safog

Yes I agree, but still trying to figure out what impact that has on the broader eco system if USDT ends up being worthless starting now. How exactly will it impact the BTC price?

I don't think there are any claims that Tether the organization itself is doing anything like that. They just print USDT and send it to people who are interested in buying USDT like exchanges.

The two problems as I see them are:

- Is USDT actually backed 1:1 by USD / cash equivalents as Tether claims? w/o independent audits we have no idea. So technically, if you hold USDT on an exchange and use it to trade alts and evade the taxman, then if this whole thing falls apart your USDT might be worthless.

- The owners of Bitfinex and the people who run tether are the same set of people. So theoretically it's possible that

   + Bitfinex generates artificial demand for USDT somehow 
   + Finds a way to swap actual USD for USDT (customer 
     deposits? 19bn worth of customer deposits? Unlikely) 
   + In turn goes around and buys BTC with that USD for some 
     reason 
   + Does it w/ enough vol that all the arbitrage bots won't 
     be able to arbitrage it away.

These are a lot of ifs and I'm just not seeing the incentives here as best case Finex gets stuck with a bunch of BTC they inflated themselves which isn't in their interest.

I'm not a finance guru, so I'd love it if someone more informed than me can comment on how someone can pull this off.

You'd need to do better than that. How exactly does printing USDT lead to BTC price inflation? I haven't heard anything convincing yet. Most of the vol doesn't come from the BTC USDT pair. Exchanges don't seem to be doing anything shady like manipulating the price upwards by themselves.

That's surprising for me - my memory of it was that ball points were just plain safer as a 3rd / 4th grade kid using them.

Fountain pens on the other hand were expensive, messy (they can leak in your pocket, you have to refill them with ink, the nibs might need replacing) and just plain hard to use in general.

I think I got my first fountain pen in high school - one of those landmark dad / son moment along with things like learning how to shave etc.

I feel like I’ve read articles about birds feet not getting cold from four different sources (Reddit, YT, Twitter and now HN) in the past week. Why is everyone suddenly so interested in birds?

Can't you do worse things if you have >50% hash power? It seems like DoS is pretty mild all things considered.

This is a really nice idea but considering we haven't even solved the relatively simple case of users giving permissions to apps and expecting them to behave responsibly, I'm not optimistic that we can solve the much more challenging case of importing library code.

e.g., If someone gives an app the ability to upload photos, it can silently read all photo metadata, upload all photos to a private server instead of uploading just the single photo that the user picked. This can be solved with OS level standard photo pickers but it hasn't been yet.

Same with package code. Maybe a package needs network access for stuff it genuinely needs to do. However it can (and probably will) at some point go above and beyond in the amount of data it collects. FB Mobile SDK outage is a good example of this. https://www.bugsnag.com/blog/sdks-should-not-crash-apps

Man, you're really getting the short end of the stick here - it's actually pretty surprising because even though the forum is tech heavy, you wouldn't expect this much hate on consulting as a business model.

Outliers like the Opioid stuff aside, I do think most day to day typical things that consultants do is valuable work for companies. Say you're launching a new product and want to figure out cost based / value based pricing - it's either a single person in the company that does that that might not have a lot of experience in that area or a consultant from a consulting company that has a good track record at doing value based pricing specifically. I know who I'm going to pick.

I think it'll be more like Jassy saying: Dave (Clark), make sure retail top-line grows x%, profitability grows y% and keep an eye on Walmart.

I was just sort of following the whole circus without any interest (maybe a slight short interest even) and even I'm really angry at how this has been done.

Absolutely disgusting, people need to go to jail for this, you can't get away with punitive fines that are less than what the hedge funds would've lost on the trade itself.

I hope regulators step in and preserve all correspondence + records on why this decision was made. But somehow, I don't think this will happen. They will lose documents, texts and chats mysteriously and that will be that.

Only hope is whistleblowers leaking stuff to the media.

That is a real stretch. Plenty of people have lost fortunes on /r/wsb using robinhood without anything of note happening.

I think this has been the standard approach for all e-ink displays that have been floating around (both homemade and commercial).

So, yeah, I appreciate it but it's not specifically innovative in this regard.

Yeah that's fair. I think I need some concrete data before making statements like these - In absolute numbers, Millenials haven't been hitting the financial milestones that their parents did (incomes, home ownership %, retirement savings etc.).

If that's worth the non stop complaining, I have to figure out.

Along this note, the new generational warfare is Gen Z vs Millenials.

Gen Z posters are mostly tired of the millenial narrative of boo-hoo the system is rigged, I'm so poor, why won't someone give me free stuff and it's a meme to make fun of millenials on TikTok for saying this.

I wonder how it'll go for them given they're mostly still in college / high school but we shall see. They've mostly graduated into a booming economy, got well paying jobs just as they graduated but that might all change in the next few years.

I for one am pretty tired of all the doom and gloom inequality nonsense all the time. I did everything right and am not successful story doesn't resonate with me at all for one. Most people who went to college and chose a standard, decent major (business, law, medicine, engineering) are doing pretty well for themselves. Yes we had 2008 and things really sucked just as we were graduating, but so what? Lots of people (including me) have dug ourselves out of that deep career hole. Don't blame rich people for your nonexistent career. Even if you took away all of Jeff Bezos' wealth and wiped out college loans, the career you've built for yourself doesn't change.

You should really investigate your biases if the first thought that comes to your mind is that Google chose flock because it thinks customers are sheep.

It'll eventually become the default. Every single new fridge will have a display. And that display will have ads.

So no one has said this yet, but a lot of people charge their cars at work. I don't know if you're in the US but in my experience this seems like a east coast phenomenon. Lots of electric chargers in bay area, seattle and generally urban areas on the west coast.

Oh the engage in a lot of trickery including chopping the image up into bits and loading it as part of a thousand different <img> tags. More pain than it's worth.

Are these downloadable? Just clicking through didn't seem to have any download links available.

For context, I've been trying to learn color theory and put it into practice in photography. One of the things you could do to train yourself is to look at how the great artists of the past used color - of course if you have a great eye, maybe this comes naturally to you, but for me, I'd have to upload it to some site like color.adobe.com and have it extract the color scheme manually.

Ever since I started, I've been having so much trouble downloading photographs of the art work that I just started taking screenshots and using those instead. Kind of sad that what is our collective cultural history cannot be widely used because the photographer who took a photo of the art work didn't chose to make their high-res photo widely available.

On an unrelated note, the older I get, the more it amazes me that there are so many ways to make a living in the world.

Every day I discover a little part of the economy where people are not doing something bog standard and yet can make ends meet, have job security and have enough fun with their jobs that they can seemingly do them forever.

On the other hand, there are so many more jobs where people are barely making ends meet and living paycheck to paycheck, so maybe it's more important to focus on that.

I think what you're missing is that FB does employ an army of content moderators to decide if something passes their bar or not. And these are low wage, button clicking jobs along the lines of the AWS mechanical turk where without very explicit clear guidelines, you fall flat on your face.

For context, reviewers apparently typically spend ~0-3 seconds to determine if a piece of content (mostly pictures) is acceptable. Given the pace of content creation, I'm amazed they even get that long, I assume algorithms do a lot of the heavy lifting as well.

Even if you have extremely smart reviewers, if your guidelines aren't clear and you leave it to the reviewer's interpretation, you'd likely get extremely inconsistent results and that feels like a worse product experience than having no moderation at all.

So either have the govt decide these guidelines (esp. on political speech) and let them eat humblepie or let the platform do it and don't complain when they ban the POTUS.

He's been saying that pretty consistently for several years though.. too lazy to dig up the links.

Regular users might be somewhat impacted (if their bill gates is tracking us through vaccines post gets removed for example) but most people I'd say just want to post their breakfast / travel photos on Facebook than deal with QAnon conspiracies.

The big problem here is that writing a regulation that decides what's okay / not okay on a platform (either by the platform itself or by a govt) is basically impossible.

Any sort of you-shalt-not-serve-this-content type of rulebook won't stand up to real world use and you need a team of lawyers to exercise judgement on if content is allowed or not allowed on a platform.

A couple of examples to de-politicize this:

- FB says gore / violence is not allowed. There was a Facebook post on how one of Mexico's most violet cartel members was killed that circulated on FB [1], received a lot of attention, and popped up in people's feeds leading to cries to take down the post (won't someone think of the kids!). They did take it down and then the Boston marathon bombing happened. Similar pictures of blood / gore circulated but this time FB was forced to keep the pictures up in "public interest".

- Nudity is not allowed on the platform. As part of their nudity filtering, they kicked off a group on breastfeeding from FB which again lead to protest and FB allowing it and modifying their policy to specifically make an exception for breastfeeding. YT and Amazon suffer from this as well (though we haven't had a big PR bust up yet). Amazon algorithms for instance recommend "adult" fiction (with provocative cover art) along with children's books. Beyond just playing whack-a-mole with these products, and some half assed attempts to detect nudity in book covers, I don't think a lot of progress has been made.

So yeah, I think Zuck will be more than happy to say, please tell us what to allow on the platform and we'll follow it to the letter and deflect the blame to the regulators.

It's not even clear that there's a solution here beyond let the platforms exercise their best judgement and sort of muddle along.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/1/5569878/the-dark-side-of-t...

It was mostly a thought exercise - I'm just kind of weird in that I like setting up and configuring servers so I'd like to take a stab at it depending on what HN says - just to keep myself sharp.

Auth0 is new, thanks! I'm checking it out now. I was only familiar with the AWS IAM.

Do angry responses mean anything? It's always been the other way round - China does something messed up and the world leaders would give out angry speeches and life would go on without much change.

Let them have a dose of their own medicine for a bit.

You say this after the president of the United States has incited a seditious, violet mob to attack the Capitol because he's a sore loser.

There are many examples you can pick if you want to point out bias in media, day before yesterday was not one.

For reference, conservative subreddits remain active, Donald Trump is the one that's banned.

There's a lot of bots doing arbitrage between exchanges though. If one diverges significantly from the other, the bots will eat up the difference, I don't think you can make any claims about where the demand is coming from based on this?

That's a bit handwavey. Experience plays a part here and I've at least never seen a scaling issue where the root cause is not some form of API latency.

Most of the raw HTML generation, rendering is done by frameworks and browsers respectively and they're pretty standard / efficient pieces of software.

Does it change meaningfully under load? As long as the API p50 / p95 latencies are what you expect, the HTML generation / rendering is rarely a problem.

I'm actually curious about why it makes sense to load test an entire web UI (which is what this post seems to be suggesting).

In my experience, it was enough to load test individual back end APIs to figure out load profile for each API and use that to scale your h/w and serving HTML is rarely a bottleneck. This is complicated if you have a big monolith with a diverse traffic pattern - so knowing your auth API can support up to 1k QPS on your existing h/w is not super helpful for example. There are ways to work around this, but kind of complicated to enumerate all the scenarios in a comment.

This still needs some sort of state building, but this should be a lot easier than setting up state using a UI / clicking buttons.