flooow

Every time I hear about another massive hack on Ethereum, I feel a little bit sad that I didn't specialize in software security. For many years there was huge amounts of free cash just sitting on a table waiting to be taken, a victimless crime (VCs and cryptobros are not victims, everyone is playing the same game).

I expect the low-hanging fruit has gone now. And setting up spearfishing attacks to scam teenagers out of their NFTs doesn't seem as noble (or as profitable).

It's an interesting philosophical question.

Let us take it as read that if you have children, you are morally obliged to work to ensure that the planet is habitable for them and future generations. But if you choose not to have children, do you have any moral obligation to ensure the planet can continue to support life after you have died?

I could foresee a future when more-or-less everyone agrees that something drastic would have to be done to save the planet, but an electorally-significant block simply say "don't care, dead soon, so long and thanks for all the fish".

Alternatively - capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with the fight against climate change. It will take something more like a war-economy, with the free market reigned in, lots of command and control and lots of government rules.

Both the left and the right realise this. It's just that the left are happy about this and the right are not (and would rather burn everything to the ground instead).

Not sure that this is true now, but willing to bet my career that this won't be true in 3 years.

That is not a coincidence :) I like Haskell a lot but at this point I am willing to bet that I will never be paid to write it. It fells like community of 'people like me' have collectively decided that Rust, not Haskell, is their best bet for a better life, and I'm fine with that.

The way I have seen it explained before: Rust is not the perfect applications language, but there actually aren't any good mainstream applications languages out there, so Rust is perhaps the best we've got.

What I want:

    * Powerful, strict typesystem (typeclasses, sum types, type-inference, closures)
    * Constrained mutation, no 'spooky action at a distance'
    * Safe multithreading
    * Fast
    * Memory-safe
    * Native binaries
    * Large, deep ecosystem
    * Great tooling
    * Jobs

Rust comes closer than most.

Dart 1.0 was a fully-fledged Java-like type-unsafe OOP thing, released at just the time when such things were becoming unfashionable (for good reasons).

There was clearly a time where Google could have, and should have, killed it, but instead they decided to keep it alive and make it a core part of Flutter (Lord knows what internal politics lead to this decision). It appears that since then, just like Golang, Google has decided to plough incredible resources into turning a bad language into an OKish one. Meanwhile the world moves on.

The flutter site contains a very unconvincing explanation of why it uses Dart [1]. Unconvincing in the sense that the reasons given do not add up to a reason why a very niche language should be kept alive when many other languages would do just fine (Kotlin seems like the most obvious choice).

[1] https://docs.flutter.dev/resources/faq#why-did-flutter-choos...

Fortunately this particular problem should go away soon. Async-fn-in-traits is due to be stabilized in the next few months [1], which means that the use of #[async_trait] will no longer be necessary, which means the compiler will correctly surface a warning for unbounded recursion.

[1] https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2023/05/03/stabilizin...

For non-Germans - the Elster is the magpie. According to Wikipedia, in German folklore the magpie is a thief.

As a Brit I do not associate the magpie with stealing per se but rather with having a fascination with shiny objects like jewellery - which also sort-of works, for the joke.

TLDR:

> In my research, I argue that the diminished sway of the Catholic Church, nearly 30 years before the French Revolution, was the key driver of the fertility decline

For what it's worth, I have simply used the picker function of uBlock Origin to remove the comments, sidebars and search bar, then turned off autoplay. I am never logged in (I don't have an account) and don't 'browse' via the main page, just tend to follow links from Twitter and Reddit. Now it's a pure video service with no distractions.

You can get a very long way with the uBlock picker. For example on Twitter I have blocked all the not-logged-in popups, all the engagement metrics (likes, views) and the search bar.

Another random tip, turn off suggestions/autocomplete for the URL bar of your browser. It forces me to type the whole URL of any site I want to visit, and stops me idly 'browsing' my history through the autocomplete.

Keep getting LinkedIn messages from Tezos recruiters, quoting surprisingly high salaries. By all sensible metrics (e.g. token value, trading volume, actual real-world usage) they are just another dead crypto project. If I were in charge, I would take whatever cash I had extracted from 'bag-holders' and retire. But I suppose they want to keep up appearances for a little while, and this bit of news is probably good for a little more exit liquidity.

I believe there is a small but persistent contingent who would very much like HN to care about cryptocurrency, because HN is very influential among developers and would lend them much-needed credibility. They may or may not be co-ordinating but I don't think that would be necessary to get this onto the front page.

What I have noticed is, when crypto has one of its periodic disasters (e.g. collapse of FTX) the comments are generally highly sceptical of the technology, in keeping with the general tone of HN. But occasionally 'good news' articles like this one get boosted and then the top comments are of notably different tone. For example, comments praising Vitalik, a presumed billionaire with unknown motives, dubious achievements and a unspeakably enormous environmental toll against his name, would be very unusual in any other thread.

My understanding is that Tether have repeatedly refused to allow an audit of their holdings, therefore everyone assumes everything they say is a flat-out lie.

Thank you for semi-articulately saying my argument back to me.

> In the UK, you need a substantial amount of meta-knowledge about the media outlets and political landscape in order to use news reporting to become more, not less or dis-, informed.

This is most-certainly true, and an interesting corrollary is that journalists themselves very likely underestimate the impact their work can have. Being on the inside, they of course know (because 'everybody knows') that this Daily Mail article about Jeremy Corbyn being a soviet spy (yes, it is real [1]) is utter dreck, basically just popcorn nonsense for bored retirees to flick past on the way to the sports pages. Journalists might have a hard time believing/understanding that people actually trust and respect them, and may even take what they say at face value, with actual consequences.

Of course, their proprieters understand this full-well, which is why e.g. Murdoch is willing to plough endless cash into loss-making endeavours like The Times.

Not that I intend to absolve journalists whatsoever. Their actions have literally destroyed everything (we just haven't realised it yet).

[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5401097/Jeremy-Corb...

> "My role was to identify the voices that were not in the mainstream and to give those voices a stage," Rheem says. [...]

> He says the media was hungry for these perspectives.

> "Journalists were actually actively looking for the contrarians. It was really feeding an appetite that was already there."

A rare example of the BBC breaking the media omertà on itself here. You thought journalism was supposed to help you understand the world? Nope, reading our slop will actually make you *less* able to make informed decisions.

There was a good paper written about this all the way back in 2007 [1]. Makes for some eyebrow-raising reading in the year-of-our-lord 2022.

[1] https://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/publications/downloads/boykoff07-ge...

Yes, proportional representation would be nice, and might solve some of the UK's many problems. But it isn't going to happen in my lifetime. They won, we lost, and as a result living standards are going continue to get worse for most people in this country for the foreseeable. That's really the whole story.

Pretty obvious what the scam is here. Starmer lied to the membership to become leader, has ruthlessly purged the left including the former leader, and now plans to sit tight doing and saying nothing, hoping the Tories self-destruct as they occasionally are want to. Meanwhile Labour will suck-up to the right-wing press in the hope that Murdoch et al will decide not to destroy them on a whim as they did the previous iteration, enough to sneak the next election. Net result, the 40% of the population who voted for a left-wing party in 2017 will have no representation for the next decade minimum. Again. Great democracy we have, brilliant stuff. Signed, extremely bitter former Labour member.

I ctrl-F for 'cost', then for '$', nothing. Close tab.

Pretty soon it is going to become a very difficult decision whether to have children. I would argue we are already at that point, however this idea has not really gone 'mainstream' yet. But I fully expect the birthrate to have plummeted by 2030.

The question we are going to have to answer: "What happens when there is no future?"

Somehow I always remember it as being good escapist fun, but it isn't really. But I'll probably watch it again in a couple of years' time.

I went to see Manor at opening night. I thought it was OK, I was entertained. Was weird to find out (just now!) that it had got an absolute mauling in the press. It makes me wonder if I have terrible taste, and to what extent the 'quality' of a work of art is constructed after the fact by a social in-group (the critics).

Relatedly, I've started watching movies at random, without reading reviews before or after, to try to develop a sense of what I actually enjoy. Whether I have any real critical faculties at all. Perhaps it is all just received opinion. I re-watched League of Extraordinary Gentlemen last night though, and can confirm that it is in fact bad.

When someone makes a bad-faith argument, should one go to great lengths to refute it? Perhaps sometimes. Other times, it is better to dismiss it as nonsense and get on with one's day.

"Trickle-down economics" is an extremely bad-faith argument, essentially boiling down to "rich people pay slightly less rich people to tell poor people it's better for The Economy if they stay poor". That it was ever given credence in the first place reflects very badly on the economics profession (or, as I would reframe it, shows that economics as a subject has been wholly captured by elites).

I agree completely, it's a very strange objection - Rust is one of the very best languages for web servers. I wish I could use it at work instead of Django.

I think some C/C++ devs take a perverse pride in their language not being suitable to write web servers, because webdev is not real programming anyway (excepting the 'systemsy' parts like nginx).

Well, Rust is great at systems, great at web servers, pretty good at one-off script, even pretty usable for frontend. Every time I hear someone pigeonhole it as just a systems language, I think - you're missing out.

Yes, sort-of, the supply grows by a fixed absolute quantity every year. I don't really consider it to be a serious attempt at a useful cryptocurrency though.

I suspect any coin attempting price-stability (minimum requirement for a useful currency) would need some kind of central bank to control and guarantee the supply. (We have that already too! It's called Tether and it ain't great.)

If the crypto community wants to demonstrate that it isn't a giant Ponzi scheme, why not come up with a non-deflationary token, which will not massively reward 'early adopters' at the expense of everyone else, in perpetuity? (A non-deflationary token would be one where the supply grows by some reasonable percentage every year, effectively acting as a flat tax on one's holdings).

In reality, non-deflationary cryptocurrencies have been tried on various occasions. Surprise! None of them have taken off because "number doesn't go up".

We are in drastic damage-limitation mode. Every option is unappealing. Many will result in mass suffering and death. Pick one. (And yes, the current strategy, 'doing nothing', is picking one, probably the worst one).

The above strategy at least has the benefits that 1) it is fair 2) it will actually work. Incidentally, 1) is also the reason that it will never get implemented.

Nah, you don't get your dividend until you are 16.

1) Tax carbon at the source - yes, that means every oil well and coal mine pays a whopping great tax before any fossil energy leaves the front gate. Prices will adjust all the way down the supply chain

2) Use this huge income source as global helicopter money, the dividend every person in the world gets from allowing other people to destroy their global shared ecosystem

3) Create various green energy projects into which citizens can invest their dividend

4) Planet does not become unliveable mad-max hell within our lifetimes?