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Link is dead.

As an anecdote, to kick off discussion, I, as a native European Portuguese speaker, that was born in France (moved to Portugal when I was 4), can _barely_ pronounce them correctly.

Not all R's have the same roll of the tongue. They're usually in the middle of the word. Hate those R's.


Don't worry, as native European Portuguese speaker, the way we speak the H means (hint for others, we really don't), has already landed me in some funny situations in languages where it actually makes a difference, like German.


The difference between the sounds of "a penis" and "happiness" is mostly the h vocalization which European Portuguese basically ignores.


They're the trivial wallet addresses (close to the beginning and end of the search space). I would expect them to be used for debugging and testing in the early days.


What makes them trivial, how are they generated?


> A private key is basically just a number between 1 and 2^256

It's like saying "I'm gonna pick a random number between 1 and a trillion", and then picking 999,999,999,995. Probably not a smart idea given that you don't want anyone else to be able to guess your number.


But the values are generally generated pseudo randomly by machine. This seems similar to the birthday problem, where the odds of encountering a value in a given range is higher than you'd expect.


1. yes, generally and ideally the private key is generated pseudo randomly. But at the beginning or for testing, people might have manually picked a private key.

2. the birthday problem basically halves the exponent security wise. The rule of thumb: If you have N possible outcomes, then after around sqrt(N) guesses the probability of a collision approaches 0.5. So, for birthdays, it's 365 outcomes, so with 19 or 20 people your risk of collision already approaches a half. For BTC private keys, there are 2^256 possible, so with 2^128 guesses you'd approach a likely collision. Fortunately, that's still 1e38, so if you check 1e10 per second, you'd still need 1e20 years to get there.


The birthday problem means that the number of values you have to choose to have a 50% chance of a collision scales approximately with the square root of the size of the space. [0]

2^(256/2) is way, way bigger than the number of used bitcoin addresses, which is about 33 million according to this csv [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_attack#Mathematics

[1] https://bitkeys.work/download.php


ECDSA private keys can be arbitrary strings of random bytes of a certain length (unlike RSA, where we need to find prime factors). The first page is roughly the equivalent of using a low single digit number as your password.


Indeed, they are. Just like your comment and mine are included in the library of babel: https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?comment:14


There's a narrative that I hear often about Corvo island:

Corvo is a small island in the Azores archipelago, which is home to less than 500 habitants.

Every time a police officer, joins the island, it usually has a bit of a tough time, as it tries to write fines and issue warnings to the small population. The small population, not only disregard its orders, but they actually shut them out.

Since there's very few establishments, the police officer, eventually, has to comply with the population.

To be honest, I don't know how much truth there is, in this story, but I don't find it hard to believe.


A decent next step would be to send more than one police officer, but it probably isn't really worth it.


Would doubling the cost, or more, actually provide double the benefits? At the end of the day it's the police officer who has the duty to protect and serve.


This is what we wound up doing with Pitcairn.


It’s almost impossible to imagine this in light of the “all or nothing” approach American law enforcement has toward its job. Would it really be as simple as ignoring the police that would undermine their authority?


it's a question of scale. in a small town of 120, yes, absolutely. In a city of a million, it's hard to get everyone to hold the line. A few fall, which causes more to lose their nerve, and more fall, and authority is enforced.

but a group of say 500? that know each other on sight? Sure.

I grew up in a small town in the US southwest. There's a reason Texas has successful defenses for murder that were "he needed killing". It can be terrifying to be on the wrong side of a popularity contest.


It only works with a lone police officer. It's extremely hard to cope with being totally socially excluded on a remote island. Any situation where the police themselves can form a community because there's enough of them, this approach won't work.

(I would note that one of the great American novels, To Kill A Mockingbird, deals precisely with the loneliness of trying to administer justice without community support)

Then there's horror classic The Wicker Man, about a police officer sent to a remote island to investigate a vanished girl and wall of silence ...


American law enforcement doesn't dictate how law enforcement ends up working in Portugal...


> I want a mesh of satellites around the earth.

I assume your motivation is (alongside with a bunch of us), "bring people closer to space than ever before", but you have provided no evidence, that polluting low earth orbit with arguably redudant satellites is a good approach.

You seem to imply that it will lead in "revolution in prices". I too, commend SpaceX for the landing boosters, but for now it doesn't reduce the price nowhere near enough to let humanity approach the space age. Starlink comparatively, IMO does nothing.

Space tethers, anyone?


Refresh tokens are the real alternative, IMO.

I kinda agree it looks like an ad for redis, since it doesn't even considers alternatives.


Hasura [0] has a great article on how to make front end authentication as secure as possible.

[0] - https://hasura.io/blog/best-practices-of-using-jwt-with-grap...


Agreed. Long(er) lived refresh tokens, and then having signed access tokens such as JWTs so that the API server doesn't have to hit the database on every request.


Yeah, I'm from '94 - I've never seen a world without Comic Sans. Or Wingdings for that matter.

That just triggered an old memory from very early me playing around with clip-art and transitions on PowerPoint.


The world before Comic Sans looked a lot like this to most people: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_...

(IBM VGA 9x16 font, used by MSDOS and pretty much every PC from the mid 80s to 90s)


I use this font in many places, and it gives people 2-3 years my junior nervous twitches. They associate it with events like "thing has gone wrong, time to reinstall windows".


I remember back in the early 2000s, having a QBASIC window open was enough to make most people say "you broke it". A blue screen covered in IBM VGA was firmly established as a bad sign by that point.


Actually, I thought that Hercules monochrome was a novel improvement on CGA.

I never saw the IBM monochrome that shipped with the original PC. I certainly saw a lot of CGA.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_Graphics_Card

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter





> In Firefox you can add "ui.systemUsesDarkTheme" as an integer in about:config and set it to "0" for forced light or "1" for forced dark. This setting changes what is reported by the media query, you can still set your OS and/or browser theme independently. You will need to restart Firefox to apply the setting. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21196903


A set that contains all things must contain itself by definition.


Russell's paradox?


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