beefield

I think https://www.vulnhub.com/ has quite a few.

As a layman in modern physics, I struggle to understand the shape and size of a photon as a wave. As far as I understand, e.g double slit experiment would implicate that the size of a single photon wave would be clearly macroscopic in nature. Is there any text available that would discuss this without a need of Ph.D in physics?

Sorry for an likely ignorant question, but can someone ELI5 why we are confident that evereything in universe is less than 13 billion years old or whatnot, and not just redshifted beyond recognition?

> you better have something to give in exchange for that thing you want.

Peace. That's what poor people stop giving once they feel too poor compared to non-poor. No, this is not a value statement, but an objective observation about human nature. I do not expect anyone to like it (I do not like it), but not accepting it as a fact is... delusional might be a proper word?

After you accept that it is good for you to keep poor not too poor, you likely start wondering how to be efficient about keeping the poor not too poor, and afger that you end up somewhere very close to UBI.

Well, I have worked in an environment where database server names were server software version concatenated with a shortish but high entropy random alphanumeric string. I'll take cute or descriptive any day over that.

> But biomass being converted into electricity is horribly inefficient

Even in CHP?

I occasionally wonder what would be examples of types of problems/questions that would be easy for post-singular superhuman AGI but very hard/impossible for humans? Not in sense how fast the problem is solved, but in the sense that the question/answer is even understood?

So far I have come up with high-dimensional spatial awareness (not sure how well we could get what happens in 1000 dimensions).

> I’m increasingly convicted there is inherent value in humans doing things regardless of the whether an algorithm can produce a “better” end product.

To me it would seem that we are speedrunning towards a future where humans doing things have value, but only for themselves. It is going to be more and more difficult to produce any value to others. Only way to generate value in a transaction is rent-seeking by taking advantage of (artificial) monopolies, network effects or gatekeeping. This may sound dystopian, because humans seem to have a strong need to provide value to others, but the bright side is that you are free to do what you value.

Obviously you can split your code into many files in a way that obfuscates the workings of the program pretty much comoletely. And I think you can write a single 10kloc file that is so well organized that it is easy to read. I just never have seen one...

I believe that files offer one useful level of compartmentalizing code that makes other people easier to understand what is going on by just looking at the file structure before opening a single file. The other guy can't grep anything before they have opened at least one file and found some interesting function/variable.

Because one day someone else may need to read and understand your code?

Yep, so real question is if it is fine that cash using companies are subsidized by non-cash using companies. If you do not cover the banks' cost of handling the cash in cash fees, then you need to cover it in net interest margin.

To me the biggest thing against select * is readability. Basically you are obfuscating what you are doing and getting from the database. In trivial queries it does not matter, but when you read more complex procedures, it starts to be a bit annoying.

Okay, I admit, that is one of the more accurate descriptions of myself I have seen. I wonder if I could get a tiny bit of career advice here. Currently I basically have a couple of old employers that are quite happy to take me in for a few months a time to do something (financial regulation/risk management of derivatives is a powerhose of things not solved/done well enough) The trouble is, I'd like still to do something else on my career, and I have been flirting a bit with infosec, playing hackthebox etc, and pentesting might be fun. I acknowledge starting an infosec career would be a pay cut, but I am not that worried about that. What I am worried is that I have this nightmare of a infosec job where I spend my time running standard scripts and producing standard reports to customers, instead of this probably naive idea of getting to really scratch my head and hack around new problems (obviously some reporting is unavoidable) Is it possible to avoid the nightmare, if yes, how? Or should I just be happy with my current contracting gigs?

> For what?

Management consulting and Investment/stock analysis are the first ones that pop into my mind. (With some sarcsam, but admittably way too little)

I would be quite keen to know how a state trust based "stable"coin would work in an environment where treasuries give negative yield. (Only a question of time, even if yields are currently going up)

How does Kraken/proof of reserves ensure that in case of bankruptcy there are no creditors with higher privileges?

At a minimum, tax code should be changed to discourage limited liability corporation forms. Personally I'd also like to see that limited liability as a concept would be forbidden in many/most industries/cases. In Brazil the management and owners of a bank may be held liable if bank fails even without wrongdoing. And I think there has not been many failing banks in Brazil...

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2013/05/04/b...

(Paywall, check google cache)

It's a pity because we should be seeking solutions for both problems, money system allowing negative rates and private transactions. They should not exclude each other because both are important for different reasons.

It's a pity that the venn diagrams of people who understand the need for private money transactions and people who understand the macroeconomic need of (occasional) negative interest rates do not in practice seem to overlap.

Looks like we are pretty close for someone being able to flood internet discussions with billions of alt-right/far-left/whatnot fake bot accounts. Bad times for moderators and anyone trying to engage in decent discussion.

Just to be clear, even if I very much would like to agree with you in theory, in practice this is what you are advocating, like it or not:

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

Okay, I may be a bit blunt, but to spend any significant time with crypto means that you are either a) illiterate in finance, b) illiterate in technology, c) into scamming people, d) into gambling or e) into illegal things. If a or b, you yourself probably do not realize it. Anyway, any combination of these would constitute black mark in my recruitment process for most of the jobs.

> What is interesting is that amongst professional finance much of this has been apparent the whole time.

It is important to note, that even if from looking from far outside, finance looks like one thing, in reality there is a big divide within finance regarding how "value" is defined. On the other hand, there is a simple notion that value of a thing is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. And on the other hand, there is a bit more complex idea that if you somehow know the value of a cash flow, then if you are able to create the same cashflow in some other way, then the other cash flow must have same value.

The first one is the home of powerpoints, VC capital and crypto. (It's also easy to recognize these professional financiers once you start to discuss whether sweat equity should be valued similarly to cash equity. They are completely appalled with the idea, because reasons.)

The second is home of financial regulation, really fancy maths and modern banking risk management.

The failure modes are different here. The first one, typical failure model is scam. The second, well, you can google LTCM for that.

And what comes to crypto, there is a clear and obvious difference. The first ones see no reason why not investing into crypto, after all, someone is paying 60k for a BTC, its value is thus 60k, what more do you want? The second ones scratch their heads. They see no positive net cash flows anywhere, thus the value must be negative. And this is the reason (in addition to regulation) why banks and professional bankers for the most part keep clear from crypto and struggle seeing value, while VC money is/was pouring in.

> For what it's worth, all reasonable people in the crypto space want regulation to make sure these types of poor lending practices don't continue.

I'd be very keen to learn what kind of regulation, exactly, anyone is seriously proposing for these crypto products? Namely, the problem I see is that the products in the crypto lending space in my understanding simply can't exist in anything that has any resemblance of current financial regulations. To be honest, I am not sure how they can exist in any regulatory scheme that tries to penalize scamming people. Now, if the regulation said that it is okay to scam people in crypto industry, that might be interesting. But i am not sure if anyone has been proposing that.

I don't think there are any loopholes in that sense. I can easily imagine you preferring to buy a ready team with existing infrastructure for regulatory reporting than building one from scratch. Especially if your financial background is from prop trading and you despise - while having zero clue about - how banks actually manage their risk and communicate with regulators.

The problem is not the ones who want to publish if their balance is missing. The problem is the ones who want to hide their balance is missing.

So, lets imagine you have been running this continuously from the beginning and there is absolutely nothing fishy on the chain of the events of the ledger that makes this proof. All customer deposits (1B worth of coins) are backed by respective assets (1B) in the portfolio. Unfortunately the business has been run badly, and in addition to this portfolio, the exchange has assets of one worthless laptop, but there are some tax liabilities worth 2B and an just found loan payable to Italian Mafia worth also 2B. Tax authorities file for bankruptcy.

1. How does the exchange ensure money is paid to the customers instead of Mafia or tax authorities?

2. If/when it can't, how these liabilities are included in the proof of liabilities?

(note: this is a real and difficult problem. That's why there are laws, regulations and deposit insurances around customer funds in finance, which, yes, fail occasionally. I just do not see how that can be solved by blockchain.)

Unfortunately this does not prove in any way that the exchange has included all liabilities in the sum, it only proves your deposit is included. A very, very different thing.

What? I just checked news last week and there was a small thing about an exchange called FTX that seemed to have exactly this problem.

I admit, I did not read that in detail. Can someone explain how the "proof of liabilities" is proving that it contains all liabilites of an exchange? for example the electricity bill that is coming to be paid next week or the off-book loan of x billion cryptocoin from your fellow exchange that you need to pay back also next week?

Awfully lot of trust you seem to need in this fancy world of trustless money of the future.