kordless

I'd like to build something that attaches cryptocurrency payments to API calls, basically a 402 payment required implemented with the Lightning Network.

With such a system in place, pulling updates could be pinned to a particular API call, with a particular payment address, which itself was attached to a particular data store. In theory, as long as you had access to the wallet that did the build before, you'd be able to do the same build at a later date.

I'm greatly simplifying this here, but my conclusion after getting a crypto payment OpenStack instance launcher PoC working was that applying crypto payments to deployment methods basically provided a lightweight federated layer that allowed logically linking processes, similar to what you would get with a Zapier/Apigee/IFTTT knockoff. Applied to microservice architectures it would allow deployments to be both trustworthy and repeatable at later dates.

I already need readers, so putting on my visor magnifiers will probably do the trick!

Trimming someone's comment to suit a desired reply is akin to speaking for someone. Read the comment again. Empathy for others is included. Accepting blame (giving a shit) is not.

Nonsense is irrational, but not all irrational logic is nonsense.

> How to Become Well-Connected

> “If you find yourself keeping score in your professional relationships, you’re on the wrong track.”

Being "well connected" is an objective here, given it's lead by "how to". That intent leads to keeping score, so it's less than obvious how to resolve becoming well connected without keeping score.

Not giving a shit about what others think is the SECOND step to the enlightenment. The FIRST step is letting go of self judgment. Accepting self first allows one to realize that speaking for other's intent, even if they are blaming, may originate from their own self-judgements.

I no longer give a shit what anyone thinks about what I say because I realize I can only speak for my own choices and not others, not because I don't have empathy for other's thoughts. That's not to say I've perfected this technique however, I frequently catch myself blaming others when blame is going around. I can only set intent to become better myself. Others have the choice of doing the same, or not.

My unconsciousness has no choice but to speak to me, given I can't visualize.

<rant>There is no fucking way I'm getting a neural implant. Musk, Zuck and their likes can go fuck themselves for even daring to put money behind these ideas before working on the larger problem of understanding how the Internet, and then intercommunications it gives our brains, has negatively affected us as a society[1]. Being aware of our brain's weak spots is critical to preserving a rational society. I would extend that to the infrastructure that connects them as well. </rant>

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

Chris acted irrationally and had the right to do so. However, by his intent to spread irrationality by removing the officer's choice, the officers were eventually baited into acting irrationally which then led to the arrest. If they knew more about these types of removal of choice, and how they may spread by their very presence, it may have had a different and more desirable outcome for all involved.

Detecting trolls is important, in other words.

Stating it is reasonable that an individual has a right to choose irrationality removes the leading portion of your question which itself is a removal of choice by those who attempt to answer it. Applying rational thinking to answering it reveals an important question to ask ourselves:

> Why is it reasonable for men vested with the authority to enforce the law for the peace of society?

I think it is somewhat rational for individuals of a group to elect a sub-group to make choice for the individuals. In the case of law, which is suppose to be a rational instantiation of future choice for the group, it is the peacekeepers that are responsible for making choice of who is removing choice from other individuals or the group, as a whole.

However, irrational laws and expectations do creep into the group from time to time. Benjamin Franklin once spoke to this by stating, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

A corollary to this insight would be: "Those who would give up temporary Rationality, to purchase a little temporary Liberty, deserve neither Rationality nor Liberty."

Edit: Safety equated to Rationality.

> And why shouldn't they?

This is a leading question, which is to say it's not a question that can be answered in a rational way. If one desires removal of choice in the conversation, they may answer it irrationally.

> Look at the case of the murder of Laquan McDonald in Chicago.

The use of a separate case of an individual having choice removed, or individuals in a group removing choice for an individual, applied to the officers involved in this video (and conversation here) is illogical. Just because someone of the group "law enforcement" acts irrationally one place does not mean all will act that way everywhere else.

> Being annoying or insulting to government employees isn't a crime.

When Alex Jones presents his words as truths it is also not a crime. However, while holding the separate goal of being "controversial" and "in your face", the dissonance that is created by such actions is palatable, and akin to a crime of logic or truth. If one attempts to disrupt the arrival of a truth in a given situation, they seek to create additional work for the aggregate to determine truth.

In this case, the officer wanted to know why someone was shining a flashlight (changing colors no less) around in the general vicinity of the stop. The reply was along the lines of "no concern of yours", when in fact it WAS a concern of the officer. In essence, the individuals filming were actively removing choice from the officer to be concerned, speaking for his actions (by implying he was or was going to run plates) and in general acting in a way that would encourage the future event of confrontation. In other words, they are acting in an irrational way to cause further irrationality to occur, when none existed.

I've been kicking around a framework for detecting and describing these types of logical "arguments" which are all verbally spoken or written. In the case of comments on HackerNews, I regularly point out the dissonance in the argument, and attempt to show how these arguments can spread if the irrationality is intended to disrupt, as is done with leading questions that blame using biased arguments.

> That same power to connect can lead people down a dark or dangerous path. Approach the internet with an uncritical mind and you could emerge as a flat-earther, anti-vaccer, or worse.

Maybe. Or, perhaps it's the tendency of irrationality to beg more irrationality today, when a large number of vectors exists in which the irrationality can spread. If someone said something irrational and blaming 30 years ago, a few people might hear it and think, "huh, that's a weird thought". Most would probably not repeat the thought to anyone later because most people don't want to be viewed as irrational or weird by others. Maybe a few people might, because they were already irrational, but the chances were low that enough would repeat it to where it could spread.

30 years later, two things have happened to increase the likelihood of a "viral irrationality" to root and grow at increasing rates: 1. lots of people on the Internet and 2. lots of irrational things being said on the Internet. I would classify most of the irrationality on the Internet as others speaking for others thoughts or feelings. Check out Alex Jones just pulling shit out of his ass for example, under the guise of "news", but really just being a performance artist. He's "entertaining" people by pretending to be trustworthy, and keeping it going by making anyone listen to him question the "real" news (of which is he is not a member) to keep the schtick going.

I look at it more like a weird NP problem, where increasing amounts of time are needed to unravel the logic being presented as it spreads further into the aggregate, given it's self-referential in nature to answer leading questions with more irrationality. The blame game people play might be likened to two traveling salesmen trying to solve each other's problems of shortest path while also traveling paths that avoid or overlap each other. Given certain paths, the salesman may find themselves in a loop, blaming each other for being stuck, but unable to stop doing the calculations to get themselves out of the pickle.

Check out the concept of a double bind. It's relevant to this discussion.

The two slit experiment has been done with buckyballs, which would indicate all matter is capable of exhibiting quantum nature.

Keep in mind the double slit experiment is designed to illustrate the "effect" we observe, when we observe, is at least partially governed by the observation. Given certain interpretations, it can also have philosophical ramifications[1][2] for the existence of reality, self, and choice.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_wave

> What makes you so sure that cryptocurrency brings anything to the table that the underbanked would want?

What makes you ask leading questions which cast my comments into a blaming statement that I think cryptocurrencies bring anything to improving the underbanked's situation or experience? This is what is called speaking for others. I intensely dislike people speaking for me.

As a matter of my own truth on this subject, I actually have no opinion on whether the application of cryptocurrencies is a good one or not to this problem, given I'm not underbanked or in a 3rd world country dealing with the challenges of moving money around in less than trustworthy environments. Further, I have no second hand knowledge of the problem myself.

What I do know is that there are a LOT of underbanked people, there are people working on this, some of which I know, and that I support them in their efforts. Whether or not their efforts are good ones or not, I cannot speak to.

My point of commenting was primarily addressing the fact we can no longer trust random comments from accounts with little to no posting history, which insist on making blanket blaming statements that infer all new decentralized technologies are somehow linked, inexplicably, to crime.

I'm honestly curious about this thing I see occasionally on HackerNews. The observation of the thing are mostly negative comments, irrational in nature, which are presented by a significantly aged account with very low karma and posting history.

Servicing the underbanked is an important goal. I know people working on solving underbanked issues and I know it is important to them and support them.

In this case, your comment is a completely blatant blaming statement. Just because less than traditional marketplaces share a similarity to this product, or the other way around, is no indication it's intended use is a darknet market replacement. In other words, the developers intent here is unlikely to be what you claim, simply by way of a biased comparison. The outcome of use by users may be different certainly, but that doesn't make your claim valid, or rational.

In fact, the only group who would be mostly likely to make this claim would be a group who seeks to control markets. If such a group sought to control markets, by manipulation of sentiment and social logic (of which is required for discussing said post) then a highly rational thing to do would be to create a lot of accounts over a long period of time and then use those accounts randomly to post negative sentiment about things that remove control from the group.

Further, I present an observation that by not knowing who it is that is posting, we (the HackerNews group) are doing ourselves a disservice in letting these individuals have an equal voice, especially when it is a voice of blame. That is not to say that entities should be denied posting when new, but perhaps those entities should be required to engage in positive additions to the discussion before being able to be blaming, as I am doing here, clearly. Of course, I have the karma to do so and a long history of comments that can be inspected to verify identity.

That's a good use-case for cryptocurrencies, and text messaging, if there ever was one. I'd like to see a project, similar to HN be developed which implements this using similar techniques to eliminate the increasing inclusion of irrational arguments into the discussion.

I suppose at this point we should ask ourselves why everyone keeps repeating the same thing over and over again. That's irrationality defined.

You appear to be disagreeing with something I said, so I have to assume it's based on the assertion that naming a company AND product the same thing is usually a bad idea, at least for marketing purposes. The confusion that has arisen with other products in the past is real, and it's clear that people are confused with this move. That's why I said it. I didn't say it to be completely precise about what happened, because people aren't precise in understanding how companies market to them. It's a common mistake in marketing, of which I am moderately skilled, or so I hear.

Anyway, I would say, in general terms, that reality is perceived differently from person to person. This means that some may conceptually map a concept to a word in a completely different way than another. That some are confused about this particular change in mapping is a good indication that my recommendation is a sound one, where the product, company, project and repo should be called different things to avoid branding confusion[1] when the consumer is making a decision.

I would also add that this behavior of companies "being confused" in return to people's confusion resulting from a change in branding of something is also an indication of irrationality. And, it's also blaming in tone to assume people should "just get it" when these things are executed on poorly, at least marketing-wise.

[1] https://hbr.org/2002/03/brand-confusion

I never said otherwise. Again, the idea people hold about a technology, with a given tag, is moving in the direction of what they expect as users of said infrastructure. Please note that I did indicate this was an irrational belief. Whether or not Docker actually does this thing people understand it to be is another argument entirely.

Silence when dissonance exists may be a bad thing. Silence when dissonance is resolved by reflection may not.

The Japanese know sacredness because it's baked into their society. Maybe that was because of Zen Buddhism, or a different reason ("island life" will do it to people too). Whatever it is, it may have bad manifestations in larger cities, but there's no denying the Japanese have always had a special sort of sacred way of getting impressive things done.

Yup, and your's as well, by extension. I'd add that the rebrand needed to happen, given naming a company and a product the same thing is never a good idea.

The object "Docker" has been in dissonance for quite a while now, both by the company's perspective and the consumer's perspective. I think rationalizing it as a "brand" move is a bit simplistic.

It is a FACT that individuals are unable to use the term "Docker" on anything they would like to create and share with others. This has been enforced with takedown notices and legal entities getting involved in "protecting" the Docker brand, on Docker's behalf. This, in and of itself makes sense, given Docker is a private company with a significant amount of private investment behind it, with expected returns on protecting that investment. It has used that investment well to further build the brand, as you indicate here.

However. Docker is also an idea which is one of taking a "software container" and starting it somewhere, running it for a bit, twiddling on it in a variety of ways, then moving it somewhere else where someone else can do that too, without too much operations headache as you do so. Again, it's the IDEA of this that matters, not whether it is technically true or not. The idea simply leverages the concepts of writing, deploying and running code and smears them across a the vast resources of which the Internet is comprised.

I've seen the gleam in people's eyes when they talk about a ubiquitous computing infrastructure, of which it will run their code, without question, and never, ever breaks. Irrational beliefs are still beliefs, and sometimes it is necessary to also believe they are rational ones in order to get things done. We're all busy, and the Internet requires a lot of us to get more done in the future. People need the idea of Docker to get project's interest raised, approved, and put into production to get more things done.

This is where Docker's dissonance comes in, and does so fairly heavily handed. Docker is here to make money. They will do that at the expense of all other things, given their purpose is to preserve shareholder value first. That includes changing the idea that everyone holds about ubiquitous computing. That's not to say that shareholder value isn't tied to consumer value and completely rational, but it can also become a vicious circle very quickly when company values are prioritized over consumer values at any expense, or vice versa even.

Personally, this is why I'm not a big of traditional investments in infrastructure technologies. While I do think that traditional investments have been a great help to the growth of technology in the past, it is my belief we are going to continue to run into increasing challenges attempting to rationalize arguments for shareholder value vs. user's best interests when it comes to infrastructure. And, to make it even more challenging, I think most times the users don't realize they are trusting these offerings in an implicit way, which makes their view on matters highly irrational. That is to say, irrationality indicates additional work must be done to resolve the truths of who and what to trust. This is made difficult by applying that irrationality to the very systems on which we base trust.

I don't want to live in a reality where we are having to constantly question the trustworthiness, or irrationality, of our infrastructure.

I don't have a great suggestion for how to fix these types of issues other than proposing a radical change in infrastructure business models. I do have a suggestion on how to do that, but it will make it completely irrational for traditional investors to consider, which would limit the adoption of it, even if it got going. A catch 22, if there ever was one.

This was done in Seattle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra_khhzuFlE

Using "you" here is a bit blaming, especially given the nature of RSVP is "Reply if you please". If someone wants to RSVP for an event, that means they choose the event for themselves in their internal view.

Out here, especially with social sites, RSVP is taking on another meaning entirely. Those "slots" are fictitious (just like airlines overselling seats) and assuming attendance numbers will be what something like Meetup says they are is irrational. I usually factor in a 40% attendance rate - nothing wrong with that if it's more, but it's unlikely to be 100%, unless one holds an irrational belief their event is going to net more than another.

That's not to say it doesn't make planning for the event a bit more challenging, but I seriously doubt there anything anyone can do about it other than charging for the event, which may not be desirable.

I ran an OpenStack cluster in my house for a few years. The deployment was managed by a bunch of scripts which I wrote and published to help others learn the basics in deploying an OpenStack cluster, sans most of the more complicated networking stuff. Last count, about 25K unique IPs downloaded the images used in those scripts to launch test instances. At one time I held the top 3rd or 4th link on Google for "openstack install".

A few years ago, I leveraged a bunch of methods in OpenStack to build a thing which would launch instances based on Bitcoin payments to certain preloaded addresses. These addresses allowed "templates" to be associated with cluster capabilities and code to be deployed. Payments to that address in Bitcoin would immediately net you an instance, of a certain type, on someone's infrastructure.

The general idea behind this creation was a way to abstract hardware components into a system by which applications could launch themselves and utilize the resources provided in a fair, secure and trustworthy way. It is my belief this model was WAY ahead of it's time, a precursor to the hybrid models we see emerging today, and lead directly to my personal realization that federation of all systems will be a basic requirement for implementing trusted computing in the future. We're going to need it with AI. Not sure how I know that, but there it is, irrationality and all.

Unfortunately, standardizing deployment methodologies doesn't net you federation. Standardization itself doesn't net you trust, unless everyone can agree on the standard, which is out of necessity done in an non-trustworthy way. Votes of a board, for example, aren't represented with fair consensus, unless there's an algorithm behind the votes. Otherwise, votes end up being slightly irrational, because people behind the votes are slightly irrational. Or very irrational, depending on the company they work for.

And yes, federation can be implemented in a trustworthy way by a corporation, such as Google or Amazon, but that requires all people in that federation (a discrete group) agree they will use this thing to implement trust, even though the thing may not actually have trust implemented in a rational way (i.e. by algorithm).

At the end of the day, OpenStack was doomed not because of container tech, or the structure of the board, or who ran the biggest cluster, or because it was overly complicated for simple use cases.

It failed because it did not implement the basic requirement of delivering trusted infrastructure in a scalable and trustworthy way across a broad range of infrastructure, in a wide range of locations, and do so in a way that separates the use of the infras from the irrationality of humans running the infra.

Until something does that, and does it well, we're stuck with Google, Amazon and other provider's solutions. This is also a good rationalization for the continued increase of cloud services by companies and the continued emergence of hybrid models in the future.

Maybe. Maybe not. So, it's irrational to believe that all desired outcomes may be obtained by limiting use of a resource based on its perceived value.

That's the one. Hardest game ever. Love it.

I find the latest update to LinkedIn unfortunate, given it's authoring UI is complete crap, UX-wise. I really can't see anything of use to me anymore over there, so my visits are becoming less frequent. I used to have good conversations with connections. Now all I get is recruiter invites and companies looking to do "business" with me, mostly out of Eastern Europe.

Twitter, on the other hand, is somewhat entertaining, given I have a decent amount of followers who may or may not be listening to my random rants. A minor ego boost, at best, but still probably a very large illusion on my part. It's fun to pretend though! ;)

Honestly, I have to say this place, HN, feels the closest to home. Or playing Rust, depending.

IPs are a terrible way of limiting input into a system given relying on the network stack to provide unique identifiers is an irrational expectation.

I'm thinking of a grid of Litecoin addresses would work well to limit abuse of infrastructure to gain advantage, while still allowing bot activity. A payment to a given address would last the amount paid divided by cost of ownership amount per time period.

This is a common irrational argument (meaning it requires more work to determine truth) regarding the exhaustion of "supply". A "coin" is simply a numeric value in a wallet of a whole amount. Fractional amounts can, and will, continue to be "created" using subdivision of existing coin. There is, with future code changes, no limit to the precision of the values stored there, so even a sub fraction of a bitcoin will still do to serve the entire network, if the network is still operating, of course.

The deflation issue is what is really addressed here, where no new coins will be introduced at a given point. Whether new coin arrives or not, is really not an issue. An analogy would be the use of pennies if all the paper money went missing.

It's not a truthful statement. If you, op and the others that voted me down want to believe it, there's not much anyone can do about it. All of you are irrational to believe that something someone says is the truth just because it rings true with an experience you had in the past, with another company, with other people running that company, with another product. What it is, is dogma, which is why I hate dogma.

This is a completely irrational thing to say (and is speaking for others) when you really have no idea what the facts of the matter are one way or the other.

> This is exacerbated by not having the luxury of taking cues from facial expressions, body language, smiles and the context of the situation.

This is caused by this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

Don't forget the fact that all these companies built their empires on top of "viral growth", which is an effect only possible because they figured out a way to get people to spread the "idea" of the product the company was pushing at the time to others. Of course, making money off these ideas is also important, so the VCs and private equity firms were there to help "guide" the company into making decision to change the product in ways the users don't/won't/can't notice.