HackerTrans
TopNewTrendsCommentsPastAskShowJobs

Gosper

no profile record

comments

Gosper
·il y a 21 jours·discuss
Language count is a decent notoriety signal though pretty coarse. The OP/author should take a look at QRank: https://qrank.toolforge.org/

> QRank is a ranking signal for Wikidata entities. It gets computed by aggregating page view statistics for Wikipedia, Wikitravel, Wikibooks, Wikispecies and other Wikimedia projects

from https://github.com/brawer/wikidata-qrank/blob/main/doc/desig...
Gosper
·il y a 2 ans·discuss
Sounds like https://xon.sh/
Gosper
·il y a 3 ans·discuss
I know, I'd love to use my phone as a display via capture card so I don't have to carry a portable monitor to troubleshoot headless boxes.

The developer says the 15 and 15 Pro are only missing software, the hardware is capable:

> I’m sad to say that we’ve confirmed with Apple that it will not be working with the iPhone 15. But this can be fixed in software, so feel free to file a feedback request for UVC support on iOS!

https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/16qzdtx/hi_reddit_we...
Gosper
·il y a 4 ans·discuss
This is why the home computer and smartphone revolutions we were promised never happened. No one absolutely had to have them so everyone waited for next year's cheaper, faster, and better models and the market died out.

Imagine a terrible world where people are incentivised to buy stuff they don't need and barely want; we'd be drowning in crap and burning up the Earth to make it.
Gosper
·il y a 4 ans·discuss
You can directly inspect the Bitcoin blockchain. The genesis block pointedly includes the headline it does to demonstrate it could not have been created before 3 Jan 2009.

After that date the blocks Satoshi produced, as a requirement to process and validate transactions to bootstrap the network were simply mined not pre-mined, in a manner open to all.

They could indeed transact in the future. Although I suspect at this juncture should that ever occur it would be to make a political statement since I find people of that intellectual bent tend to be poorly motivated by base material wants. Anyhow, that's pointless gossipy speculation.
Gosper
·il y a 4 ans·discuss
> BTC is a trash-grade asset because it's practically useless and proof of work is extremely expensive for BTC holders (and environmentally damaging)

A permissionless settlement network open to anyone in the world, with a sensibly staid development policy is as useful and valuable as... well, check whatever the market participants value it at.

I suggest you read more widely and deeply to build an understanding of energy production, consumption, transmission, the externalities of each step across then environment, society, and civilization.

Bitcoin incentivises efficiency in energy production (and use in it's narrow sector) and the development of increasingly more efficient energy sources. By virtue of having no marginal cost per energy unit produced, renewables are the most cost efficient now and only more so as the days march on given renewable's technological headroom to grow.

> programmatic public chains, especially Ethereum, are cost-efficient and extremely useful.

Don't forget naively complex, and liable to usurpation by the ever next fast growing challenger networks for the same at present hyped up use cases.

> They will become one of the foundations of the global economy

Not with ever shifting goalposts, issuance rate, and pre-mine shaped like this https://www.lynalden.com/ethereum-analysis/#Ethereum%20Monet...

Along with an inability to map to and represent the assets, subjective agreement, and legal richness of the outside/real world.

> proof of stake is more egalitarian than proof of work because while the rich get richer in both, only in PoS do the rich get richer at the same rate as everybody else, whereas in PoW there are significant mining economies of scale

In PoW the compute and energy rich participants of the network get richer, these miners are not necessarily the same as the monetarily rich. They are rewarded further riches in exchange for their service in producing unforgeably costly proof that they have explored a given mathematical space and that as a side effect a statistically likely amount of time has elapsed and concomitant quantity of computation has occurred such that the history of the network is ever less likely to be able to be edited.
Gosper
·il y a 4 ans·discuss
You should absolutely examine every coin and token's premine, distribution, issuance policies, caps, and the control and malleability of those over time.

But you're barking up the wrong tree here. Bitcoin is one of incredibly few cryptoassets with no premine. I hesitate to say only because I don't keep track of the myriad uninteresting derivatives. You could have been Hal Finney or someone else as equally receptive and enthusiastic on the open mailing list right from the outset.
Gosper
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
So you then follow that chain and try transact on it. If your counterparty is satisfied then cool, carry on separately in your own bubble.

As you continue to transact with the rest of the world you'll realize you were both on a fork as you eventually encounter a chain with a much greater block height and you figure out that's where the current consensus lies.

You will still have your your UTXOs on the main chain since the transaction won't exist there. You and your counterparty figure out which chain is subjectively valuable to you.

In reality you ascertain the provenance of the software you're using the same way as all other software. If you fall for a supply chain attack and use the wrong software then all bets are off, you're vulnerable to your attacker and anything can happen.

You don't know if there's going to be a reorg in as much as relying on quantum mechanics you don't know you're not going to fall through the floor. Nothing is certain, only somewhere on the scale of probable to improbable. Look at the available current hashpower and decide where the incentives lie.

Anyway this is getting into the epistemological weeds. How do you know the universe/simulation you think you're in wasn't created last Thursday? https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Last_Thursdayism
Gosper
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
You can fork endlessly and each fork won't matter one whit because they don't follow the longest chain secured with the most hashing power.

Or your fork can follow the longest chain and abide by the rules so your transactions are accepted by the rest of the network, in which case you're using Bitcoin and haven't forked.
Gosper
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
Written for public consumption that post conveys a great deal of certainty while eliding over doubts:

"Change fork choice rule to mitigate balancing and reorging attacks"

https://ethresear.ch/t/change-fork-choice-rule-to-mitigate-b...

And more fundamentally at the heart of the matter

https://ethresear.ch/t/comment-on-three-attacks-on-proof-of-...

> Moreover, there is a general argument that the attacker will always be able to keep the consensus from finalizing nomatter what the fix is.

> The argument simply comes from the fact, that mathematically provable binary consensus algorithms known in this universe have n2 behavior, and ETH2 is linear in n .

> Therefore, the only way to really fix ETH2 is to make it n2 . Otherwise it is unfixable from the math point of view. There will always be another attack.

> It may be that by continuing patching a fix after a fix after a fix one can end up with something that will work from an engineering point of view.

> This will be security by obscurity.

> But it will not be secure from the math point of view.

So while bodging in patches might work one day, it's an immature approach and a scary place to try store value.

The sheer number of moving parts create a scary amount of emergent complexity and complexity is the enemy of security.

Disclosure: I'm an early but now uncomfortable ETH holder.
Gosper
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
Ethereum's current approach to PoS is insecure. It will take a lot more work to get to a secure enough place to switch over, if a switch is even possible at all.

I pointed to the latest vulnerabilities in another reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29229084
Gosper
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
I don't know why you were flagged, but if your question was in earnest:

Bitcoin almost certainly won't move. Because those touted energy efficient protocols come at the cost of much weaker security guarantees which undermine a key point of Bitcoin.

Proof of stake, the forerunner of energy efficient protocols, may work better for networks that have different aims, although smart contract oriented blockchains still need good security to be trusted.

The stupendous levels of complexity involved in trying to hammer out proof of stake into a viable method of energy efficient mining make the approach look ever more unpromising.

Ethereum keeps delaying the switch and the touted 2022 migration has once again been kicked into the long grass after this paper from a few weeks ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.10086

Lead to: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-42764 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-42765 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-42766
Gosper
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
Great, so when prices increase so much people can't afford to buy something there's no inflation with regard to that item. That's handy.

You're right, I suppose the homeless don't experience inflation in housing costs, therefore it doesn't exist!

This is as beautiful as the NSA's redefinition of surveillance whereby they only collect _all_ the data they can. But it's not surveillance until they look at it, which they assuredly don't because there's so much of it.
Gosper
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
I'm ashamed I have visited. Print those warnings in all the emphasized font you want, could Nagaenthran comprehend them and connect the dots to his coerced situation?

Everyone should at some point in their upbringing have a modicum of experience caring for someone with a mental disability

Singapore's actions and judicial system are vile and disgusting.
Gosper
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
That's incorrect. The busywork is to prove that a certain amount of time is likely to have elapsed, as a coordination mechanism in a network of unreliable, uncoordinated, or even adversarial actors.

PoW is valued by the network and its participants.

What needs to be accounted for are the carbon and other negative externalities dumped into our singular shared environment. This is a massive global problem that you do a disservice by focusing on PoW.
Gosper
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
> When people stop buying the latest and greatest machines for Bitcoin mining, Bitcoin's price will crash to zero. It will trigger double-spending attacks, which will undermine trust in the network. Gold doesn't have this problem; so gold is better.

Nope, you're laboring under a misapprehension. Even if all new compute power stopped being manufactured miners will run their existing equipment. The mining difficulty will plateau and overtime gently decrease as equipment breaks.

Older and less efficient (at computing double SHA-256) equipment can be profitably brought online where the price of electricity to do so is available and other more valuable uses of that energy in that locale are not possible.

You can ride this all the way back down the years and generations of ASICs then GPUs to CPUs. Once humanity is out of CPUs, well, we'll have more pressing issues. We'll talk again then, or not.

Yes, mining and securing the network nevermind transmitting transactions would be difficult with ink, paper, and abacus technology alone. I'd expect gold to hold some value here despite difficulty in securing and assaying it restricting its useble value to technical specialists and institutions. Nonperishable food, water filters, consumable entertaining substances, etc. would be a better bet if you're prepping against a Mad Max level of collapse.
Gosper
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
> and better solutions exist, such as proof-of-stake

A far weaker security guarantee – when network security is the entire point – is certainly not better.

Bitcoin is irrelevant to your otherwise valid point that environmental externalities should indeed be accounted for in power generation.
Gosper
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
We have completely different observations.

I spent last December in London and saw scant respect for the rules during the second wave. A minority of people wore masks, and few of those wore them properly. I was invited to a few house parties and festive gatherings.

Then I spent January in Paris IIIe where mask compliance was much better, but the streets and supermarkets were heaving before the daily curfew. Squeezing down aisles to buy supplies for dinner. Friends publicly complied with the rules but had big house parties every weekend.

I departed in shock and with an understanding of the European case numbers. There was no discipline, everyone seemed too fed up and bored to care anymore. Abstract anonymous others be damned.

Returning to zeroth world east Asia was a relief. Everyone, and I mean 100% of everyone, wears masks properly.

That originally happened before any official requirement. People go out when there are zero cases, but when a community transmission case happens the streets go quiet for a while, cases disappear, then nearly normal life resumes.

While health might play a part, discipline, a sense of community respect, and a competent administration seem far more important.
Gosper
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
About as many as can are decamping for less oppressive climes: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/27/uk-receives-34...

The professional class in Hong Kong is steadily dwindling with families going where they can or methodically planning to. Canada is most desired, then the UK, and Australia.

It takes time to find employment, a place to live, and schooling for your kids.

But the biggest factor is Covid. Politics aside, Hong Kong has been a great place to ride out the pandemic while the UK handled it abysmally. After the Delta variant and Covid as a whole subsides expect emigration to pick up.

Curiously the job market in Hong Kong is booming and I've seen an uptick in western expats arriving, so there's an appeal if you stay apolitical. Which is easy enough when it's not your home getting wiped out.