation.