Hacker News Reader

inquirerofsortson PayPal to allow cryptocurrency buying, selling and shopping on its network

> as far as I know there's no actual good evidence on how much fiat they're backed by

Would you say there's a minimum amount? Thought it was quite clear in the courts that it was at least 90% fiat backing with anything else being hard too account for which I'm guessing is doublespeak for "it's ours and you can't touch it".

Virtually all of the people who actually hold tether are exchanges, mostly in the US. Everyday people are rarely exposing themselves to risk here.

Just for comparison, the reserve ratio required by US banks is now effectively 0%.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm

inquirerofsortson PayPal to allow cryptocurrency buying, selling and shopping on its network

Didn't they say the same thing about general encryption not long ago?[0]

[0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180111/12215438987/fbi-s...

It's all PR work that the compliant media laps up. Most of us live in a world where guilt needs to be proven, not implied.

inquirerofsortson Richard Stallman's Personal Homepage

If you took out the person behind it all and just presented this at face value I do often wonder how differently these views would be perceived.

I love RMS, his steadfast dogged persistence in the face of overwhelming adversity that is stronger every year is actually quite inspiring.

Really hope the next generation standing on the shoulders of giants can properly articulate these issues far better though. For regular everyday people it's hard to impart and make anyone understand why software freedom is so incredibly important in functioning modern societies.

Maybe I'm an over-optimist but I think we'll get there one day.

inquirerofsortson Sweden's new car carrier is the world's largest wind-powered vessel

> is the world's largest wind-powered vessel

Nothing but CGI models. Surely a news agency as reputable as CNN can get the nomenclature right here?

It will be the world's largest wind-powered vessel once built in 2024.

inquirerofsortson Fighting for the right to repair your own stuff

While I certainly align with the sentiment, it's almost surreal to watch in action.

If you don't buy products with these conditions you never once face these problems.

The title really should be: "fighting for the right to repair products I happily bought when the EULA clearly said I couldn't do that"

Maybe stop buying these products and the companies will change their tune like the wind.

inquirerofsortson Zoom Rolling Out End-to-End Encryption Offering

Of course they could. Just like they can in Australia. We've already got plans for large tech companies to have "embedded" federal agents in their buildings.

inquirerofsortson Show HN: Chat bot powered by GPT-3

Unless I'm missing some subtext, yes right here: https://github.com/openai/gpt-2

To quote:

> WARNING: Samples are unfiltered and may contain offensive content.

inquirerofsortson National Rick Astley Hotline

works well, worth every $/min

inquirerofsortson Show HN: Chat bot powered by GPT-3

This should probably be a Show HN submission. It's cool and interesting to see in action.

Also your "try it out live" link 404's because it's a relative path.

I gave it go at https://itemsy.com/ mainly didn't respond to anything offensive I tried to goad it into.

Eventually got told I can save terrorist material using the product. Maybe that's true, I don't know :)

Perhaps check that out.

https://imgur.com/a/wQaJJNr

inquirerofsortson The Shockwave Rider: A sci-fi classic, whose future we live in (2018)

Wernher Von Braun wrote a fictional book about his non-fictional Mars proposal, with a character named Elon in it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/7wqnk4/werher...

inquirerofsortson Mitigating SSH Based Attacks

Good article.

Interested in the benefits of #2? Have never seen this done.

The firewall config in #3 seems like the proper layer to be handling it long-term, if you do both then the config in Tip #2 will never actually trigger.

With sending an email on login, you'll have to create one for every user. To run a command for every login use a sshrc file[1], this runs as sshd before any access is granted, quite useful for a lot of things.

You can also set the ForceCommand open in sshd_config but this also runs as the user, I prefer sshrc files for (maybe unjustifiably paranoid) security reasons.

Also from memory quite sure there's a difference between /etc/motd and a Banner file set in the config. Banner will run before login, motd runs after.

[1] https://man.openbsd.org/sshd#SSHRC

inquirerofsortson The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (2014) [video]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...

A good overview of the first category for anyone interested.

inquirerofsortson Ask HN: Why Paul Graham’s Website Isn’t Using HTTPS?

Rather than go to all that effort of doing something illegal for an individual, it's far simpler to find prior work.

https://www.google.com/search?q=javascript+injection+by+isps

inquirerofsortson OB–4 – Portable high fidelity loudspeaker

This reads like an ad, as do many of the replies.

Please read the site guidelines my friends.

> Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html