Funny I lived on 11 acres carved from a 180 acre plot. The 90 year old owner of the surrounding plot died and his children had it logged. For three years loggers were running chainsaws near daily and 18 wheelers were tearing up my small road as they built new ones to feed it. The road was shared from my house to his through my property. Then his teenaged grandkids started running motorcycles through the clear cut and shooting guns. Sitting on my porch used to be pleasant but now it was constant noise. Since the land was unmaintained and unincorporated I had no recourse. I moved before they finished. I check google maps every few years and they are STILL logging.
I forgot to mention that the lack of forest now means I can see floodlights from the local high school sports fields 20 miles away and can hear the freeway traffic that passes through the nearby town, also 20+ miles away. It’s not deafening just annoying and persistent instead of wind blowing through thick forest.
In the US there is the affordable care act from ~2013, where anyone can purchase insurance from a pooled market subsidized by the government up to a certain income (50k I think). But that is also impacted by the state you live in, as the states negotiate the contracts paid by federal dollars (I know it's effed up). So the ACA is cheaper on the west coast than it is in Alabama. Today, a "gold" policy for a single man in his 40's is about $900/month through the ACA. The cheaper "emergency" plans (aka "trash" plans) appended by Trump are still a few hundred dollars, but cover almost nothing.
I now pay $120 for me and my wife for a plan that is better than the $1000 plan through the ACA in Oregon because I'm no longer self employed.
That's almost a 10x difference.
After working for myself for 12 years, hustling consulting and contracting gigs, I'm way happier working for a company that pays well, has great benefits, and I always know I have a paycheck coming.
Exactly this. People feel like wages have not been increasing. In reality wages have been increasing, but employers are passing most of the increase over to health insurers.
> I now pay $120 for me and my wife for a plan that is better than the $1000 plan through the ACA in Oregon because I'm no longer self employed.
Look at box 12 code DD on your W-2. That is the total amount you are paying for your health insurance (it’s just that your employer is paying it directly). It’s still counted in the cost of employing you though, obviously.
Assuming you have a silver or gold level plan, total cost to insure you and your wife is the same on healthcare.gov or if your employer buys it.
The only broad savings are if your employer is self insuring and their risk pool (employees and their families) are disproportionately low risk (young and single).
I wonder if your employer sponsored plan is not ACA compliant.
Health insurance has a 2% profit margin, and premiums are tightly regulated by state insurance commissioners. So a wildly different premium indicates a change in coverage, or a change in the underlying risk pool.
For an annual out of pocket maximum of $10k to $18k and age rating factors capping age 64 premiums to 3x age 21, the minimum bronze/silver monthly premium should be somewhere in the ~$400 to $1,200 depending on age. For example, see NJ’s premiums here:
That is super lucky. They didn’t break the crypto, they broke the PRNG. Amateur wallet design. Any security programmer with a passing knowledge of NIST entropy requirements 800-90 a/b/c would have never done this.
Almost all cryptosystems are broken by implementation issues, not attacks on the algorithms themselves. This may be a particularly straightforward attack, but crypto is hard. There's a lot of details you have to get right and a single mistake can destroy all the effort, regardless of how much else you got right.
Combine the time with some other incremental hard-to-predict inputs.
Start with the time, in the milliseconds (not seconds, i.e. epoch time). Use that seed to create a random number. That random number is now your master_seed.
Once every 10 seconds, measure the temperature of the CPU, and every other temperature sensor in the system, and put that into a new random seed. Create a random number using this seed. XOR it with the mast_seed and store it as the new masted_seed.
Every time someone moves a mouse, use the timestamp and the pixel offset to update the master_seed similarly as above.
Every time a packet comes into the ethernet interface, use the timestamp and a hash of the packet contents, and update the random seed.
XOR the contents of the video buffer.
Track the timing of keyboard clicks.
There are lots of sources of entropy that you can use to make the seed effectively unguessable.
just like anything else with cryptography, please don't roll your own. all major OSes and programming languages provide primitives to generate cryptographically strong random numbers- use that instead.
Seed? Use a TRNG. Every embedded processor (nearly) has a NIST qualified TRNG. Ring-oscillator for entropy, plus conditioning (whitening), there's your seed. Sometimes amplified thermal noise, but the ROSC is the easiest to manufacture.
From a developers point of view- if you are given an option to provide a seed value, you’re using the wrong api. Libraries exist to provide cryptographically appropriate rngs in every major programming language- use those instead.
Oh god this gets trotted out every time someone points out the evil that crypto facilitates. Give it a rest. It pales in comparison and there are many other solutions that your argument conveniently ignores.
> For example, illegal transactions, scams and gambling together make up less than 3% of volume.
Sure there's the odd dumb criminal who doesn't understand the prosecutorial implications of an immutable public ledger. But it pales in comparison, according to the actual data.
Yes, because most of the transfers happening are speculative investment trades, arbitrage, etc. People moving money around, without paying for anything.
That source says, when it comes to the demand in terms of spending crypto for goods or services:
> 46% of transactions are due to illegal transactions
If Bob transfers $10 back and forth between both of his bank accounts 99 times and then buys $10 worth of crack, would you say that 1% of Bobs money was used for illegal purposes or 100% of it was used for illegal purposes? Depends on what specifically you're trying to measure.
There are two things here that are simultaneously true:
1. A small percent of BTC transactions are for illicit purposes.
2. A large percentage of the goods and services purchased with BTC are illicit.
Moving the goalposts. GP was only talking about illegal activity. But since you brought it up -
Global GDP is $101T. Global yearly forex volume is $2738T. So by this logic you should conclude that 96% of transaction volume in the traditional financial system is also not tied to economically meaningful activities. You're going to be disappointed if you want to believe society as a whole is any less financialized than bitcoin.
What do you think would be an acceptable percentage of speculation?
I think it's absurd to say that only say 3% of crypto transactions are criminal, if the majority of other transactions are meaningless.
Surely what we actually care about is how many useful, legal, meaningful transactions there are.
For example if for every 1 legal transaction there is 3 illegal transactions and 96 speculative or maintenance transactions... it starts looking like this is predominantly for criminal uses even though only 3% of transactions are criminal.
There’s no question kids (and immature young adults) identity shop, they always have, and DSM diagnosis is a nifty badge. And there’s always profit in this desire to be unique just like everyone else. Whether it is a mall store that sells specific identity adornments, or today, doctors who will sign a prescription, both are ways to profit off kids anxiety at being individuals.
But today’s social media (even HN) is dominated by this generation so it is hard to discuss it without being downvoted into oblivion.
Perhaps the pendulum has swung too far, but for me as a kid psychiatric treatment and diagnosis was shameful. Before my time, it was grounds to send people to be locked away forever (which is probably why it was shameful in my childhood).
The new era where everyone has a disorder is, in my opinion, preferable to the one where any disorder was viewed as inherent weakness that needs to be toughed through, even if that means some are diagnosed (or claiming diagnosis) undeservedly.
It means that those that actually need these services (and yes, it's more than just make believe) have an easier and more socially acceptable route.
I view it much the same way I view allergies. Sure, some people are "faking it" to be special, but enough aren't and allergens are a major problem for them. I have a family member that has been hospitalized multiple times because someone decided to test if they really had their allergy.
Interestingly it took until 1961 for the E61 group head to appear. This clever valve system with portafilter revolutionized consistency and took some of the fussiness (skill) out of shot-pulling process. The design is still going strong today, although there are definitely improved versions of it on super-high-end machines.
> Interestingly it took until 1961 for the E61 group head to appear.
Espresso machines with group heads are ubiquitous (at least in Australia), I don't know of any cafe here that makes espresso without an espresso machine of group head design.
Now I'm curious what cafes and coffee shops commonly used to make espresso before the innovation of the group head. Maybe they didn't serve espresso and only did drip/filter coffee instead?
And to add… most cafes in Australia (at least the ones I’ve ever been to) all use e61. Maybe something to do with La Marzocco having an almost-monopoly here
If you go back to the 90s, most countries had no idea about espresso, cappuccino etc. I remember my dad making an instant cappuccino in the early 90s, but it was hard to find an actual espresso maker then.
Espresso makers for home use were incredibly rare back then and still are today in most households, since they're large, expensive and difficult to use compared to the usual household coffee makers like drip filer coffee, French press, AeroPress, etc
Most people who wanted espresso-like drinks at home used the Mokapot for that since it was much cheaper, smaller and easier to use.
Agreed. I still have a Moka pot for making espresso, but I rarely use it. Most of my brew is from a normal coffee maker (drip) - the type is Moccamaster and it's a dutch brand. Also built in the Netherlands. When I'm out, I go for cappuccinos as a treat.
Just like with any substance - daily use increases tolerance of the substance and it's side effects. This includes "hangovers" for habitual over-indulging drinkers... they don't get hangovers like someone who drinks occasionally and then overdoes it at a party.
Other countries do it all the time. Europeans drink wine at meals. My wife's company even serves wine at their cafeteria in their Geneva office while their US offices are completely dry including office parties. No drinks at the Xmas party.
Impairment for e.g. driving isn’t so great but as far as just before work—how many people are on prescription mood-altering drugs? The potential for abuse is worse with self-medication (well—I mean, hypothetically, but see also opioids) but I don’t per se see “I like to stay a little high at work, makes my day a ton better” as a significantly worse than “I take a Wellbutrin each morning, makes my day a ton better”.
I forgot to mention that the lack of forest now means I can see floodlights from the local high school sports fields 20 miles away and can hear the freeway traffic that passes through the nearby town, also 20+ miles away. It’s not deafening just annoying and persistent instead of wind blowing through thick forest.
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