Octokiddie

This seems like something that will become especially prevalent this time around given the much higher level to which salaries were pushed during the bubble.

The article doesn't really entertain the most logical answer: because that's part of the plan. Musk is trying to cause Twitter to declare bankruptcy so that it can be rebuilt. Musk is already on record as saying that the software stack needs a complete re-write. Maybe he thinks the company needs a complete reboot.

At the very least, a bankruptcy could wipe out a large chunk of the debt the company now holds post-acquisition.

Also, you might try distributing your writing more widely - not to promote it, but to get feedback. Find alternate distribution channels.

1. Nobody wants to maintain a generalist instance, partly because it's harder to apply generalist moderation policies and partly because it attracts so many more users.

2. Running your own instance does solve (1), but Mastodon was not designed as a P2P network and likely can't function that way.

That part about this being "the last straw" implies some change of view. Read in a certain way it could be a goodbye.

Kind of ambiguous and non-committal.

Instead, Jobs answers the question behind the question: What role should new technologies play at Apple going forward?

This is a very useful technique to practice. When asked a question whose premise you don't agree with, you can become confrontational on that point. Or you can reach in to grab the question behind the question and answer that instead.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/powell20220...

It ran a total of 8 or so minutes and mentioned Paul Volcker twice:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Volcker

This speech is a masterpiece of clarity and focus. It said: rates are going much, much higher than you think possible. So buckle up. It's rare to get such a clear signal from the Fed.

Volcker was the chair of the Fed during The Great Inflation of the 1970s and early 1980s. He's seen as a legend among those who favor responsible monetary policy because unlike his predecessors, he hiked and hiked and hiked. As the legend goes, he crushed US inflation, which lead the US out of the 70s inflationary quagmire to the prosperity of the 80s and 90s.

Not so widely known is that Volcker didn't just raise, he also cut rates in mid-1980 when CPI started to cool and the US fell into recession. After the rate cuts, inflation ripped higher. And Volcker's Fed responded by jacking rates to 19%. The result is the second recession just one year after the first.

Talk about a whipsaw. Not great for credibility.

Valid or not, the lesson policy makers learned is this: don't give inflation one inch or you'll regret it. The economy is far stronger than it appears and you'll be back raising rates far, far too soon.

This appears to be the play book Powell is drawing from now.

The good news is that what the Fed does matters very little. Through the great inflation, companies continued to borrow despite double-digit interest rates.

For all of 2022, bond markets have been screaming recession by causing multiple yield curve inversions. Inflation is headed lower, but it has nothing to do with the Fed and its irrelevant bank reserve manipulation schemes.

The bad news is that Volcker's rate hike blitz earned the deep respect of markets. Even though the Fed has very little direct control over the US dollar or the business cycle, the vast majority of market participants believe the Fed is in the driver's seat.

This is why backing down isn't an option. That credibility the Fed gained was hard won and no chair wants to risk being known as Arthur Burns.

Which bank? FTX? FTX was in his own words an "exchange." An exchange holds customer funds in custody for immediate redemption. A bank lends customer funds out and can't meed a redemption surge.

Also, the conspiracy theorists claiming that this guy was swept out of the hearings to protect powerful people are in for a big disappointment. It's just more of the same line as before "I messed up, but I won't tell you specifically how and if I hint at it it will be self-serving."

For those downplaying the claim based on the source, this is irrelevant. The signature and the public key are all that are needed. The author is irrelevant to verification, although he probably has an interesting story to tell about how he came about this message and signature.

The payment was locked to this address:

1Q2TWHE3GMdB6BZKafqwxXtWAWgFt5Jvm3

The first payment can be viewed here:

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/f4184fc596403b9d638783cf57...

You can see that this payment was included in block 170. The network produces ~144 blocks/day. So this transaction occurred almost at the launch of the network.

Hal Finney has claimed, without proof AFAIK, that this payment was made by Satoshi to him:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.0

The implication is that a private key known by Finney signed the message claiming that Satoshi was Paul Le Roux. The latter was the subject of a piece speculating that he was Satsoshi:

https://www.wired.com/story/was-bitcoin-created-by-this-inte...

This doesn't necessarily mean that Finney was involved. You can browse the transaction history associated with the address here:

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1Q2TWHE3GMdB6BZKafqwx...

As you can see, a signed transaction was published as late as ~2018~ 2017. Finney died in 2014.

So there are a few possibilities for what's going on, including:

1. Finney is not dead.

2. Finney's private key was leaked to someone who signed the message.

3. secp256k1 cryptography (the kind used for Bitcoin signatures) is now broken.

4. Finney signed the message sometime before he died.

Given that few outside of Bitcoin know about Finney's legendary status, (3) seems unlikely because the attacker could have just signed with the private key for the genesis block.

This leaves (1) and (2), and (4). I'm doubtful about (1). Finney suffered from a horrible, fatal disease and it was obvious in the interviews he gave.

The most likely explanations are (2) and (4) IMO. The presence of the transactions signed after Finney's death is consistent with (2).

When a Bitcoin payment is spent, the private key often has little monetary value (but a lot of privacy value). So the cryptographic material encoding it might be treated in ways allowing it to be used by others.

Then again, it's possible that Finney signed the message, later died, and his private key was leaked.

However, you slice it, this is not clear cut. There are various kinds of evidence that would make it more so, but AFAICT, they have not yet surfaced.

Edit: Maybe Finney signed the 2017 transaction before he died and then it was later published. This kind of thing might be done for estate planning (although not a good idea). The transaction:

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/70ec308460a38f6de25f89c6ed...

spends three coins locked to the 1Q2 address and is dated 2017-09-05. However, one of the coins was only appeared in 2017. This raises the question of where that coin came from and whether it could have been minted before Finney's death.

It's worth noting that USDC is not even a token controlled by Binance. It's controlled and issued by Circle. So effectively, Binance is refusing to honor its commitment to depositors to give them their money on demand.

That's called a "default."

Why? The article says something about a key bank being closed. Nonsense. Is the USDC held at that bank? No. Binance is allegedly holding it. Only clearly they're not because they can't produce it on demand.

I'm frankly amazed that people with the ability to understand this alphabet soup mumbo jumbo keep falling for the same scam over and over again. Underneath all of the slick marketing and nerd posturing is a simple truth: these are all fractional reserve systems. Conceptually, they are no different than banks or pyramid schemes.

The only possible reason you want a stable coin, rather than dollars, in the first place is because you're doing something that requires you to route around US financial regulation.

The US dollar is digital. It moves around the world using a digital network. It's traded the world over by almost every country whether they want to or not. You can buy almost anything there is to buy with US dollars.

You "need" a stable coin because you're trying to have your cake and eat it too: US dollar-like liquidity and value preservation without US dollar financial regulation.

Consume a small amount of mass, release a very large amount of energy due to the huge conversion factor. The first law isn't violated because the energy being released is coming from the annihilation of matter.

Mass and energy can in principle be converted given the right process. LLNL consumed the mass that produced the energy.

> But, as with all science, it's good to be cautious and not overhype results yet to be fully analyzed. We have been here before, after all. In 2013, reports swirled the NIF had achieved this exact feat. It wasn't the case.

https://www.cnet.com/science/climate/a-fusion-energy-breakth...

AFAICT, the only thing that's been publicly confirmed is that announcement will be made tomorrow.

> Legal experts told CNBC that if the federal government pursues wire or bank fraud charges, Bankman-Fried could face life in prison without the possibility of supervised release. Such a severe punishment would be unusual but not extraordinary. Ponzi scheme mastermind Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison, an effective life sentence, for his massive ponzi scheme. ...

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/12/ftx-founder-sam-bankman-frie...

Oh, does it ever encourage fluff! Plenty of long form stories posted to HN fit into this category. They begin with a meandering anecdote, build to a surprising or paradoxical end, and only then does the actual story start.

I get bored with this approach when I can't see a connection between the anecdote and the title. A non-fiction title is a promise to the reader. Renege on that promise and the reader is gone like Enron. Long form starts to break the promise when the anecdote gets so shaggy that you forget the title and therefore the reason you're reading the article.

The linked goes on to take apart the syntax Gladwell uses, which is useful to know. But the most important thing Gladwell does AFAICT is to closely align his anecdotes with his controlling idea. That means:

1. Choosing only those anecdotes that optimally align with the controlling idea (theme).

2. For each anecdote, culling stray details that don't align with the controlling idea. This is a painful process for writers, which explains why there are so many shaggy tales told in Big Idea nonfiction.

Everything was an "embarrassing mistake."

SBF's problem is that the only way for FTX to become insolvent is that user funds were being used in violation of the terms of service.

An action story has three obligatory elements:

- a hero (James Bond)

- a victim (humanity, or maybe a damsel)

- a villain (rotating)

This sounds childishly simple, and it is. But it's also very easy for authors of thrillers to forget the triangle because it's not something you even notice in a well-crafted action story. But all three need to be fleshed out to the extent that the audience cares about them.

The difference between an action story and a thriller is that in a thriller, the victim and hero are the same character. For example, Stephen King's Misery is a thriller because the hero is the victim. Action stories often involve the hero's facing death, but it's done to save the victim.

Something else that's easy to forget is the human value at stake in an action story: life and death. James Bond is always on the edge of being killed, even when in extracurricular persuits. If Bond doesn't succeed, the victim is toast, and the stranger that death is, the better. At the end of the story, there's no doubt which way it went.

This is why good action stories are page-turners, or as Fleming writes:

> "You have to get the reader to turn over the page."

Humans are hardwired to pay attention when death is a possible outcome. That's why rubbernecking is a thing even though people complain about it. It's also one reason cited for the popularity of NASCAR. Death can come at any time even though the action is quite repetitive.

More than that, the scenes in an action story tend to turn on life and death. That's one place where action story authors can get into trouble: writing too many scenes that turn on a value other than life-death, or don't turn on anything. It's shockingly easy to write scenes that offer nothing more than information. One or two of them is all it takes for the reader to yawn and quit.

Money is also the thing that will continue to be problematic for Ethereum going forward. Two technical problems drive this:

1. Scalability issues related to a very large block chain size and the associated difficulty in bringing up and running a full node.

2. The transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake is driving the convergence of validators and exchanges.

(1) drives individuals increasingly into the arms of gatekeepers to tell them what's "on the block chain" rather than directly participating on the network. (2) degrades what little censorship resistance Ethereum may have once had.

and

> As we noted in the original announcement, our goal is not to convert existing C/C++ to Rust, but rather to shift development of new code to memory safe languages over time.

For those working on C/C++ code bases, how does the incremental addition of Rust work in practice? What strategies and tools come in handy? Also, what are some good case studies where Rust was introduced to add new features, but still needed to work within a system mainly composed of C/C++? I've seen some of the first steps with Linux, but I'm thinking of a project where more substantial additions have been made.

As others have noted, "make all software programmable" seems a bit vague. And it's vague because there's no problem in there. When is software not programmable?

I think the idea is to make application extensions easier to integrate (like photoshop plugins), but I'm not sure.

Start with the problem statement, and everything else will fall into place. Leave out the problem statement, and leave your readers mystified.

That word "people" is doing a lot of lifting. Some people will actually value behaviors like over-communication and other won't. It all comes down to culture.

Organizations whose management ranks have a lot of over communicating, bossy, self-promoting, nit-picking, blame-pushing, excuse-spinning, credit-grabbers will promote the same kinds of people to top positions. But people who actually do the work will see right through these behaviors for the obvious plays for promotion that they are.