null0pointer

That use case still works. You only need one exit node in one jurisdiction where the site you want to visit isn’t blocked. Surely an exit node operator in country A can’t be prosecuted for allowing access to a site on country B’s blacklist.

Yep, investment is an inevitably corrupting force for a company's mission. AI stuff is in a bit of a catch-22 though since doing anything AI related is so expensive you need to raise funds somehow.

Genuine question: How do people on HN reconcile the idea that tech salaries are suppressed with advocating for remote work and opening employment to the global market where employees are often paid much much less than in the US?

Yeah how am I supposed to raise millions of dollars without a working product by selling yesterday’s tech??

As far as I’m aware the base layer bitcoin blockchain still doesn’t have the capacity to onboard a significant fraction of the population. Additionally you need to keep your LN node always online otherwise you risk losing your funds, which is an utterly impractical requirement for the vast majority users. And if you’re going to suggest people should use custodial/centralized services to make bitcoin/lightning transactions then what is even the point of using crypto.

Sorry if that sounds unnecessarily harsh. It’s not directed at you, parent commenter. I agree that this is the exact use case crypto was meant to solve. I just think it’s a tragedy how Blockstream and co have crippled bitcoin and its development.

Not to mention using custodial services for cryptocurrencies defeats the entire purpose.

This use case is the entire point of cryptocurrencies. It’s just a shame that there wasn’t more effort spent on improving the UX rather than running the VC playbook on the ecosystem to seize control over it.

If you don’t take VC funds someone who will is going to copy your business, expand much much faster than you with all their free money, undercut you and any other competitors for years driving you out of business, before ultimately dominating the market and squeezing customers for more money than you while providing a product that is worse in every way and a fraction of what you had envisioned for your own product.

It’s downright cancerous.

> 1. Information doesn't want anything.

The phrase means "want" in the same way water "wants" to flow downhill.

> Sure many of us also do patreon etc but that’s never really sat right with me personally

I'm curious what it is about the Patreon model that doesn't sit right with you? To me it seems like it's both the most respectful monetization strategy to viewers, and provides the creator with a much more stable income than YT ads, YTP shares, or sponsors.

It boggles my mind how valuable advertising is. Who is clicking on that shit and presumably buying those products? I just cannot believe that there were actually $100k/day worth of actual ad conversions, no matter the player count. Yet the money flows so I guess people really do click on that shit and then buy that shit.

This is awesome! I’ve been putting off building the same thing myself.

It’s fairly easy to search for the user and text of the tweet if you want to verify a tweet that’s still live. But much of the time the original tweet has been deleted so the QR code would be a dead end too. Maybe it would be good on a third party service to screenshot and archive tweets though.

I’ve wondered the same thing. How much does a company have to spend on ads just to keep up with their competitors’ ad spend? I don’t know but if I had to guess I’d say most of the ad budget. Not to mention that ads are a cancer that infest and overrun anything they touch.

I really like Affinity, especially their buy it once pricing model, and I use Affinity Photo for all my photo editing. However, I was very disappointed to learn they were recently acquired by Canva, a company that is blatantly following the VC growth playbook. So I fear that sooner or later Affinity will fall victim to enshittification. It will either become exactly like Adobe is today or it will be sacrificed on the altar of ROI.

It’s also annoying to use a password manager. It would be much easier to just use the same password on every account.

The sheer hypocrisy of this article coming from McKinsey & Co. I can only assume pointing that out is the reason this was posted?

A crypto "company" is fundamentally antithetical to the entire ethos of cryptocurrencies. Yet that didn't stop grifter and greedy "investors" pumping money into them.

Not really. He was into altruism insofar as it acted as moral licensing for him.

I have also worked in multiple different sized companies, including FAANG, and multiple countries. My assessment is that FAANGs tend to select for generally intelligent people who can learn quickly and adapt to new situations easily but who nowadays tend to be passionless and indifferent to anything but money and prestige. Personally I think passion is the differentiator here, rather than talent, when it comes to doing a good job. Passion means caring about your work and its impact beyond what it means for your own career advancement. It means caring about building the best possible products where “best” is defined as delivering the most value for your users rather than the most value for the company. The question is whether big tech is unable to select for passion or whether there are simply not enough passionate people to hire when operating at FAANG scale. Most likely it’s the latter.

So I guess I agree with both you and the parent comment somewhat in that in general the bar is higher at FAANGs but at the same time I have multiple former colleagues from smaller companies who I consider to be excellent, passionate engineers but who cannot be lured to big tech by any amount of money or prestige (I’ve tried). While many passionless “arbitrary metric optimizers” happily join FAANGs and do whatever needs to be done to climb the ladder without a second thought.

The point is that the probability doesn’t matter because the outcome, total human extinction, is given infinite weight.

He’s spent all those years conducting field research for his stealth-mode social engineering startup.

You are completely right. “Not your keys, not your coins” This lesson apparently needs to be learnt the hard way over and over and over.

To be clear I’m not trying to victim blame here, it’s just that if people actually understood what they were buying then they would have known this. FTX, and indeed all legally incorporated companies in the crypto space, are greedy scumbags antithetical to the entire purpose of crypto.

Don't worry, they fail to support legitimate crypto too. Legitimate cryptos being XMR, BTC, BCH, and ETH, predominantly.

Bitcoin’s transaction throughput is artificially limited (hamstrung) and so not a useful denominator for comparisons.

In theory it’s possible for a Bitcoin-like blockchain to record all of Visa’s transactions in a single giga-block with only a single mining hash attempt.

Transaction throughput is not meaningful here.

> So split any cryptocurrency network into small segements, then add your machine to that network with a false history, design the network to be small enough, and your machine will out-hash the rest, and so it's history will win. Rinse-and-repeat.

You cannot forge history, even with 100% of the hash power. Firstly, each transaction is cryptographically signed with the keys of the sender address. Secondly, each full node within the segmented network will have the full history.

The only thing you can do is publish different blocks to the segmented network than the blocks the outside network has. You cannot create arbitrary transactions. You can only censor others’ transactions within the segmented network. Since the mining difficulty will not adjust instantaneously your segmented network will fall behind the outside network in block height unless you control more hashing power than everyone else mining Bitcoin on either network combined. So as soon as anyone in your segmented network re-establishes connection with the outside network (and they will, they could receive a physical hard drive with the blockchain on it and rebroadcast to segmented nodes) all your work is for nothing.

You might say “yeah well I’ll publish an entire fake history that is MUCH longer than the outside network with lower difficulty so I can stay ahead”. Well, actually you can’t, because if you wanted vastly more blocks between Bitcoins inception and the present then the difficulty will necessarily be much higher because that’s how difficulty gets set, by how quickly blocks are produced. You would have to change the difficulty adjustment algorithm, creating a fork between your own malicious node(s) and the other nodes in your segmented network. Oh and by the way, you _still_ can’t create arbitrary transactions.

> The global bitcoin system is well within rearch of a hostile state 51%'ing it

I’ll believe it when I see it. They honestly have a better chance outlawing it and imprisoning anyone who’s ever used it.

I didn't know that. That's good if it does.

> Either way you need to have a kind of central authority, or at least trusted third parties.

Not everyone needs to run a node, and not everyone could, but it is totally feasible for an individual to run their own if they decide they can't trust anyone else for whatever reason. Especially if you were running a node specifically for the purpose of name resolution you could discard the vast, vast majority of data on the Ethereum blockchain (for example).

> what if someone gets a name and we as a society (i.e., justice, whatever) decides that they should not be in control of it? [...] and that's a problem.

No, that is a feature of a decentralized system. Individual node operators would be able to decide whether or not to serve particular records, but censorship resistance is one of the core features of blockchains in the first place.

> What if a private key is lost, the associated names are gone forever?

The association wouldn't be gone, it would just be unchangeable until it eventually expires. This is a known tradeoff if you are choosing ENS over traditional domain name registration.

> What if your private key is leaked by mistake and someone hostile take control of your name?

As opposed to today where someone hostile, like for instance the Afghani government (The Taliban), can seize your domain for any reason or no reason at all?

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I think we just have a fundamental disagreement about what types of features and use cases a name resolution system should have. That's completely fine, you're entitled to your own believes. You can use the system that most closely resembles your beliefs, and I'll use the one that most closely resembles mine. Fortunately for us different name resolution system can peacefully coexist due to the nature of name mappings. At least for now, none that I know of collide in namespace.

ENS (which is what the GP refers to) has human readable names. But it doesn't have support for A/AAAA records today (does anyone know why? A-record support was in the original spec). Aside from that the only reason you wouldn't be able to type "mycoolsite.eth" into your browsers URL bar and have it resolve to an IP is because no browser has an ENS resolver built in. Yet.

Now do Discord.