splix

"contract" is a wrong term, that's what I always arguing, because it has nothing to do with the legal meaning of the term. Here it's a public (i.e., "deployed") code. It just exists.

Regarding "profiting", it is a good question, and that's what I don't understand in this case. To my understanding there is no direct fees in Tornado Cash. But there are Relays, which, to my understanding, allow to withdraw to a fresh address and take a small fee for that. Anyone can run a Relay, and the use is optional. I think those guys were running one of them too.

A Relay doesn't know who is who and cannot limit withdrawals of money deposited by a sanctioned entity. But as they were told that some of transactions are likely illicit, even though they don't know which particular, they knowingly profiting off it in general. That's very broad and later can be applied to anyone.

Similar can be applied to mining. In general ETH, miners do know the addresses and they do not accept transactions that include sanctioned addresses. So they are fine. But for Monero example, it's the same problem. Even though they don't know the transactions participants, they may make profits off illegal transactions.

Just checked online, he actually seems to be a russian citizen

The citizenship doesn't really matter, b/c Russia may want to kill own citizens too (ex., if they don't support Putin).

Do you suggest that Russia can make a list of people they would like to kill and US would be happy to provide them to Russia?

They knew that because it's a public information and they didn't prevent it because it's already deployed smart contract. They have no ability to prevent a specific party from using it, it's already deployed to the network and note that it's still impossible to change it even now.

As an example, since now it's under US agencies control and they know that sanctioned entities are using it, why they still don't try to prevent it? Are they supporting NK?

"Allowed" by a technology in this case, I guess.

Like should they be allowed (i.e., have a possibility) to financially support opposition, journalists, etc.? Should the persecuted minorities (LGBT, etc) be able to hide their actions that may reveal them? Or should they be able to leave the country without revealing such plans to authorities in advance? And so on.

It's relevant because a privacy in finance (i.e., "breaking the laws") is important for those people. So I'm curious what the KidComputer thinks about this.

Curious, what do you think about breaking the laws of authoritarian countries to save people's lives? Do you think people should be allowed to do that or not?

Do you mean there is no legitimate reason to have a financial privacy? like in general it should not exist, or just this particular example?

No, they definitely don't want to be in Russia because Tornado cash was used to make donations to Ukranian army (because the donators don't want to go to jail, since it's illegal). So Russia would be happy to jail the developers of that service.

I wrote about my experience with broken SSDs before. I had that one from SunDisk, and when it broke, I contacted support. Without much difficulty, I received a replacement, which works fine. I also had the same problem with a Samsung SSD, but I wasn't able to get any meaningful response from them at all.

So the lesson is not about the broken drives, as all of them could be broken. It's about who is actually willing to fix the inconvenience for you.

SunDisk/WD will do it, and you'll have a working drive. Samsung, on the other hand, will do nothing in this case.

Btw, since the thread is about both Samsung and SanDisk now, I can tell a personal experience with both regarding the same kind of issue.

I had the exact same problem with SanDisk as explained in The Verge article. I had it in January, before it became a known major issue, so I guess they were not prepared for that. However, the process was smooth enough, and I just filled a ticket with details, received a couple of questions, send it to their service center and received a new one later. It works fine now.

But I had a similar situation with Samsung SSD too, it died after a couple of months. But they made it impossible to replace it. The process is so bad that I was never able to get into any support for that case, and never received any meaningful response. So I just gave up eventually, so I guess I just donated few hundred dollars to Samsung.

Unfortunately, we see those EU cookie banners and GDPR forms even if we live and visit a non-EU web site from outside. It doesn't target only the people inside the EU. So for this particular case is has no borders.

We considered it as a replacement to Slack to decided to stay on Slack. The reason is that we were unable to configure any meaningful network/firewall policy for it. The app reports all your actions to a bunch of 3rd parties, which we obviously want to cut, but as I remember the main problem was that their backend API is also non static and changes its IP all the time so that was a total mess to track and configure properly.

"The Origins of Business, Money, and Markets" by Keith Roberts (Columbia Business School Publishing)

I also was like "wow!!! an Operating System with Zero Knowledge!! that something new! wondering if it's something like Qubes OS?" just to find out it has nothing with Operating Systems

But it's not the UK, right? I mean I cannot incorporate in UK and then say it's a Cayman Islands company for YC purposes (i.e., without incorporating another entity to own the first)

I'm just suggesting to add a one-two sentence description to understand if it's something worth exploring or not. I understand that people can go to some videos, spent some time reading bunch of articles, etc, but if they don't know what kind of project is this it's unlikely to happen.

As I mentioned below, my question: is it a blockchain? Is it a network protocol? It it a development SDK for something? If latter, the for what? Or maybe it's an app container like Docker or Kubernetes but encrypted? Or guessing by the name, an Operating System, it must be run on some hardware? What hardware it supports? Though from the "installation" section it doesn't seem that it's an Operating System at all.

It doesn't really say anything (and it was not clear that these two projects are related).

I mean it doesn't say what is it. Is it a blockchain? Is it a network protocol? It it a development SDK for something? If latter, the for what? Or maybe it's an app container like Docker or Kubernetes but encrypted? Or guessing by the name, an Operating System, it must be run on some hardware? What hardware it supports? Though from the "installation" section it doesn't seem that it's an Operating System at all. So what it is?

Oh, I see. Thank you for the links. So, UK/EU are not accepted by YC, that's really surprising considering that Caymans are perfectly fine.

I tried to find any description of the project, but no luck. Github readme is only about running it. Link to the website redirects back to the Github. Mentioned Aleo network website doesn't say anything about the project too, it's basically just "Intrigued? Subscribe below", and it's unclear if the projects are related at all. Okay, I'm intrigued. So what the project does?

Cayman Islands, really? I thought it's a huge read flag for banks, IRS and other agencies, so VCs, including YC, would avoid it. Maybe I'm wrong as I'm not an expert, so can you please tell more?

Also, you didn't mention EU and UK. Does it mean that YC would prefer Singapore to a EU/UK startup?

Speaking about historically, that was implemented in Soviet Union, and I don't think it worked well. Though it certainly gave extra tools to the government to control the people.

That would be a payment, just not with money, right? So why it's better than just paying this money directly and letting the person decide, rather than introducing an extra step by putting the money into a development and then giving the property instead? The direct payment looks more efficient to me.

I guess more a closer comparison would be with the Project Reactor https://projectreactor.io/ which is also a low level framework for data processing.

Ah, I see. Thank you. I will definitely try it

Thank you. I actually like the idea that I can split the processing into independent binaries and scale them manually. And especially the fact that I can implement it in Rust.

Btw, another questions. Things like Flink provide a dashboard to analyze the processing flow / graph, to see the bottlenecks, etc. To my understanding Hydroflow doesn't provide it yet, but I'm curious if you're working on something like that, or if it provides other kind of metrics, perhaps something compatible with Grafana?

I'm familiar with Java based tools for data processing, like Spring Reactor, Apache Beam, etc., and trying to figure out how I can Hydroflow instead.

To my understanding, I just implement small pieces of the processing steps and connect them through a common bus like Kafka. All those steps are just independent binaries. And to make the final processing flow I run multiple instances manually scaled depending on the task. Like to make an aggregation / reduce I just make sure I have only one instance of that binary is running. And so on. All can be orchestrated and scaled using Kubernetes or similar. Is that how I supposed to design the processing?

But they don't claim that your legal team should not be bothered? I mean, that's the strange part, not the license itself

It's still possible to violate the license. I guess a "fat jar" distribution could be a trouble.

Strange claim, actually. Considering that it's under LGPL, so the legal team must and want to know about it.