Hacker News Reader

ntoskrnlon The local news crisis is deepening America's divides

The article is about local newspapers, not TV stations

ntoskrnlon Bill to grant crypto firms access to Federal Reserve alarms experts

We might find out if that's true soon enough. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/23/tax-return-backlog-is-crushi...

ntoskrnlon Vite – Next Generation Front End Tooling

Are you sticking with the tired old 2019 tech, or have you rewritten everything with Kotlin, Compose, Swift, and SwiftUI?

ntoskrnlon 40% of Google users now connect via IPv6

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/223050/why-do-i-ha...

ntoskrnlon Mickey Mouse could soon leave Disney as 95-year copyright expiry nears

I hope the first public-domain animation we see is of Mickey Mouse swimming in a lair of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck

ntoskrnlon Ethereum Energy Consumption

To be clear, I'm not claiming that any particular implementation of PoS is vulnerable to this exact attack. It's an illustrative example of one class of attack that is a danger on PoS chains but not PoW chains, and might help people intuit why PoS implementations are more complex.

Coming back down to earth, this is why ETH requires checkpoints[1], but PoW chains do not[2].

[1]: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms...

[2]: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/75733/why-does-b...

ntoskrnlon Ethereum Energy Consumption

I'm extremely skeptical that it's more secure.

PoW burns a lot of energy, but the algorithm has an elegant simplicity to it. Crucially, the _work_ is impossible to fake.

PoS (very roughly) means that the richest control the network... which seems reasonable. But suppose you decide to rewrite the blockchain to say you're the richest, do you then control the network? It's a circular loop, and defending against those kinds of attacks is dramatically more complex. I've been lightly following development and I get the sense they've been playing whack-a-mole with vulnerabilities and bugs since ~2016. It's hard to have confidence in the result.

ntoskrnlon Ethereum Energy Consumption

https://web.archive.org/web/20210806101020/https://spectrum....

According to this, the PoS schedule first slipped in 2017. (search for "snooze button")

ntoskrnlon RadioShack reinvents itself as a crypto platform with wild tweets

Is it public how much they paid? I couldn't find any info besides this https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201119005153/en/Ret...

ntoskrnlon Newer, better sunscreens have not been approved by the FDA

You're also not allowed to have the best toothpaste in the world. Toothpaste with Novamin can't be sold in the US. Thankfully the internet makes it easy to get the good stuff anyhow.

ntoskrnlon What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

My experience is based on visits to an Amish town in Ohio when I was growing up in the 2000s. I distinctly remember being surprised to see they used phones and rode in cars. But that was a long time ago and only one town of many. I didn't mean to generalize all Amish communities.

ntoskrnlon What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

I wasn't offended and didn't downvote you. But the Amish do receive mail and use phones.

First article I found: https://amishamerica.com/do-amish-use-telephones/

ntoskrnlon Tech layoffs keep stacking up

Re: Ukraine. My article was March 23, the second article is Apr 28. So suppose they got back online a month later, that doesn't mean they've always been online. Just like if GitHub is online right now, it doesn't mean they've never had any downtime.

> He noted that since “the national bank is not really operating, crypto is helping to perform fast transfers, to make it very quick and get results almost immediately.”

That quote is pretty unambiguous. At least for a time, Ukraine benefited from a financial system with no central point of failure.

Pornhub probably offers different payment methods depending on your jurisdiction. I don't know much about that industry, I was just quoting a thread from the day before where a few people confirmed.

You're right that in a first world country, with reliable infrastructure, paying for uncontroversial products (note uncontroversial != legal), BTC will have more friction. Even if BTC is wildly successful, I'll be happy never to buy socks with it. But there's lots of adoption in other countries, and for fringe products like the ones you listed plus VPNs, "water pipes", etc.

And why are you asking for use cases "besides" these? That's the problem with these threads. Someone says "no use cases", then I list some use cases and cite my sources, then the next reply is "actually those don't count, please give me even more use cases!" Posting in these threads is exhausting.

ntoskrnlon What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

Sure, I could move to the woods and live off wild berries for the rest of my days. But if you want to be part of modern society, your bank will mail you your credit card, and your water company will text you a code to login and pay. Realistically, what choice do you have?

ntoskrnlon What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

I'd give anything to get rid of my phone, but almost everyone you do business with (DMV, electric/gas/water company, etc) expects you to have one. Same thing with USPS and their paper spam. At this point they're little more than government-mandated spam delivery channels. Private companies are handling the spam situation infinitely better.

ntoskrnlon Tech layoffs keep stacking up

Parent specifically asked about the four-year market cycles and I answered that specific question.

To your more broad question, BTC demand outside speculation is driven by economic usage, despite HN's doubts. If it wasn't for that, I'd be asking the same question about its value. If you're open-minded and interested in learning, I've written up answers to that question several times. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31932743

ntoskrnlon Tech layoffs keep stacking up

> If it is just driven by speculation, then what makes for "normal market cycles" in speculation?

Miners are rewarded in BTC for keeping the network secure, and they sell these BTC to cover operating costs. Every four years, the mining rewards are cut in half (per the consensus protocol). Miners have less coins to sell, which results in a supply shock. The price floor between these supply shocks is ostensibly determined by economic activity outside of speculation. This has resulted in a repeating four-year market cycle. Of course this pattern will only continue until it doesn't. You can search "halving" or "halvening" for more info. https://www.investopedia.com/bitcoin-halving-4843769

ntoskrnlon YouTube removes criticism of dangerous fractal wood burning, but leaves up tips

I'm a fan of ElectroBoom, but I have to agree, some of them are pretty horrifying to watch. The Jacob's Ladder video sticks out in my mind - I still can't decide whether it was staged. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g1z47U_kZQ

ntoskrnlon FCC Closes Robocall Loophole

I didn't know the damages were statutory - I guess I should look that up myself. In your case, was it a class action suit? If not, I wonder how they had standing to sue on behalf of thousands/millions of other users.

ntoskrnlon FCC Closes Robocall Loophole

What would the damages have been had you lost? I'm being called by a persistent "insurance" salesman that I'd love to take to the cleaners

ntoskrnlon FTX closes in on a deal to buy embattled crypto lender BlockFi for $25M

Disputed. Not refuted.

ntoskrnlon FTX closes in on a deal to buy embattled crypto lender BlockFi for $25M

Advertising is a black hole for money.

https://twitter.com/BlockFiZac/status/1422189818667323394

ntoskrnlon Why I’m Cryptophobic

Who says BTC isn't used for payments? Many porn sites ONLY allow you to pay with crypto, including PornHub[1], and they're keeping the lights on somehow. It's being used by the Ukrainian military to pay their suppliers while the banking system is offline[2]. It's being used for remittances. I had to pay my rent with it once. Also VPNs, etc. There's far more global economic activity conducted in BTC than in gold.

It all depends where you look. In some niches, BTC is used a lot. In some niches it isn't used by anyone (hi HN!) But it's a big world out there, and if you look outside your bubble it's not hard to find people using it.

Re: the last paragraph, BTC did indeed crumple under load for a long time around ~2016, and transaction fees were very high as a result. But lightning network has appeared since then and fees are back down to reasonable levels, well under $1. Those were serious growing pains, but we made it through just fine.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31914284

[2]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-crypto-is-helping-ukraine-r...

ntoskrnlon Extreme temperatures in major Latin American cities could be linked to 1M deaths

Heat stroke as a cause of death is a bit nebulous, in that it can cause parts of the body to fail that otherwise wouldn't. It's similarly fuzzy to dying of old age: If someone has a heart attack, and they're 95 years old, did they die of heart failure or die of old age? If someone has a heart attack, and it's 120°F outside, did they die of heart failure or die of heatstroke? Heat deaths are typically underreported because of this.

ntoskrnlon Labrador's robotic shelf for people with mobility issues

Please name the company.

ntoskrnlon Three Arrows Capital has defaulted on a loan worth more than $670M

That may be true right now, but their banking system has had a lot of downtime this year.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-crypto-is-helping-ukraine-r...

> He noted that since “the national bank is not really operating, crypto is helping to perform fast transfers, to make it very quick and get results almost immediately.”

ntoskrnlon Three Arrows Capital has defaulted on a loan worth more than $670M

https://www.yahoo.com/video/ukraine-government-using-crypto-...

> Chobanian says vendors are stepping up to accept crypto in exchange for supplies and crypto is proving to be more efficient than traditional payment methods.

> “It's really difficult to [send money] using traditional methods. First of all, it takes a lot of time. Secondly, it's a lot of bureaucracy and so on. Here, we are really fast. So we receive money and we spend it almost immediately,” Chobanian said.

https://www.yahoo.com/video/least-14m-26m-donated-crypto-215...

> “We're doing it really efficiently,” Chobanian added. “The majority of spending is actually done in crypto.”

ntoskrnlon Three Arrows Capital has defaulted on a loan worth more than $670M

It gets old quick. I remember joining when bitcoin was around $100 and it looks exactly the same now as it did back then.

ntoskrnlon Three Arrows Capital has defaulted on a loan worth more than $670M

One example: Ukraine's military has been using bitcoin to pay their suppliers. The bitcoin network is antifragile and not vulnerable to attack the way their traditional banking infrastructure has shown to be.

When searching I mostly found results on crypto news sites (naturally), but here are some mainstream sources:

https://time.com/6155209/ukraine-crypto/

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-cryptocurrency-tec...