Why it's everything NYT Bestseller non-fiction? I'm not a big fan of NYT Bestseller non-fiction but I find myself much better with novels matching my mood. If it's something older or classic, better.
Good point here - and a lot is just left off the list if it doesn’t agree with the editors “beliefs” even if it’s really a bestseller in terms of sales.
I visited 4 airports that aren't in the list. Do you think I can add them to the list? Never committed before to OpenBSD so I do not know if I compute as a "OpenBSD developers" in "New airports can only be added by OpenBSD developers who have visited an airport and thereby have verified its existence."
Developers are categorized as people with commit access to the project. So contributing patches itself is not enough to add entries to this specific file.
I think maybe this could be workable if an OpenBSD developer were to visit you in person to verify your existence and thereby transitively verify the existence of the claimed "visited airport".
Everytime that comment is referenced, people forget that the rest of comments were mostly positive plus constructive criticism or challenges they'd face.
Yes, and BrandonM's comment was constructive criticism. He was trying to help Drew with his YC application (that's what "app" meant back then) and clearly wanted it to succeed ("I only hope that I was able to give you a sneak preview of some of the potential criticisms you may receive. Best of luck to you").
I think that example really exemplifies HN's biggest blindspot. A lot of successful companies are built around taking an existing technology, then packaging it in a way that drastically reduces the frictions for the user. The typical HN user doesn't understand those pain point, because they're technically sophisticated enough that they're mostly invisible.
So, you take something like Dropbox. Yeah, it pretty much is just mounted FTP. And the average HN is looking at that and thinking "I could do the same thing with a bash script, what's the big deal".
It is a blind spot of knowledge. Sure you can make a script that does it. But most people can not do that. Heck just yesterday something in my hacked up system did something odd. It spit out an error that I will now have to research (probably find nothing) and then have to dig out the code on. Then spend several days probably reverse engineering some tech API that I have never seen before, in a style that will be different than what I am used to. But if I had bought a product that did the same thing. More than likely 50 other people would have the same issue and a few dozen work arounds. If those failed I could have a shot at just taking it to whoever sold it to me and saying 'fix it'. But as I hacked together something on my own. I own it, warts and all. I enjoy doing that but most people have zero idea where to even begin in fixing something like that. Buying something that 'just works' solves so many issues (and creates others).
Probably the biggest one that sticks out in my mind was when the iPad came out and all the tech boards like this were down on it. But it was what most people wanted to use a computer for. Most people did not want a computer. They wanted a media device. For many years the only way to get that was to get a computer. Now you can get that media device without most of the headaches of a computer.
I think Dropbox is only a blind spot because it took a syncing tool and combined with running a user application with root privileges in the 2000's era of computer security applications and gamification for user acquisition.
> Jobs had been tracking a young software developer named Drew Houston, who blasted his way onto Apple ’s radar screen when he reverse-engineered Apple’s file system so that his startup’s logo, an unfolding box, appeared elegantly tucked inside. Not even an Apple SWAT team had been able to do that.
It’s not a blindspot for many people. It’s open source and open protocols vs closed source spyware. SCP is far better than Dropbox if you value privacy for instance.
A lot of resistance to things like Dropbox come from the experience of being screwed over by closed source software. If you look at the state of Dropbox today, those initial comments look pretty spot on.
From the pictures, it looks like it has plastic guide wheels but if it were conductive to short out the two rails, it would activate the signals and any trains will be stopped before they reach you.
Do not ever rely on this sort of safety mechanism. There are also systems in use that rely on axle counters and bookkeeping - basically, on each block they count the incoming and the outgoing axles. When your draisine now is either too lightweight to trigger an axle counter or you set it on the rails in the middle of a block, the ops central won't know you are there.
Even simpler, there are systems that use a physical token.
To proceed into a section of track, the train driver/guard must physically possess an object, typically handed over at a station just before the section, and returned just after.
While the UK has indeed stuck to almost exclusively using track circuits for a very long time [1], within the last two decades axle counters have become much more common.
[1] With some exceptions – the Severn Tunnel e.g. was switched to axle counters already in 1987 because track circuits proved too unreliable within the (wet) environment of the tunnel.
The ones I've rode look like these[0], so in case they are running in different directions, you can easily lift up the one side with just one wheel on both vehicles, and then just push them. Simple and not a heavy lift either.
Definitely an issue with personal rail travel, whether from the opposite direction or an unclearable traffic jam in the same direction, and whether two rails or mono.
If it’s like the ones I’ve been on, you either lift them off the rails, or if you’re just hiring them, sometimes just both turn yours the other way and swap.
True, but chanting that at every correlation you see is a great way to never learn from anything.
To be honest it's a bit hard to believe this reporting has nothing to do with the price dropping ~10%, given that one of BitCoin's big parts of its value prop is precisely supposed to be that governments can't do this.
Bitcoin says that whoever has the private key controls the funds. In this case, whoever was in custody before the FBI took the funds was seriously negligent in protecting their private key (which is not that hard to do).
Governments can simply take the private keys if they wish along with your computer. Come up with smart ways to avoid that (but I'll memorise the private key!) and they'll just lock you up instead.
In the case of coins moving through exchanges, they can simply take the coins instead by threatening the exchange.
In many other cases they can also catch you when you try to use the money by converting it into a currency that people actually use to transact like USD.
That it is "easy" to protect private keys is the theory, yes. If it turns out not to be an accurate reflection of reality, that's going to affect the value proposition of BitCoin.
As best I can tell, Bitcoin has moved more than [it has so far today, ~6%] on 42 days in the last year, and 38 days the year before that, considering open-to-open values.
10% daily moves happened four times in May: twice in each direction.
Statistically, we should consider it just a normal, unremarkable day for Bitcoin.
True but the cryptocurrency world doesn't seem to understand that. They're always tying events to price rises, and making proclamations about what will happen to the price in the future as a result.
That is true - it is, after all, entirely possible that the BTC price drops caused the Colonial ransom seizure. [1]
Perhaps people are correctly estimating that as BTC is likely to lose another use case for it (ransomware)[2], there is now less demand for it, thus resulting in the downward price pressure we've seen over the past few weeks.
Perhaps criminals are correctly predicting that 'their' BTC might be taken away from them, thus causing them to liquidate their positions, thus resulting in downward price pressure. [3]
[1] I am, of course, making a joke.
[2] The writing is on the wall, due to the government reaction to the Colonial hack.
[3] No, Monero is not a solution for them, because the FBI is not stupid. XMR:BTC is largely sideways. If ransomware switches to it, it's likely that exchanges transacting in privatecoins will be treated as international money launderers. https://coincodex.com/convert/monero/bitcoin/?amount=1
True. But the prices of most of the ALT coins are correlated with BTC, which has also caused them to go down too (in the same way they went up with it before May).
I wonder if the future push towards Proof-of-Stake away from Proof-of-Work will one day stop this happening.
It’s not, but it sets the precedent that the FBI will seize bitcoin without any kind of due process when it is able to recover proceeds from a criminal transaction
.
This jeopardizes the use of Bitcoin as a currency for cross-border criminal transactions which is a large if not majority share of its use case.
So it’s easy to see why its value went down — fewer criminals will want to use it.
>This jeopardizes the use of Bitcoin as a currency for cross-border criminal transactions which is a large if not majority share of its use case.
Do criminals seriously expect that bitcoin (or any other cryptocurrency) is safe against the wallet being hacked? Hardware/cold wallets have been around for years, so this is more of an opsec issue than a technology issue.
Hell yeah they will, honestly it's about time we did some more aggressive offensive security operations.
But what does crypto have to do with criminals? Criminals just need to up their op sec game, they know that. BTC dropping is only related insofar as this stupid correlation is getting pushed hard in the media right now.
A possible causal factor is that much of the crypto world actually thinks BTC is private. It's not. It's the opposite: a 100% public fully replicated ledger.
