keypusher

Learning your way around cloud services is a great idea, but I would be hesitant about starting with Lambda and Serverless, or doing only that. It's somewhat of a different paradigm, kind of back-end for front-end developers, or at least people who don't want to deal with infrastructure. While that is a great thing, I think there is value in understanding what a more tradition webserver on AWS looks like with an EC2 instance, EBS volumes, AMIs, security groups, load balancer, SSH access, etc.

AWS offers hosted Redis/Memcache via ElastiCache

I love that the very first picture is of Tree Style Tab (add-on). I have been using it for years and absolutely can't live without it. I wish they would find a way to disable the now-superfluous top-tabs in quantum, but I'm sure it can be done in time. Everything does seem faster and more stable since the update, I'm happy they got through the transition without pissing off a huge amount of their die-hard users that were tied to old extensions, by giving enough time for crucial things to be ported.

Buy on a trusted exchange (ie coinbase), move coins to your own private wallet.

It's not just the main source, it's nearly the entire source. (~98%)

> Back in 2014, the last year of the Google deal, that agreement brought in $323 million of the foundation’s $330 million in total revenue.

I used to believe this too, but not anymore. High transactions fees and slow times are a problem, but increasing the blocksize is not the answer. BTC can currently process 7 tx/second with 1mb blocks. If you double the block size, you get to 14 tx/s, it scales linearly. PayPal processes ~150 tx/s, Visa processes ~5000 tx/s, and can burst up to 50k tx/s. This is orders of magnitude off, and would require scaling blocks up to 1GB. By setting the precedent that increasing blocksize is the answer to slow transactions, you open the door to a future where only a very limited number of powerful entities can afford to run a full node, which brings you right back to a centralized currency. In order to scale BTC, it basically needs to move to off-chain transactions or some other new tech. The devs know this, they want fast transactions too, but they don't want to risk centralization to get there.

> they can always lower it later

I don't think this is true. Once you have blocks on the chain greater than 1mb, those blocks must be valid forever. That means protocol must support new blocksize forever.

It would be interesting to rethink versioning, but this proposal is not the answer.

maybe they aren't familiar with this tool. perhaps you could email them and suggest it to them, and then they would improve their site.

> Such reports assume that everything they’re told by management is true

No, they checked the balances with the banks. They verified the amount as stated was held by the bank at the time. You can see that in the section that begins "FLLP confirmed each bank account directly with the respective bank"

This guy has been trying to spread doubt about bitfinex for a long time, but never has much to back it up. A few months ago he went on a big campaign against Tether (tokens associated with Bitfinex), claiming they were created out of thin air. Tether then completed and released an audit by a professional, accredited team of their bank balances (1). I don't personally use Bitfinex, and it's possible some of these accusations are at least partially true, but there's really no evidence to confirm that. Don't buy into this type of FUD without doing your own research.

Some of the claims he makes are disingenuous. Bitcoin Gold has nothing to do with Bitfinex, and is listed on a number of exchanges. It's definitely a pretty sketchy project, but it was a BTC fork and users tend to dislike when their exchange keeps forked tokens to themselves. EOS/IOTA are big projects with large market caps and real teams. Did some weird accounting happen after the Bitfinex hack? Maybe. Did most of the people end up getting their money back? Yes. Does it matter now? Not really. This is the largest BTC exchange (by volume) in the world. They generate tens of millions of revenue from exchange fees every month. There's no clear reason for them to engage in any weird, illegal money schemes at this point, they already have a money printing factory.

https://tether.to/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Final-Tether-Co...

Bitfinex is the largest BTC exchange in the world, over $500 million per day in volume today. Big days are multi-billion dollar volume. Like most exchanges, they take a percentage cut of every transaction. This is not a company with zero value. The "buy low sell high" arbitrage thing is from a previous, unrelated business idea posted 5 years ago to a btc forum by the founder of bitfinex. As far as I know, it never went anywhere.

> Once bitcoin can handle Visa's transaction volume (250M transactions/day) we can talk scale.

blockchain != bitcoin. solutions such as ripple, iota, and others have tech in place that can scale to those levels and beyond. i don't think any of them are ready to replace visa yet, but the hurdles are not fundamental to blockchain.

If only they could have found a vendor selling enterprise grade multi-site data backup solutions. Or a scanner.

> Inflating asset bubbles without accompanying consumer standard of living

Like the rising US stock market and real estate prices, without accompanying consumer standard of living?

> Poor oversight of loans causing volatility in commodity markets and general mayhem

Like the 2008 crash?

> File-sharing giant Dropbox has signed the biggest lease in San Francisco history, an agreement for 736,000 square feet, the entirety of a new office complex under construction in the southwest corner of Mission Bay. [...] The space will represent an expansion for Dropbox, which occupies 182,000 square feet at 333 Brannan St., a building Kilroy also owns, as well as 115,000 square feet at 345 Brannan. Dropbox currently has about 1,500 employees and 102 job openings in San Francisco, according to its website.

So, they currently have ~300k square feet. They are expanding to a space with 736k square feet. And they have 102 job openings posted, which they were all filled would expand their workforce by less than 10%. What exactly do they need all this new space for? Even if they have huge plans to somehow expand their filesharing business, doubling their workforce at this point seems quite optimistic.

There are certain legacy extensions I simply cannot live without. Tab Tree is one. Are there any routes to move forward with legacy extensions?

One way to accomplish this would be reverse proxy layer with sticky sessions that routs some percentage of traffic to X and some to Y.

> It'd be worth implementing some kind of more robust auto update mechanism, or a schedule for the phase in of this [the block size], if only because when people evaluate "is BitCoin worth my time and effort" a solid plan for scaling up is good to have written down.

Prescient words from Mike Hearn.

> Even though JavaScript is a weakly typed language it doesn’t mean that it is inherently insecure. Yes, the programming language used plays an important role, but at the end of the day it is the developers obligation to write secure code in the first place.

Sorry, but I just don't agree. Javascript is a popular language, and has an important role to play in frontend development, but for financial transactions and critical contract code, the lack of safety almost guarantees catastrophic bugs and vulnerabilities will be made in production code. Maybe this is fine for hobby projects, but if you are talking about moving billions of dollars around in the real global economy, I don't see it being done safely in Javascript. I like that projects such as Tezos are integrating formal verification of smart contract code, that seems like the right way forward.

Yes. BTC went up significantly after the fork, and BCH is also climbing.

Dave Kleiman - Look him up. It's actually all a kind of sad and sordid story. The myth is far better than the reality.

MixCloud seems to be doing pretty well on the electronic music front. I don't know exactly what qualifies as underground anymore, but there are tons of great electronic mixes on there and a pretty active community.

It does not happen everywhere. It happens in companies lacking sufficient years of experience building software, without good management. It's so common as to be almost universal in engineers with less than 5 years of experience to encounter some important piece of software that they think is ugly and poorly written and embark on a massive rewrite that they think will fix all the problems.

Would you short the US dollar because one small bank got robbed due to bad security? The flaw here was not with Ethereum, it was with the wallet developer.

Oracle voted yes on this proposal.

Mikrotik

https://www.amazon.com/Mikrotik-Routerboard-RB2011UiAS-2HnD-...

> Closing the public access doesn’t make PaX/Grsecurity a non-free/libre software. Those who purchase subscriptions can access the source code. We don’t see GPL violated in any way here.

I'm not an expert in software licenses, but this seems wrong. Can you really have "free" GPL software that requires a subscription fee?

The problem is that is a billion people, and they aren't the only ones who live next to that river. It's the people upstream who are also defecating into the river that are likely causing them to get sick. And digging a hole in the field for the village to go in can be a bad idea because that area becomes a breeding ground for all kinds of bad stuff. This isn't like when you went camping and pooped in the bushes one time. This is millions of people, every day, for decades. The waste builds up unless it's taken care of, and putting your waste into the river where it will be washed away starts to look like a viable strategy. Maybe these people aren't as dumb as you think, they just live in a very different environment and didn't have your education.

The biggest threat to most users is that their password on SomeRandomSite gets out (db dump, hacked, whatever) and since they use the same password everywhere, now their bank and/or their email password is out in the wild. If you are willing to carry an encrypted password file around with you, and consult it every time you need to enter a password, go for it. Yes, that is more secure than LastPass. What LastPass offers is balance between convenience and security.

Also, I believe that a hacker who gained access to LastPass's database would merely get a bunch of encrypted passwords. LastPass doesn't know your master vault password, which is needed to unlock your vault and use the passwords that are stored there. So, they are a big target, but primarily for attacks like this where an individual page might be able to hijack the plugin for users visiting the site, and not because some could hack LastPass and get everyone's passwords.

I believe the trackpad is laid out that way so that you can comfortably rest your left hand on WASD and right hand on trackpad for mouselook, when playing FPS or RTS type games. For non-gaming uses or left-handed users, I agree it is a complete non-starter. Also I tend to think that if you are serious enough to spend $4k on a gaming laptop, you can probably just shell out for a decent mouse instead of using the trackpad.