oleganza

Why for free? Give, like, a 50% discount. Their "free stuff" would be "50% for free".

Monaco is special in a way that power does not matter there that much and even downforce is not so important, so comparing different cars over that track does not make much sense.

Whenever people bring up Lisp syntax, I like to remind everyone about io language. Its homoiconicity is inspired by Lisp, and almost all good things about Lisp syntax are applied in io, but at the same time it avoids this awkwardness that turns away most of the people (and turns the remaining minority into zealots :-)

So if you design a language and want to use Lisp-like syntax, I recommend to also check out io before steaming ahead.

For publicity reasons F1 and Indycar/CART virtually never race on the same tracks. Otherwise people would point fingers and say that US series are slower overall, or top speeds in F1 are not as jaw-dropping as in US.

I'd bet FE has similar arrangement - no one wants obvious comparison with an obvious loser by some metric.

If you and all your family and friends live in a country with a single currency, no bombs over yours or their heads, no serious inflation and no foreseeble risk of account freezes/closures, ATM restrictions and economic sanctions, then you probably can argue that crypto is some fringe tech that brings nothing, but PITA and risks.

But many people have themselves or have family/friends that need to save their money, or escape with their money. Or, recently: escape with all banking cards being blocked and find themselves having to live off Bitcoin. Cryptocurrencies are solving very real problems right now, for millions of people in Latin America, Asia and Europe:

1. They help remit money across the globe: Hawala network is way more scalable since there is a secure global settlement layer - the blockchain. No need to have 3-4 hops through trusted parties. You can directly exchange cash for bitcoin in one place and the opposite in another.

2. They help moving personal cash across the border: if you can't trust or use your bank, you won't be able to safely move more than a small pack of $$$ through customs. Crypto is your only option to save your money.

3. They help you pay the bills wherever you are regardless of your residence/visa status. You may not be able to open a bank account in a foreign country, but you would be able to book a flight, a place to live, pay for taxi, pay for cellphone, pay for food delivery through crypto-interfaces such as cheapair, travala and gift-card gateways like bitrefill to use amazon/uber/airbnb/careem and thousands of other merchants.

This has nothing to do with the properties of Go/Rust as languages, but all about organizational structure. Go is supported by Google who can put necessary resources to include a bunch of high-level batteries in the stdlib and keep it coherent. Rust community does not have such resources and even if there are some big players joining the community, they don't own Rust and won't be able allocate resources for continuous support without a proper org structure that allows this to be sustainable and efficient.

Philosophical reasoning like "Rust should have small stdlib" is horseshit. Ideal language has every function perfectly designed in the stdlib (kinda like PHP in 2003, lol). But to get closer to that dream you need some sustainable organization that maintains and expands that stdlib, wishes to do so and has resources to do that continuously.

If it's just random 5 people doing maintenance and hacking at their spare time, that's not enough for an expanding library of diverse code. That could be enough only for keeping very core features working/improving like const generics and borrow checker.

Your example is valid and replies are ill-informed. There is a difference between a "date" and "time interval". Timestamps are good for storing intervals, but if you need to plan something on a _date_, you need to store the date. This means you care not about specific number of seconds having passed since now, but about what calendar (and the clock) is saying when the event has to happen.

Example: nobody cares if a concert planned on November 19, 2024 at 19:00 in Honolulu starts in 12345600 seconds or 12349200 seconds since now. But everyone cares that everone's calendars and watches are in sync by that time and show specifically that date and that time, regardless of how many times people switched DST or timezones in the years in-between.

Signalling is how mating works which leads to procreation that repeats the same process. If you don't signal your worthiness by winning contests, looking good, showing money, earning respect or in any other meaningful way, you are less likely to find a good matching spouse that will lead to more copies of you down the road.

> I get why

Apart from purely political/commercial reasons, I don't see why.

Sandbox and App Store are mutually exclusive reasons for this situation.

Option A: you have good security architecture, so running arbitrary code is safe because all the data is well-isolated and programs cannot mess with each other's data. There is no need to have humans reviewing apps, apart from optional parental controls that people may opt into.

Option B: you don't have good security, so you need to micro-manage app publication and have ability to revoke them, in case an exploit is discovered.

Also, for a development machine, when you run arbitrary 3rd party open source dependencies, build scripts etc, you really want iPad-like security model where each project lives in its own sandbox. But the Unix permission system is an unusable mess, so even if you put your project in a container, your build script can still push to git repo and do other fun stuff outside build folder.

It is completely backwards. Letting government think that it's an institution that grants rights and tells how to live instead of helping people sort out conflicts while letting everyone decide how to live their lives is a sure way to destroy society. Because power-hungry sociopaths would be the first to play such game.

Good parents don't parent via restrictions, but by offering kids something better to do with their time. Restrictions are powerful if they are super-clear and super-limited ("do not kill", "do not steal"). Just making a pile of good-to-have "don'ts" diminishes the effect and risks brewing revolt.

If you manage society and worry that people smoke too much or drink too much, or don't do enough sports, or eat junk food, figure out a way to make a better alternative more available and more satisfying. Be a good parent who guides to a better way, not an annoying parent who simply barks "no" left and right.

I prefer more ECC than less, but as a friend of mine noted, most of the data are JPEGs (or video for that matter) and bit flips there usually go unnoticed because they simply adjust the pixel color slightly. So the chance that 1-in-2048-million bits is actually an important metadata bit that corrupts data structures is pretty low.

Well, here comes the type system, so your fancy data structure has zero cost. Rust recently got more support for const generics, so you could encode size bounds right in the types and skip unnecessary checks.

Usually people say "oh, it's just another typical failure of writing in memory-unsafe C", but here's a slightly different angle: why is this common error is not happening under a single abstraction like "data structure that knows it size"? If C was allowing for such things, then 100000 programs would be using same 5-10 standard structures where the copy-and-overflow bug would be fixed already.

Languages like Rust, of course, provide basic memory safety out of the box, but most importantly they also provide means to package unsafe code under safe API and debug it once and for all. And ecosystem of easy to use packages help reusing good code instead of reinventing your own binary buffers every single damn time, as it's usually done in C.

So maybe it's not the unsafeness itself, but rather inability to build powerful reusable abstractions that plagues C? Everyone has to step on the same rake again and again and again.

No, you shut down entire industries not because of poor vents in a concert, but because some overly powerful, yet replaceable and hysterical bureaucrats decided to cover their asses (from being eaten by the exact same bureaucrats) with arbitrary loud and visible policies that had little correlation with actually solving any problems.

Notice similarity between places like Florida (less power-hungry governments + freedom-loving population) and places like Belarus and Russia (more authoritarian central gov that does not fear for losing its seat in the next election): both were shutting down things to a much lesser degree than everyone else. I think the reason is exactly the combo of "I can have arbitrary power as long as I have good PR" in the average democratic political environment.

You decide to frame it as "remove protections", while I frame it "here's thing with different tradeoffs". Did cars arrive on the streets with "protections removed" because they could go faster? Or we just accepted different tradeoffs and had to adjust design of the streets, cars and behaviour to improve safety of the new tech?

Of course, freedom comes with responsibility. If no one can take your coins easily, you won't be able to recover them easily from someone else either. That's an alternative compared to super-centralized hierarchical finance. People often imply that one is strictly worse than another without considering both advantages and disadvantages.

FYI: nullc is a long-time username of Gregory Maxwell (here on HN, on Reddit and elsewhere too).

"very few places accept BTC directly" is a non-argument.

First, we both agree that the market is far from saturated with BTC. When/if it is, then sure many more places will accept BTC.

Second, even with USD you are separating payment processors and issuers. Visa/MC being shut down does not make USD worthless. Just like if some major exchanges disappear, that would only make people seek some other ways to perform transactions they want to perform.

That's an orthogonal issue. There are plenty of non-crypto investment scams (ask your local VC), phishing etc. Some part of the population will always be robbed or scammed, regardless of the name of your country, inflation rate or what currency you use to pay the bills.

Crypto may be higher on radar because there's lure of high returns because market is expanding rapidly, and, as in any bubble, some things will pop and some people will hold the bag. Just like with dotcom bubble or california gold rush.

PS. Even though California rush left most people without much direct profit, the indirect profit was that California was populated, infrastructure developed and it became an important part of the global economy, and as a free state was one more place where people could move to build a better future for themselves, even if they were not directly interested in the gold itself.

Bitcoin does not have counterparty risk. Your coins remain yours regardless of who else was doing risky bets and went bankrupt. (Provided you hold your own keys.)

As for volatility, that's purely a function of holding distribution and market liquidity (and the market right now is far from saturated - hence 30% dips and huge potential upside in the future). As soon as the "whales" are thinly spread across the globe, you don't have a risk of your coins' value suddenly crash because of one guy selling his holdings.

Speaking only for Bitcoin, that's a leverage against state monopoly on money issuance.

Regardless of the church you subscribe to (deflationary spiral of death VS austrian hard money libertopia), the fact remains that people:

- want to save value for later,

- want it to be liquid,

- want it to be secure

Govs' monopoly on money and ad-hoc issuance policy does not make fiat currencies a good fit. Physical gold is hard to secure, transport and partially liquidate. Gold certs and all sorts of funds are subject to counterparty risk that we begin with (see the history full of abuses in that realm). Real estate is expensive, comes with high taxes and is very far from being liquid.

Bitcoin solves all these issues because it's far more liquid and easier to secure than gold or real estate. That creates a leverage against how much gov could inflate their money supply or tax other assets: they more they do, the more value flows out into Bitcoin. Today Bitcoin is a tiny slice of the pie, but in the future it may be very visible and offer real competition and make all the people who do not even use Bitcoin find themselves in a more stable fiat environment as a result.

Myself going from "web designer" to a "zero-knowledge proof cryptographer" (I'm a coauthor of Dalek Bulletproofs implementation, the cleanest API, documentation and fastest ZKP system ever) I'm sad to see crypto textbooks spending most of the time on symmetric ciphers, going through the same nonsense like ECB and then touching asymmetric only with RSA and annoying GCD stuff when everyone moved onto elliptic curves already.

I'd like to see material around modern stuff (Keccak and ECC) with only a cursory discussion of pitfalls of the past standards in contrast with the current stuff. And more time on asymmetric, discrete log and fiat-shamir protocols that are so much fun and require really a 7th grade algebra to grasp.

I've also made a couple of videos on ECC basics with that approach: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk0r9S76wngNPJb_GlhJYdw

EDIT: what i mean, is focus first on how to use primitives and what they promise, rather than how they actually work. Once you feel like you can play with these legos, it's more fun to dig deeper and see why ECDLP is hard and how ciphers are made. But please don't start from within - it's an annoying boring mess that distracts from the true beauty: the cool things you can build with these tools.

Please don't confuse the breakdowns in specific political groups with overall community. In any realm there are 10-100s of quiet participants for each loud person who takes on some public role and tries to organize things. Enthusiastic bureaucrats often clash unless there's de-fact dictatorship that suppresses such conflicts before they create too much noise. But their problems are not representative of everyone else's work and participation.

So the server and device securely agree on something like TOTP list (weak keys with expiration date), so intermediate data can be authenticated within those time windows? But if that applies to encryption too, then won't later bruteforced decryption pose a threat?

Epsilon stands for a "arbitrarily tiny bit" in calculus.

"Blockchain" became a term when people started riding on Bitcoin hype to push their own scamcoins. So, on one hand there was "there's not just Bitcoin, there's an entire Blockchain Space" theme, but on another — everyone saw "blockchain" as a giant ponzi operation. Also, there are people who are fixated on proof-of-work as something evil, so that's also why CT was saying "this is not a blockchain".

Yes, that's true. Thanks for correcting me.

Captain Obvious suggests that Emo Philips was not joking about throwing anyone off the cliff, but about the very fact that political subdivisions in religions pretend to be about which moral values are more correct, instead of being dirty power games of self-proclaimed authorities covered up by thick layers of ideology. Our imaginary gods do not care either way and there is no evidence that we should care either.

First of all, we are talking about on-device decryption, so there is no difference in terms of security whether people extract a symmetric secret key or an asymmetric secret key.

Secondly, yes, asymmetric encryption is slower, so you almost always use hybrid scheme: asymmetric scheme (ElGamal, for instance) for encrypting the symmetric key, and then a symmetric scheme (e.g. AES) for the bulk of the data.

Only in very exotic protocols such as digicash blind signatures or anonymous credentials with "algebraic MACs", you want your actual content encrypted directly via ElGamal or RSA, so that you can do some operations or proofs about the ciphertext — in those cases you can't encrypt symmetrically as that would erase all the algebraic relations.

Surprised to not find a mention of the second law of thermodynamics in the article.

What happens after 6 hours? Let's say I capture all the data from all the sensors and decrypt it with a 24 hr lag. I don't get a real-time info, but i collect all the patterns and whatever long-term data that's accidentally sent out.